Hey Heather,

On 12/18/18 9:31 AM, Heather Rayl wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> this is slightly off topic, but our library is in the new market for new
> hardware to run our virtual machines and services. right now, we are
> running an ancient version of VMWare and WShpere for VDIs on an even more
> ancient HP blade setup.

Oh I don't know. Feel "on topic" to me :-)

> 
> We are investigating going with HP again, using Simplivity.
> 
> However, we also got a very attractive quote from Lenovo, who has their own
> hyperconvergence software called Nutanix.
> 
> I was wondering if anyone has used either of these products before, and
> their experiences. We would definitely upgrade our instance of VMWare, so
> we would be running VMWare for our virtual machines and VDIs in the
> beginning if we went with the Lenovo solution. However Lenovo also offers
> their own VDI and virtual machine services to investigate when our VMWare
> licenses expire.
> 
> I'd love any info you may have.

I have experience with all the products you list and will recommend
picking the one you're (I mean not you as a person but your team will be
on call when things break) most comfortable with. So Nutanix (and it
really was slick when I saw it over two years ago) may look fantastic
and be less costly, but it will -by my measure- only be cheaper if your
staff can pick it up with ease.

My reasons are based on experience when we were in a similar predicament
and opted for an Open Source solution of Proxmox[0]. It worked really
well for a while until it didn't. And suddenly the only persons who
could fix the production servers were limited to those who took time to
learn how proxmox worked. (Yours Truly and the other overworked
Network/Storage Admin) That tends not to scale.

I've found that committing to a product is less about the contract but
those who will be tasked with fixing this. So if Lenovo is offering
Nutanix, plus skill training I'd say go for it. (Apologies for my
assumption, but you didn't say if they were). Otherwise I'd strongly
urge sticking with "what you got"... and hate myself for saying that. :-)


Cheers,
./fxk



[0] https://www.proxmox.com/en/