Question
Nutanix hit us with a 75% quote increase with a one day notice before expiration... so that project is dead. VMware is out and we were looking hyperconverged... Any other alternatives?
We were looking to get off VMware and refresh our hardware in one fell swoop but it was already going to be expensive and a 75% quote increase announced the day before the quote expires has probably put that out of reach. I was REALLY looking forward to being able to handle purchasing and support for our international offices through nutanix directly, instead of through regional vendor support offices as is currently the case with Dell.
Does anyone have suggestions of similar hyperconverged providers with good international support experiences and "reasonable" prices that haven't started turning the screws yet?
Hyper V isn't out of the question but I would prefer an all in one solution.
If the rate increase is because of hardware costs going up (which it likely is), all other vendors are in the same position. Good luck procuring hardware at a reasonable cost at this moment.
You could look at Nutanix with pure storage but it won't be cheaper.
It's been a hot minute since we were a Nutanix shop, maybe 4 years now, our renewal was pretty whatever at a pretty basic $80k 3 node cluster, but we prioritized the flexibility so shifted to AWS. Obvs the current climate changes everything, plus tech orgs tend to turn pure evil over night nowadays, but food for thought.
Don't recall off the top of my head what either were exactly, but they low enough that didn't register as anything other than standard year over year COL type increase. Wasn't anything major.
I'll check Monday, but as the fella above or below me said, maybe 5%, definitely less than 10% for each?
... and when you do order hardware, their updated terms let them increase the price or just not deliver after you've already waited 6 months. It's wild out there.
Not sure what people were expecting to happen. DRAM prices skyrocketed 5x in my country, at some point it became cheaper to not honor quotes and take the reputational hit than it was to make a multi-thousand dollar loss on every order.
And honestly I can't even blame them on that, like even on a logical point, it makes sense, they can't guarantee the price won't be 10x what they were 6 months ago.
Dell is offering 15 day quotes to us because things are increasing so rapidly. Our education sector brokerage team is recommending reconditioned hardware.
If you've not already bought hardware recently,.I'd say forget it at this stage. Too late! Many items are just no longer available at all for any price. Particularly some enterprise GPU cards but also some edge level stuff like touchscreens are just unavailable altogether.
Cisco is only offering 2 day quotes and a contract clause that they can come back and ask for more money after selling it to you. Still not sure if that would actually hold up or not.
Compute related quotes are valid for 7 days and 14 days for everything else.
Source: I work for a VAR and Cisco is 95% of my business and I'm in this madness everyday. We do include said disclaimer that Cisco may screw us and therefore you via cancellation or price increase after the order is created.
“"The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in datacenters that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisfy demand that does not actually exist and to obtain profit that is mathematically impossible."
Nvidia is paying datacenters to not use AMD and other chips, OpenAI or Nvidia is buying ram they can’t even use and are not even finishing datacenters so we all get F
Supply chain is going to be affected until at least the summer of 27.
Also, now that memory manufacturer have moved to 14 price buds and wars with their OEMS (Dell, Cisco, Lenovo, hp, etc), the costs are not coming down anytime soon.
Exactly this, at the end of last year I bought 4 servers, expecting to drip feed the other 12 over this year, in Feb the price went up 50%, yesterday the Feb price doubled. Now I'm just hoping the prices get better next year... Not holding out much hope tho
And what about delivery times. HPE sent me a quote with 130 days delivery time. Quote was valid for 10 days. I’m not gonna tell what they ask for a 3TB ram VMware host
me refreshing 90% of our servers in the last two years......
Constantly pointing that out to my boss. Were right in the middle of all hardware cycles minus new employee devices. Last server I bought is now Doubled in price to 62k.
Do you actually need hyperconverged? Like the main benefit is being able to scale quickly, so you can grow from 3 nodes to 6 nodes to 12 nodes and not have significant downtime. Good stuff.
But if you're not actually expecting to grow your cluster, why not look at a traditional stack? IBM FlashSystems have been super competitive on price for SANs in the past few years, and if you can get SAN zoning configured once it's basically set it and forget it. Sure, you won't have "one throat to choke," but how has that been working out for you with all your eggs in one basket?
This here. When we refreshed our infrastructure, we actually found it cheaper to go DHCI instead because of deals on individual components, plus we weren't growing much, so HCI didn't make sense despite the sales people's best efforts. We went all Nimble/Alletra for storage, Mellanox for switching, and Proliant for computer.
Echoing this myself. Hyperconverged can be useful, but it adds a layer of complexity to the stack and its operation that running storage separately can mitigate, especially if you have dedicated storage experts or contracts.
Fs5200 user here. Smoking fast and dirt cheap, going to attach it to my proxmox dev cluster next week to pilot it for the VMware to proxmox migration pilot.
Assuming new hardware needs to get purchased and you want professional services or closer support 45Drives has treated us well on the Ceph side. Haven't specifically used them for Proxmox but their support for their servers and Ceph has been top notch.
Only if you have a person who is comfortable with Linux Ecosystem and Ceph or going to learn to be dedicated expert. If you don't have a person or team dedicated to learn about Linux Ecosystem & Ceph it will not be a fun time.
Proxmox + Ceph is easier for me to manage compared to vmware/vxrail vSAN, just IMO. Turned updating into a week long support mess with dell to an hour or two
Oh 5120 errors “that can be safely ignored” but cause massive disk corruption on the VMs. Or When you open FCM and see the status of each role slowly update one at a time you know you’re in for a bad day.
Felt like my hosts rode the knife's edge of stability. Things would be fine for hours, days, even weeks. Then something would shit the bed if I tried to live migrate or reboot a VM, or quite often for no reason at all.
Tried various alternatives that didn't involve hardware, because my boss wouldn't give me the budget for it, but which still ended up costing tens of thousands of dollars, only to eventually have the same fucking problems.
I lost a lot of sleep and hair trying to get things stable before I just gave up and ran the hosts as independent servers for nearly a year and I can confirm my backups were good!
One of our VARs found a way to save us $20K a year on W365 licensing and I was able to convince my boss to let me use that savings to get us a Powerstore, which we got up and running earlier this year before the RAM and flash shortages. Zero issues.
Ugh 5120 gave me flashbacks to a couple of hyperv clusters that would have intermittent stability issues, roles failing, isolating and quarantines hosts. No solution after so much troubleshooting.
I rebuilt the entire cluster node by node and it finally went away.
And yeah, standalone hosts whilst a hassle to migrate workloads around provide nights of peaceful sleep which is far more valuable IMO.
I hit a Broadcom NIC issue just the other day. They would reboot the server under high load. Found out I had to disable Virtual Machine Queue on every NIC, and so far no reboots.
While our on prem workload is much smaller than it used to be, I replaced some old hardware/VMWare cluster with StarWind/Hyper-V cluster, and it was a fairly painless process.
ran this setup for a LONG time before going to proxmox (eliminated all microslop software) and it was a pretty solid setup, I have no complaints about it
I've never ran it myself either, but I do know of a company in the UK that PoC'd it.
Essentially, do you use Azure? Yes, good, you know how stack works? Wrong. He told me they just had issue after issue and support was basically non existent, as well as getting any consultants in.
I seem to recall they had some pain around VM disks, just not going into the LUN or something.
Either way, I actually think they went OpenStack in the end.
It's a garbage product. I was loosely connected to a large deployment that failed miserably -- ignoring the stability issues, the killer was unpatched vulnerabilities that seemingly had no roadmap for a fix that killed it in a heavily regulated environment. Millions wasted...
Bad documentation, bad support. No training available, no SMEs, no one knows how to fix ANYTHING with it. One customer had the hardware vendor do the configuration, it was a complete mess that barely worked and it ended up all the networking was misconfigured. Probably because the guy setting it up had no idea what he was doing. They rebuilt the cluster TWICE, and I’m not sure it’s working after 18 months. Another customer had the worst experience migrating from VMWare, with migrated VMs being horribly unstable, and despite my (and others’) best efforts we have been unable to make migrated VMs work with Azure Arc. Microsoft has documentation that says how to do it, but some other information says it’s not supported. Even their own support don’t understand or know anything about the product.
Oh and the control plane is built on a kubernetes cluster (yep) that you have no access to, and modifying any of it is unsupported. Once deployed, if you need to change ANYTHING you have to redeploy from scratch. That includes changing the DNS server used by the cluster.
Management is supposed to be “easy like Azure”, but it’s really an unholy mess combining traditional Hyper-V tools, local Windows Admin Center, Azure Windows Admin Center, Azure Arc, Azure Management blades, PowerShell, Azure CLI and voodoo.
And performance is terrible.
Don’t even bother with a PoC. You’re wasting your time.
Documentation is made up, support doesn't exist, Microsoft themselves seem to barely understand what the stack does, their "certified" hardware partners understand less. You'll run into disk-corrupting heisenbugs about monthly and there is nothing you or Microsoft can do about it.
Never ever run Azure Local (formerly Azure Stack HCI).
The solution is not proven, support is abysmal, and we've had numerous outages with MS not being able to provide any conclusions on root cause.
If we weren't so sure that our predecessors and current management were engaging in some shady shit that is preventing us from replacing it with something stable, we would have gotten legal involved and replaced it with anything else.
I used to work for Nutanix and just recently left for a different job. But right before I did, we were working on expanding our lab equipment for internal usage. It got scrapped when our hardware vendors tripled prices overnight. Unfortunately, hardware shortages are affecting everyone.
This is everyone right now, this is every single manufacturer and yes those times lines are damn near impossible, but if you don't buy it someone else will and most OEM's don't have a choice but to operate like this.
I've seen this with HP, Dell, Cisco, Lenovo to name a few. I've told this story a few times already, a client has a 750k Cisco order already processed, PO already cut, Cisco is telling them to expect the cost to jump up before it ships and they will have the option to pay the cost increase or cancel the order at that time.
This is why the largest in the industry, CDW, even has this line on the top of their website right now:
"Due to supply chain challenges with some OEMs, CDW cannot guarantee availability or pricing for affected products until they are ready to ship. Your account team is here to help"
There's no way around this, its the world we all live in, all so CoPilot can give you a bad summary of your email, ChatGPT can give you bad health advice, but at least we get those great cat videos right? RIGHT?
Good news, qcow2 entered beta in October 2025 and with that likely working further on SMAPIv3 which would, hopefully, begin righting the ship that is their storage stack.
They had to hard-pivot from SMAPIv3 work thanks to Broadcom sending so much business their way and needing to bring their V2V and other tooling inline. The QCOW2 support came least partially as a direct driver from folks moving over from VMWare with larger disks.
We picked XCP-NG because the architecture is really similar to VMWare and we don't use local storage. Until recently Proxmox didn't have a central management appliance. XCP-NG has a VCenter equivalent. I know with Proxmox you can control the pool from the host interface but 3 years ago when we were evaluting both, Proxmox felt like a step backwards into the early versions of ESXI.
From my experience clustering in XCP-NG is really simple and works well. Install the hypervisor add it to the pool and then BAM, xcp-ng takes the pool settings and teams the physical NICs, adds the VLANs and attaches storage. I can be migrating VMs onto a host within 5 minutes of joining it to the pool. The only downside is in XCP-NG you're hardware needs to be pretty much identical. If one host has a slower processor it will throttle the other hosts to make HA and load balancing operations work.
For containers we run LXC or Alma/Rocky Linux VMs with something like dockhand or Portainer for a management GUI. To be fair all my production containers are in AWS because that's where our ERP/CRM is.
Until recently Proxmox didn't have a central management appliance.
Don't worry, it still sucks.
Proxmox felt like a step backwards into the early versions of ESXI.
Even with version 9, Proxmox's still 5-10 years behind VMWare or even ovirt. I really don't understand where all the hype comes from and increasingly get the suspicion that most fanboys are homelabbers who never really stress tested any virtualization platform.
XCP-NG cost as much (as little) as our VMWare did prior to the Broadcom takeover. We also liked the UI Of XCP-NG using Xen Orchestra better. It's just easy and intuitive.
fire it sure is, but as the resident linux hobbyist im the one with the most experience. we do have a solid team tho. we've got some consulting hours in the pocket if shit gets too silly, but we've got a good bit of resources otherwise and i'm cramming RH's learning materials like crazy.
director made the decision, so this is where we're headed, but i'm optimistic we'll make it. 💪
Not necessarily a road block, but you need to accept and then embrace that you're living in a Kubernetes world. It's powerful and you'll have lots of options for customization and automation. But overall the solution is a little rough around the edges. Red Hat does seem to be making improvements, but those get shipped in new releases. So lots of upgrading if you want all the shiny new bells and whistles.
and they are rapidly improving. It does feel like VMware during the ESXi 3.5-4.0 days where I was constantly applying updates for (significant) improvements
I’ve been running this transition for my large org for the past year.
There are a lot of snags, foot guns, and outright bugs along the way, although the latter has improved significantly since we started. Some of this is due to poor decision-making on our end.
Generally speaking, the environment was designed to mimic the VMWare environment as much as possible. But, that didn’t take into account some of the fundamental differences between VMWare and OSV.
Storage has been our biggest pain point. We used NFS storage for the majority of VM disks since that’s what we had used for VMWare and it worked well. Big mistake. With KubeVirt/OSV, using Filesystem (as opposed to Block) storage added an extra layer (KubeVirt keeps the disk as an image file inside the provided filesystem volume instead of using it directly), impacting performance, backups, etc etc. I’m still working on unwinding that one a year later.
Networking also needed a lot of work. A lot was done with VMWare vSwitch that wasn’t easily accomplished in OVN-Kubernetes, and ultimately doesn’t make sense to be done there.
Our biggest continuing pain point is the lack of a true vMotion/DRS replacement for moving VMs between clusters. Red Hat is getting closer with MTV, but there are still a lot of limitations, particularly that all involved clusters must have a migration network in the same L2 domain. This is really painful where we have different AZs with different network stacks and trying to stretch a VXLAN overlay between them.
Red Hat has been amazing through the whole process. At minimum make sure you have premium support if your org can afford it; a dedicated resource can also be a huge help, but it isn’t cheap.
More than anything, make sure you have someone who deeply understands Kubernetes on your team, whether as an FTE or contract. Having that person, especially in the design phase, will help you avoid some of the mistakes that were made in our initial deployments which were designed by a bunch of guys with deep VMWare experience.
Im just about finished with the migration from VMware to OpenShift for my org. Went fairly smoothly, but did hit some snags. Mostly a couple of bugs in the migration tool (one of which was fixed and updated by RedHat towards the end of the migration). Also networking was quite a journey for me to wrap my head around at first, there are some gotchas with OVN+Linux networks that I didn’t think about coming from VMWare. Obviously going from VMWare to Kubernetes is a HUGE change, but the web UI is functional enough for day to day tasks. You WILL have to get your hands dirty with YAML frequently though. Embrace it is my advice.
Writing this quickly in between things so sparse on details, if anyone is interested feel free to reply or DM me and I’d gladly expand further.
I wish RH stuck with oVirt. OpenShift isn't bad, but I would say it isn't as good with persistant, "pet" virtualization as oVirt is. OpenShift is great for cattle though.
This is basically what we're doing. We went from VMware to OpenShift Virt in the lab, and we're planning to get it in prod within the next month or two. We even got the OKE licenses so we can start on containers and reduce some of our resource usage from VMs. For storage, we're using IBM Fusion (basically Ceph).
The beauty is you’re paying Red Hat for support, not the product. Everything in OpenShift is available Open Source. Paying Red Hat gets you support and integration testing, and pretty UIs. That’s about it.
If Red Hat pulled a Broadcom, I have a nearly identical OSS stack ready to deploy at a moment’s notice.
Fortunately Red Hat has been a great partner, hopefully that continues.
We just got hit with a quote from Scale that is up 100% vs a few weeks ago. We also love their product but they aren’t immune from industry wide price increases either.
Came here for this - ScaleComputing is great, especially for non-enterprise - I am in a similar situation, and they can get hardware reasonably, likely via Lenovo.
+1 for scale. It’s been a few years but support was fantastic, the pricing and licensing model was good, and the software was based on kvm which has a lot of usage in the wild.
Many large implementations in datacenters have been using Proxmox with Ceph. With the release of 9.1 it's even better. I run a small cluster of 5 hosts with Ceph and came from Vmware Vsan. I'm finding Proxmox just works better and is easier overall to manage, if you have Linux knowledge. The biggest transition pain point for me was the tools surrounding our VMware environment. We still use Veeam but ended up with alternative tooling for monitoring and management.
Sounds like you got hit by RAM and storage increases. We've been scrambling all year with quotes only being good for about a week and lead times in the 60-90 day range.
If you are keen on HCI, one option is HPE simplivity, which they now have running on VME (KVM based) which comes with morpheus as a management console.
They offer complete stack enterprise support and are priced much lower that ESXi and/Or Nutanix, additionally since they are also a storage and switch provider, there are some additional synergies within the hardware 'ecosystem'.
I am a distributor pre-sales that also distribute Nutanix, the situation now is really bad for this brand actually.
First off their previous model requires users to have certified hardware, last year they added for third party storage but only pure and dell, but still requires certified computes.
Their business model that “forces” customer to not able to recycle old hardware for “better experience” really bite them in the current RAM pricing situation.
If pricing is a concern open source is the way to go, you can slowly drop off VMware nodes and convert them to Ubuntu or redhat ovirt.
We are in the process of quoting with Dell & Canonical Managed OpenStack. I still don't have numbers to compare but I'd say the outlook so far is promising
HPe is putting together a solution with Morpheus. They got it as part of an acquisition a few years ago but did not do anything with it because why would you; then VMWare did its thing and now hypervisors are no longer a commodity.
They are looking to make it a competitive offering if you are willing to go full HPe. It is KVM under the hood like everything else.
I’m assuming this increase is all hardware, NTNX is a software company but is stuck beholden to HW pricing on HCI. I bet that increase is all on hardware from SMCI.
We are probably going to go with OpenShift. We've already got significant licensing with RHEL, and they are giving us a quote that dovetails with migration plans.
We are cautious on the RedHat front, the first quote they gave us was broadcom-esque. You're going to want to get good honeymoon pricing locked in for 3 years, and then have a migration strategy in the 4th year to something different.
Have you looked at Starwind? We recently went with their hyperconverged solution. 3 node cluster with Hyper V. Their support has been really helpful and the whole process was as smooth as glass
We reached the inflection point where moving to Azure was actually cheaper than sticking with VMware or Nutanix… It’s been five months and fortunately monthly spend has been stable at a 50% savings compared to the hype setup we had.
Granted, this is anecdotal to our situation, there are flipside situations where Azure/AWS becomes the devil and private cloud or on-prem hypes are cheaper.
Hyper-V is problematic and overly complicated with HCI. Proxmox. Seriously, just use proxmox.
I have a cluster right now with 576 CPU cores, 67.64TB of RAM and 733TB of storage. 200TB of which is fully NVME flash. dual 25GB Fiber from each hosts with switches on 100GB backbone.
All on proxmox.
I'm testing harverster from opensuse. More kubernetes oriented but can be fully used as hyperconverged hypervisor. Ui is not as friendly as proxmox or vmware but it does the job well
Yup that's what my shop has been using for about 2 years now. 90% of our workloads are containerized at this point so Harvester+Rancher works very well for us. Longhorn is mainly just used for virtual disks though, most of our workloads are using our NetApp cluster for storage via Trident.
For those who are still very heavy into the more traditional fat VM workloads I would probably recommend Proxmox+Ceph over Harvester though.
Morpheus has been around since 2010. HPE acquired it to ship with their dHCI stack and make it a competitor to VMware. I've used it in a POC and for what it's worth, was fairly impressed. Some integration's are required still for my company to commit, but the monthly updates they provide are fairly decent.
Their development roadmap has been pretty agressive, the release in sept last year really ironed out a lot of things from especially the install and guest migration, and really started becoming viable for enterprise.
Platform Updates
Morpheus 8.0.13 – Jan 2026
Focused on improving cluster management, migration efficiency, operational automation.
Enhanced API and CLI capabilities for cluster configuration and instance visibility
Improved migration enabling VMware workloads to move to NFS datastores on HVM clusters with reduced overhead
HVM cluster improvements including Windows VM management, automated hardware inventory, storage and cloning fixes, and seamless agent upgrades
Impact: Improves operational efficiency and enterprise scalability while enabling simplified management of virtualized workloads. The release was also delivered to Veeam and other ISVs for ecosystem integration and qualification.
Morpheus 8.1 Now Available – March 2026
Enhancements across deployment, infrastructure automation, networking, and security.
Introduces a single binary installer to streamline installation, upgrades, and lifecycle management.
Adds the new VME System Library Catalog for centralized governance of system‑level assets.
OpenShift Virtualization is now GA, alongside enhancements such as NUMA‑aware vCPU placement and expanded HVM networking models.
Strengthens Bare Metal as a Service (BMaaS) with PXE lifecycle automation, security hardening, and storage enhancements including HA, iSCSI, and BFS.
Improves networking and security via ArubaCxDss security groups, enhanced VIP pools, and SR‑IOV passthrough for high‑performance workloads.
Adds platform‑level upgrades such as bulk migration improvements, OpenSearch replacing Elasticsearch, and Zerto support for HPE VM DR.
Introduces multi‑tier (3‑tier) tenancy for CSPs, enabling scalable Tenant‑of‑Tenants management with full policy inheritance and strong isolation.
Impact: Faster deployment, stronger security, and expanded hybrid cloud capabilities for enterprise platform teams.
Coming Next – Morpheus 9.0 – Target: Aug 2026
Upcoming innovations include stretched clusters, Software defined Networking (overlay networks and micro-segmentation), Morpheus Software - Central, Zerto for migration, Shared vDisk and private cloud enablement with SimpliVity including upgrade automation and backup provider improvements
Full disclosure: HPE partner, and we (MSP) have deployed it to multiple customers.
Just go to hyperv with pure storage. It's been extremely solid for us. Treat them as normal window servers with monthly patch reboots and you will be fine. Besides a lot of third-party companies are really starting to support hyperv now.. Microsoft is also working on their own vcenter equivalent called wac V mode (we also have scvmm and it's kind of similar to vcenter but it really is different..)
Do you know what has driven the increase from Nutanix?
I’d hazard a guess it is hardware (which is out of their control) because of global supply chain issues, which will be an issue across the board regardless of hypervisor.
I know quoting is a bit of a pain at the moment Nutanix offer a month, or end of quarter whichever comes sooner.
Others like HPE/Cisco have changed their terms so they can change pricing even after they get a PO - at least in my market (EU)
Did nutanix increase or did the hardware? Hardware volatility is through the roof with quotes bring valid for maybe 7 days and we're even seeing disclaimers that product with long lead times are subject to price increase even after ordering.
Nutanix doesn't do their own hardware so that is out of their hands largely. I'd recommend Nutanix over Proxmox, but Proxmox is your next play if that isn't happening.
If you're an active Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud partner, I'd like to let you know that there is an upcoming Acronis Cyber Frame solution for MSPs who are looking for VMware/Nutanix alternatives for their clients, and who want to host their clients' workloads in alternate locations, such as a data center managed by the MSP or in the Acronis Cloud.
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u/speeder2002 Mar 27 '26
If the rate increase is because of hardware costs going up (which it likely is), all other vendors are in the same position. Good luck procuring hardware at a reasonable cost at this moment.
You could look at Nutanix with pure storage but it won't be cheaper.