VMware to Nutanix | TheaterFire

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Botto71@reddit

What's licensing for nutanix look like these days?

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We're going through our renewal right now and for I think like ~400 cores and ~2 petabytes or storage we're looking at 90k or so for software and hardware support for a single year? Not running a ton of VMs, ~85 or so, but they're all massive video processing stuff.

I don't remember the exact quote but yeah, it's not too terrible feeling to me.

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Igot1forya@reddit

The new norm, I guess. Thanks to VMware anything sounds like a good deal.

I get voted down for even mentioning it, but my VergeOS environment is over 1000 cores across 8 hosts in 3 clusters, no limits on RAM, VSAN or VM size and nearly 600 VMs for $30K/Year. This includes backup and replication, too.

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DerBootsMann@reddit

I get voted down for even mentioning it, but my VergeOS

i’m actually surprised it doesn’t get you banned !!

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Igot1forya@reddit

It blows my mind that there is so much hate for it. Whatever issues there were in the past, it seems to have resolved itself in the 2 years I've been working with them. I'm on bi-weekly calls with the support team testing new and exciting new features, they genuinly make an effort to impliment suggestions I offer and I have yet to have a negitive experience, overall. I like the direction Yan Ness is taking the company. The ship is headed in the right direction IMO. It's also added capabilities I never had with VMware. It's seriously a solid product.

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jamesaepp@reddit

So to keep the numbers simple....90 VMs, and $90,000 .... per year?

$1000 per VM....per year? IMO that is absurd no matter how good the support may or may not be.

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EurekaFQ@reddit

Yeah, but we could easily run five times as many VMs from a resource perspective outside of storage. Mostly we're paying for storage and licensing just enough cores to keep load low on the clusters.

Everything comes back down to storage for us at the end of the day, and we could probably do something much cheaper, but we have 24/7 next day support including shipped hardware replacements already built in and it's one phone call for any problem related to virtualization outside of the top level switches which has been phenomenal for us.

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kennyj2011@reddit

You don't need your storage to be completely on Nutanix (depending on the design I guess). You could potentially use a NAS or SAN to provide additional storage, or tiered storage.

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EurekaFQ@reddit

Yes, I am aware, but mostly we want only one phone number to call if there is an issue. It's really nice to have a true one stop shop outside of the networking equipment for literally any issues.

Though if we keep growing storage requirements wise we'll definitely be moving to something else, but projections are good through 2027 for us at our rate of usage with our most recent refresh.

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SUPERDAN42@reddit

Depending on features.... Maybe more than VMware

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Botto71@reddit

My issue with VMware is I can no longer buy what I need. Only everything they sell (more or less). Nutanix the same boat?

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xxbiohazrdxx@reddit

It's worse IMO because of the hardware lock in.

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plump-lamp@reddit

Nutanix is literally BYOD, that's the selling point

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insufficient_funds@reddit

I concur with the other person- what hardware lock in? You can run it on dell/hp/ibm/etc… you don’t have to use the nutanix branded hardware

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SynAckPooPoo@reddit

What hardware lock in?

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Gummyrabbit@reddit

Cost more than VMWare....by a lot...

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Ontological_Gap@reddit

It looks like hating money

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jacksbox@reddit

But are there any enterprise virtualization solutions left which aren't expensive? Honest question.

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HoustonBOFH@reddit

If you have inhouse expertise, yes. Xen is still reasonable, and Openstack has all the features you could every want. But you need solid inhouse staff.

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jacksbox@reddit

Agree with you on those. But it's the same classic Linux problem, if you had the staff for running those kinds of solutions you could do just about anything. And you probably have a business reason for having that kind of staff around (competitive advantage, regulatory requirements, specialized app stack), as much as I'd love to work in that kind of environment.

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HoustonBOFH@reddit

You pay for those people either way. Either working for you or working for them...

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xxbiohazrdxx@reddit

No.

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Big_Enuf@reddit

Take a peek at ScaleComputing. My eval 6 years ago was 25% cost savings over VMware. Easy to manage...almost too easy. Great growth and excellent customer service (I am a medium-sized customer at best and had a 60 min response on a Holiday Sunday customer service call).

Just renewed with them and cranked some GPU for internal AI use for reasonable costs.

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DerBootsMann@reddit

Take a peek at ScaleComputing.

nutanix is cheaper these days , scale folks for some reason decided they can start charging premium

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pcronin@reddit

My company did a migration in the other direction a couple years ago (a bit before the broadcom takeover). Nutanix was OK, but it had some bad things, like if the switch the cluster was on lost connection, the whole cluster died.

IIRC the migration was easy for us as we backed up from nutanix and restored to vmware. That method might work to get to nutanix in case the "official" path doesn't work.

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iihacksx@reddit

The biggest gotcha I see and have ran into is VMs like phone servers or voicemail servers that aren't compatible.

Mitel voicemail, CUCM, and 3CX are a few I know of.

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IndianaSqueakz@reddit

Mitel works on Nutanix. I have their MiVoice, Micollab and Border Gateway all running on Nutanix. They now support it.

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zertoman@reddit

Huge problem for us too, AHV has just abysmal support for virtual appliances. Or to state it another way, companies distributing virtual appliances don’t consider AHV even doing it. So our Nutanix rep and engineers would try and “make” them work in AHV, then the updates would never work on the custom appliances.

Nutanix offered us a solution though. Install ESXi on two Nutanix nodes just to run our appliances. Well thanks, but no, this coupled with a ton of other limitations, we just dropped the platform and moved the equipment to our lab.

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Krigen89@reddit

Sorry, idiot here. Please ELI5 why those apps don't work!? Aren't they just apps running on some distros sending network packets?

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placated@reddit

Because the vendors only certify their solutions on VMware. This is rampant with telephony vendors.

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Krigen89@reddit

So what happens? App just won't start? How does it detect the hypervisor?

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cwk9@reddit

For most apps they don't really care. It's about the support contract. The vendor saves on having to test and support the product on multiple hypervisors/clouds. These same companies would insist on running their application on physical hardware in the past. Always 5-10 years behind what's happening in IT.

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Krigen89@reddit

Ah. Support, I see.

Thank you

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The_NorthernLight@reddit

It its a small environment, seriously look at xcpng. Its MILES cheaper for the full enterprise licensing then nutanix. Currently only has one real negative where a single storage drive has a max size of 2tb, but they are actively working on moving from vhd to qcow2 format which removes that storage limit.

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Darth_Malgus_1701@reddit

Is it even worth it to learn VMware anymore?

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adstretch@reddit

Not doing Nutanix but moving to XCP-ng. The onboard migration tool in XenOrchestra is making it pretty easy. Even manual migrations using the OVF tool and importing is pretty easy, if a bit time consuming.

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MagicBoyUK@reddit

Yeah, about five years ago. Nutanix Move did most of the work for us. Pretty straightforward.

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Kangie@reddit

Yes, I've done the migration in the past. It was pretty straightforward. I was doing it in-place as my predecessor licenced VMware on nutanix hardware and I was able to request some loaner hardware no act as swing space and convert the cluster in place.

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bengalhousecats3@reddit

Currently In the process of migrating from VMware to nutanix. Around 400 vms. Mostly smooth. If you have any vintage OSs that are 2008 32bit or older then forget about moving them.

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blissed_off@reddit

If you’re still running 32 bit 2008 you need to stop migrating from VMware and get rid of that ancient crap asap.

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Pump_9@reddit

Yeah we explored Nutanix because some of their reps greased the palms of our execs but eventually took a deep dive into the cost and abandoned any further movement. Maybe if you're Chase or one of those companies that put 35 people and millions on a project to develop a website.

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tekn0viking@reddit

Not sure why there was so much hate on nutanix - yeah it’s expensive, but I always had a really positive experience with them ~5-7 years ago. Their support was top notch, there was one time where I had a legacy unsupported cluster, which was total fault of myself and dept, and they worked day and night with me to get it back up and running.

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blissed_off@reddit

Cuz people still drinking the Broadcom kool aid apparently. Nutanix is great for small deployments that either have separate SAN already or don’t anticipate expanding.

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mcmatt93117@reddit

Did it last fall.

Nutanix Move makes it pretty painless.

Ran into issues with some VM appliances that were locked down and didn't have VirtIO drivers.

It takes a bit to get used to making a change isn't instant (ish) that it is on VMware and that the changes don't que up.

Want to add storage then power it on? Need to wait for the first task to complete before powering it on or the power on task will fail (you can add storage live, just an example). It's not usually long, 5-30 seconds usually, but enough that my brain gets upset I can't just do it and move on and I often tab away and completely forget to come do whatever came next.

We're using their async DR also. Works well, works better if you use their IPAM. Their reporting/dashboards on it are fucking horrible. Like, beyond bad. But as long as everything is sync'd it's worked without issue and have done full planned fail overs 3x now without any issue.

Have a weird issue where, if not using their IPAM, it'll update the NIC drivers and remove the NIC and re-add it, so if you have a static IP set, it defaults back to DHCP and gets a new MAC so DHCP reservations are out the window.

The LCM upgrades work reasonably well - for the most part it's one click and come back in a few hours and it's done, but run into issues sometimes where it powers a host down then kinda just forgets about it, then eventually gives up as it's not able to reach the host (brings them back up in that phoenix environment to perform some of the updates, I believe) and you have to go back and power it back up and kick off the process again. It usually (mostly) always works the second time once it's gotten through a few of them.

API is solid, v4 just released in the past year. Really lacks in the DR/async stuff, but otherwise it works well.

Overall been happy. We were already paying for AHV anyway (hardware was there when I came in) but I can't say I'm mad about that. For the most part it's set it and forget it, almost never have to touch it.

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P10_WRC@reddit

Done a few migrations. As long as you have admin credentials for the VMs you should be golden.

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SuspiciousBumblebee@reddit

It’s been a long time since I’ve done this exact migration, but it’s dead simple. Set up the Nutanix cluster, get the networking configured up, setup Nuranix Move, and then use the Move gui to move VMs from VMware to Nutanix, grab a beer and watch Netflix while it’s doing its thing. It’s dead simple.

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