To understand the differences between Nutanix and VMware, we must first explore the origins of both organizations. Founded in 1998, VMware is credited with commercializing compute virtualization technologies with their popular vSphere product, enabling multiple virtual applications to run concurrently on a single physical host. This increased utilization of IT resources, which dramatically improved the economics of enterprise datacenter infrastructure.
Nutanix later pioneered the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) market, modernizing IT design and operations by integrating enterprise storage services via distributed software inspired by web-scale cloud architectures. Nutanix software runs on a wide variety of off-the-shelf servers, delivering all types of virtualized and container-based applications, and eliminating the cost and complexity of traditional SAN storage arrays.
Both companies are based in California and are publicly traded. Interestingly, they began as technology partners, with Nutanix software providing a simpler and more efficient infrastructure to run applications hosted on VMware virtualization. In fact, Nutanix founders launched the company at VMWorld 2012 and went on to win the VMWorld Best of Show award in 2012 and 2013.
Today, while thousands of enterprise IT teams around the world use both companies’ products, the two companies are rivals in key markets, including hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), virtualization, IT automation, hybrid cloud management, software-defined file storage, network-based microsegmentation, and more.
While the architectural differences are important to explore, both companies’ customer-facing skills should be briefly discussed, too. According to the Net Promoter Score, a measurement of customer loyalty and willingness to return to and recommend a company, both companies receive good-to-great scores. VMware’s score of 45 ranks close to the industry average of 56, whereas Nutanix’s score of 92 is remarkably higher than both the average and other organizations in the industry.
Below is a breakdown of how the two companies are working to meet their customers’ IT requirements.
Comparing Solutions from VMware and Nutanix
One of the main differentiators between Nutanix and VMware solutions lies in the product-to-product breakdown. See the charts below for a side-by-side comparison of hyperconverged infrastructure and hybrid cloud solutions offered.
HCI
|
Nutanix
|
VMware
|
|---|---|---|
| Hypervisors supported | VMware ESXi, Nutanix AHV, Microsoft Hyper-V |
VMware ESXi only |
| Additional hypervisor licenses required | AHV virtualization included at no cost | Virtualization licenses are sold separately |
| Architectural design | Modern web-scale architecture | Legacy SAN technologies retrofitted into software |
| Native file storage services | Yes, via Nutanix Files | Yes, via File Services |
| Native object storage services | Yes, via Nutanix Objects | No native support. Third party products required |
| Integrated Database as a Service | Yes, via Nutanix Era |
No support |
| Integrated machine learning | Yes | No |
| Low-latency application performance via data locality | Yes | Architecturally not possible |
Hybrid Cloud
|
Nutanix
|
VMware
|
|---|---|---|
| Delivery model | Customer managed for full flexibility | Available only as a VMware-managed service |
| Public clouds supported | AWS and Azure (announced support) | AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud |
| Integration with public clouds | Natively integrated |
Requires proprietary gateways for network integration |
| License portability between public and private clouds | Fully supported | Very limited support |
| VM hibernation to reduce costs | Supported |
Not available |
The Definitive Guide to Hyperconverged Infrastructure
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Top 20 HCI Questions Answered
10 Signs It's Time to Upgrade your IT Infrastructure
AHV: Best Practices Guide
