Nutanix vs. VMware: Comparing Hyperconverged Infrastructure and Hybrid Cloud Solutions

How do Nutanix and VMware meet customer needs?

While technology architectures vary widely based on unique business requirements, Nutanix and VMware both offer solutions to meet these needs. Exploring the differences between each solution helps align where VMware can meet your needs running VMware vSphere on Nutanix HCI today, and how Nutanix Cloud Platform can future-proof your IT to support business-critical applications and databases from edge to datacenter to the cloud.

VMware architecture: made for virtualization

VMware has focused on delivering virtualization marketed as being generally effective for these use cases:

• Running virtualized workloads that are certified for VMware vSphere/VMware hypervisor ESXi
• Using VMware Cloud to help move VMware virtualized workloads to the various public clouds

These approaches can be restrictive when the need to expand beyond VMware arises, such as:

• Enabling  a multi-vendor strategy to configure a true hybrid multicloud solution without the risk of virtualization lock-in
• Scaling workloads across a diverse set of public and private clouds
• Enabling a flexible choice of hardware, hypervisor and cloud provider
• Reducing the total cost of ownership without major technical and architectural changes

Nutanix is made to simplify virtualization. Running vSphere on Nutanix can simplify operations, making architectural changes much easier and more flexible for whatever tomorrow brings.

Nutanix architecture: ready for today and for whatever comes tomorrow 

From day one, Nutanix was founded on the core tenet of flexibility. Nutanix supports multiple hardware configurations, multiple virtualization hypervisors and multiple clouds. For example, Nutanix HCI software supports the most popular hypervisors in the industry – VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V®, and the Nutanix (at no additional cost) AHV hypervisor.

While many  Nutanix customers choose to run ESXi on the Nutanix platform today, others choose Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V and even more customers are now switching to Nutanix AHV to reduce virtualization licensing costs, enable a single pane-of-glass management across hypervisors, and provide the ability to run business-critical workloads.

Equally important, the Nutanix lifecycle provides flexible adaptation when your architecture needs change or when market conditions or technology solutions dictate. Nutanix delivers on key concepts like:

• Facilitating the management of dual-hypervisors to reduce cost and offload risk by utilizing a multi-vendor solution strategy
• Introducing user-focused self-service options and integration with partners like ServiceNow 

Overall, Nutanix delivers more hybrid multicloud value outside of legacy virtualization solutions by:

• Enabling a multi-vendor strategy to reduce the risk of a single virtualization platform
• Scaling business-critical, cloud-native and AI workloads across public and private clouds
• Running different hypervisors simultaneously under a single management “pane of glass” 
• Protecting your freedom to choose the best hardware and cloud provider for your solution
• Enabling the possibility of significant reductions to the total cost of ownership with web-scale design through software-defined-storage 
• Enabling the portability of Nutanix NCI licenses between on-premises, the edge, and public clouds, such as the AWS® and Azure® clouds.

And because Nutanix modeled its solutions on popular cloud and SaaS offerings, Nutanix products are known for full lifecycle simplicity and ease of use – from initial deployment, production scaling, and troubleshooting. Nutanix is a complete platform architecture that enables workloads to scale from on-premises to the edge to the cloud, always with cost-efficiency top of mind.

Comparing hyperconverged infrastructure solutions from Nutanix and VMware

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of HCI architectures from Nutanix vs. VMware:

Creating a multi-vendor strategy that adapts to a shifting landscape

Organizations must have the agility to adapt to unpredictable changes in the vendor landscape. For example, mergers and acquisitions can raise risk through product rationalization or price increases that may cause business disruption, create uncertainty, force untimely changes and increase costs.

Options to consider when deciding on a multi-vendor strategy are:

• Platform flexibility to run multiple vendor solutions
  
• Full license portability (across clouds and on-premises) and choice 
• Support quality and extend reach to reduce downtime
• Cost consistency without being blindsided by changing price overhead

It is important to note that when it comes to customer loyalty, customer recommendations and repeat business, Nutanix consistently outranks the competition, with a 90+ Net Promoter Score.

With the many questions that may still exist after the Broadcom acquisition of VMware, Nutanix is committed to supporting the aforementioned considerations with certainty and transparency. We can’t imagine a world without VMware, nor should you, but if a choice must be made to find an alternative, Nutanix may help you avoid the risk of significant business disruption due to an inflexible technology solution.

Run all your workloads, your way

The Nutanix future-proof architecture reduces risk by enabling a multi-vendor strategy that runs your applications and workloads in an efficient, resilient and cost-effective way. As they extend beyond their original borders to the network edge, end-user devices and public clouds, you can run your applications and workloads flexibly, on the cloud of your choice and, securely and under your control

Business-critical applications, cloud-native applications, AI applications, data lakes, and unstructured data are examples of how our view of modern IT workloads is changing, synonymous with cloud-like designs. Nutanix HCI was born from the same DNA that built how the modern web scales, and has incorporated web-scale for workloads that span multiple servers, datacenters and cloud environments. This idea has spawned a unique attribute to Nutanix: Choice.

Your choice to:

• Extreme flexibility in selecting the off-the-shelf hardware you want
• Create networks that intelligently scale
• Run workloads where you need them to run, not within the confines of a rigid architecture
• Stand-up data-centric designs focused on your business
• Decide on a license model that makes sense to your budget, whether that’s CAPEX or OPEX focused
• Align public clouds to do what they do best, run dynamic workloads and data, and keep static workloads under your control in a private cloud