Nutanix vs. Cisco UCS Hyperflex

Over the past month, I have been looking at and getting some hands on experience in the online demo environment with Nutanix and UCS Hyperflex and trying to put these environments up side by side to see they would do in my environment.

Patching:

Nutanix with their hypervisor is a lot more user friendly than use the VMWare overly. I do like the one click upgrade feature that Nutanix uses to upgrade their nodes and Prism platform. It is much easier than UCS where you have to upgrade the Fabric Interconnects and then the nodes.

Hardware:

Nutanix allows you to use nodes from multiple vendors and doesn't limit you to only using their nodes like Cisco does. But and you know there is allows a but, I am a fiber channel guy and I just feel like using ISCSI is old school. I like to know that my network traffic is on one connection and my storage is on the other. Nutanix only uses a 10 GB backbone which I know is a lot for those you are still using 1 GB network connection and possible 8 GB fiber channel if you not running both network and storage over that 1 GB ethernet. Cisco allows you to run over a 40 GB ethernet. I mean yes you can't move outside your office network at that spend but for all the servers that do need to communication mostly with each other to be able to move that fast is amazing.

Integration with VMWare:

Nutanix says they have great integration with VMware but it is not as good at Hyperflex. I was able to add a new node to Hyperflex and it automatically showed up in vCenter. Nutanix on the other hand I had to go in and manually add a new host into vCenter, I would figure the Prism tool would be able to do an api call into vCenter and do it as I am configuring it into the Nutanix Cluster.

Research is still ongoing so look back for more details later.