Nutanix vs. VMware - Hyperconverged Architecture Comparison

Despite obvious similarities, one of the biggest differentiators that compels prospective customers to select one over the other lies in the vendors’ licensing and lock-in differences. Because Nutanix is fully software-defined and operates on a hardware- and hypervisor-agnostic model, customers aren’t charged a separate virtualization fee.

License-free virtualization emerged for the simple reason that many businesses nowadays no longer consider virtualization an optional component of their infrastructure. It has become a crucial, non-negotiable feature. Even so, many vendors, VMware included, offer virtualization as an expensive add-on. Because many businesses can’t operate without virtualization, they choose to pay that licensing and management fee.

Customers looking to invest in a hyperconverged solution are also likely to consult analyst reports on the HCI space and the primary vendors in the market. The Gartner Magic Quadrant for HCI is an industry staple for evaluating the strengths and cautions for 14 of the most recognizable HCI organizations.

According to Gartner, VMware and Nutanix both rank in the “leaders” quadrant, with Nutanix inching out VMware for the past few years. This year, both rank just pixels apart. Below is the most recent figure from Gartner’s report from November 2019.

As VMware is well-known for its hypervisors, it’s imperative to understand how its main solution, ESXi, compares to Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV). To begin with the older of the two, ESXi is a type-1 hypervisor (a “bare-metal” hypervisor), meaning it runs directly on hardware instead of an operating system (OS).

In addition to ESXi, VMware offers other hypervisors, such as vSphere, with fewer features. VMware ESXi supports many critical features, like shaping traffic, creating role-based security access, logging and auditing tasks, and much more. Plus, ESXi can configure 128 CPUs and 120 devices.

ESXi does have some attractive benefits VMware customers will enjoy. First of all, thanks to its small footprint of 150 MB, businesses will enjoy being able to quickly and easily install ESXi. This smaller size and built-in security management also make ESXi a more secure option.

However, to maintain its smaller size, ESXi offers fewer configuration options. And for those who haven’t used a virtualization product before, ESXi will be a learning process. Another more deterring drawback of ESXi is that the overhead created with additional CPU work and OS might cause key applications to slow down.

On the other side of the coin is Nutanix Acropolis, which includes its own built-in hypervisor, AHV. Launched in 2015, AHV is based on Linux KVM, though Nutanix also supports VMware and Hyper-V. Acropolis customers can use AHV on its own or with another hypervisor thanks to the flexibility of Acropolis Application Mobility Fabric (AMF), which lets you move virtual machine (VM) workloads between hypervisors.

One of the main appeals of Acropolis and AHV is the lack of licensing fees. Acropolis comes embedded into the Nutanix hyperconverged platform, freeing customers from the costly add-on fees associated with other hypervisor vendors.