Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

We use Nutanix Prism Pro for central management. We have three clusters and we manage them with Prism Pro. We use it as a central point of managing Nutanix, it's concentrated on Prism Pro's dashboard. Our strategy is to only have one tool to manage our clusters and Prism. 

You can see the health status of the clusters in one view. There is one view of the health of your systems which helps you to have an overview any time you have a problem. You can dig into the tools that Prism Pro has to give you all the options to take on the problem. You can monitor things and manage the cluster really easily.

It's very easy to understand. The interface is very clear.

We plan to use the solution's X-play or Cross-play automation features. This is in contract. We moved to Nutanix and we have a lot to do. For now, we are more concentrated on blueprints but we plan to have a look at these features. 

We have a lot of projects so we cannot always dive deep into the material that Nutanix offers. We would like to but we have other priorities. It was a busy year. We have an external company that does things for us so we can make the process go faster. We know what we need and what we would like to achieve. I'm still on the learning curve. I think Prism Pro is very good and straightforward.

I have been using Nutanix Prism Pro for a year and a half. 

The stability is very good. I cannot say that we have had an issue with the Prism Central dashboard.

Scalability is very technical now. I think you can install a second instance. 

We are three people that work with Prism Central and they're all in service core IT. It's the people from the infrastructure.

We have an external partner that does the maintenance. We will be getting it handed over to us, but until now this external company does all of the maintenance and upgrades. They announce that there is a new upgrade, we plan when we can do it, and then we participate.

We are still in the learning curve and we need really a company that has a lot of experience because it's mission-critical. We have systems that are very mission-critical. We really should be sure that we have people that really know what to do. When we are over the learning curve, then maybe we can take it over. For now, we give all of this stuff to an external company.

We don't use Nutanix as a self-service platform. In our IT, we manage Central so it's not that we use it like many other companies. Like a company that can say "Okay. This department can create the resources that I need" themselves. Now, it all comes into the Central place and we do that. It's still in this little team. Only these core IT people have contact with the Nutanix dashboards.

We have blueprints in the Marketplace but it's not a goal that we made for other people. When a service asks for resources, they communicate to us what they need and we create it with this. When they have a project and they need some new software, they tell us, "Okay. We need this database, those application servers," and then we set up it for them.

We had some issues so we contacted their support. They're great. When you compare to other companies, their support is really great.

This is the first hyperconverged system that we have had. Before, we had XenServer. It is a virtualization framework like VMware. We also used templates. The goal of Nutanix is to have a central place to manage all the network storage. We are still using Virtualization Framework, which is good. We are still doing the migration, but for that, you must have knowledge about SAN management, like SanDisk. This infrastructure has a different discipline and different tools to manage the clusters. Nutanix has one starting point where you can manage all this stuff with one software. So it's a paradigm shift. It's easier. Sometimes SAN can be complex because you need special hardware switches for a SAN connection to the disc system.

With Nutanix, you can grow with your needs. If we need more storage or CPU, we add a node so we get both, we have the storage and the CPU power. The good thing about hyperconverged systems is that you can grow as your needs come.

The initial setup was straightforward. It's a one-click installation. You have to set up the VM  with one click. It's very easy. It's not complex to have this dashboard. It's a one-click installation. The setup took five to ten minutes. 

You click to install Prism Central and then you create a VM and start-up the VM. There is a dashboard that goes over more than one cluster. You don't need to have a background for that. It's a one-click thing.

We planned from the beginning to use Prism Central. When we started with Nutanix, we began with a multicluster system. When you have a multicluster system, you need Prism Central. Then you can manage cluster by cluster. Other than that, you have only Prism Element and that makes no sense. It was clear that we should have Prism Pro.

We see ROI because Nutanix enables us to reduce our hardware footprint. We had a lot more nodes. We don't need SAN anymore. We reduced this need to make a point to save money.

We reduced by 22 nodes. We reduced the hardware so we have cost-saving. With hardware, you need to buy it again every five years and pay for support. We had some nodes for more than five years, and today the new machine has more power. It's hard to compare sometimes.

With Nutanix, we don't really use old hardware. We buy new hardware that's fast because every year the hardware gets faster. If we move the same load to the new hardware, we don't need so much hardware anymore because the machine itself is more powerful. The fact you can reduce and grow as the need comes saves money. 

When we calculate all that we needed before, I think Nutanix is cheap. When you take into account that you need a SAN and all that stuff and you know you can grow as the needs comes in, I think you can save money. With the analytics from Prism where you can see that you have oversized or you can predict how it will grow, you can really react in a timeframe that you also have time to buy the hardware. I think you can save money when you compare to before Nutanix.

My advice would be to go for it. 

It has fulfilled our hopes. We have been doing virtualization for long enough and we see what the pitfalls are. Nutanix gives us a centralized, easier to manage platform. 

We bought a little cluster for the proof of concept and we saw really quickly that this solution is the right way to go. Now, we're focusing on a strategy to replace all the other stuff and to go with Nutanix straight ahead. We plan to use the file cluster but for now, we have a separate file cluster. We prefer to use Era. It's a database central management tool from Nutanix. 

I would rate Nutanix Prism Pro a nine out of ten. 

We consider it our "private cloud," and all of our workloads are deployed on it. Through our application, we offer secure cloud storage. Most of our customers are law firms or financial institutions and they really care about the security of their documents and they really care about document workflow. Because of that, we have to abide by government rules and regulations. For example, if you're a German law firm, you don't want to store your documents in Australia, you want to keep them in the European Union. 

Our product is set up in multiple regions, so we've deployed the solution, on-premises, in each region. We have an instance in the U.S. to service U.S. customers. We have an instance in the United Kingdom to service customers there, and We have one in Germany to take care of the European Union. We also have one in Australia, where we take care of Australia and the Asia Pacific region. In each of those regions, we have data centers that we lease space from. In each region, it's a centralized solution. Our entire application that the end-user interfaces with runs on top of Nutanix.

Nutanix Cloud Manager has allowed us to scale really quickly. For example, during the COVID pandemic, everyone was working from home and a lot of people started buying our product because it allows them to work from home. We grew really quickly and we were able to scale our infrastructure really quickly because Nutanix has invested a lot of time into that.

The most valuable feature is the ability to automate. Nutanix has made it really easy to automate everything that we do. That's important to me and our organization. We can get more done every day by automating tasks.

It's hard to think of anything that needs to be improved. One issue, though, is that you can set up DHCP but it's a little bit clunky. I wish they would streamline and centralize the management of DHCP.

I have been using this Nutanix solution for about nine years. We have been using the Nutanix Cloud Manager version for the past several months. 

NCM is super stable. We're very happy because that translates into our uptime which is pretty great. Our customers are happy with how available our application is.

It's very scalable and we're very happy with how we've seen it scale. We don't have any concerns about that.

The technical support is amazing. Nutanix invests a lot of time and money into making sure that their technical support is top-notch.

Recently they have implemented a series of solutions that make it very proactive. They analyze our environment, including the version of their software that we're running and the hardware. They analyze every little detail. If they detect an issue, they let you know. They're using artificial intelligence to aggregate all the data and to parse through it. As a result they say, "Hey, you have an issue in your environment," and then they tell you how to explain it. 

The second way that they're very proactive is, under certain circumstances, they'll automatically open a support case and automatically collect the logs from your environment. So if something happens in the middle of the night, before it becomes a problem, they'll open a case with support and collect the logs. When I wake up, someone from Nutanix has already been assigned to the case and they've already reviewed the logs, and they'll generally have a good solution.

And one of my favorite things about Nutanix support is that they're very willing to teach you. When I'm working with them I'll ask them a lot of questions about what they're doing or about the situation. They're more than happy to explain it all and to teach me so I can understand the situation better and become better at my job.

Positive

We used to use Microsoft Hyper-V, which is good, but it's difficult to manage and it's difficult to scale.

The solution was purchased before I came to the company, but when I arrived I realized that it hadn't been implemented in the best way. I spent a couple of years fixing the architecture so that it would follow best practices. They had inadvertently painted themselves into a corner and I took away the paintbrush and the paint and fixed things so that it would work and scale better, going forward.

The initial deployment was pretty straightforward, but the people involved just didn't have experience with Nutanix at scale. They didn't necessarily do it wrong, they just didn't do it with the end goal in mind. They had tunnel vision in which they said, "We have a task that needs to be performed and we have to get it done as quickly as possible." It was a very task-oriented implementation. What I was able to do, with my experience, was take a step back and say, "Let's look at the big picture. Where are we going to be in five years?" I was able to architect a solution that would make sure that we could get where we needed to be in five years and in 10 years.

We make sure that we follow best practices from Nutanix. When deploying the product, we make sure that our cluster size—how many physical Nutanix servers we purchase and group together—follows best practices. We make sure that we plan for the ability to perform an upgrade in the environment and we plan for potential hardware failures. We've also started purchasing specialized configurations to match our workload. All of these things are a part of how we architect and deploy the environment.

We have about 250 Nutanix servers around the world. Our application consists of four or five independent offerings and those 250 nodes are spread across those four or five offerings. There are three of us who manage the environment. I'm the architect who created and implemented the solution. I also ensure that we have enough capacity to continue to grow and to take on new projects. Another member of our team does a lot of the project work: Here are the tasks that we've been assigned. How do we get from point A to point B? And the third member of our team focuses on upgrades and hardware break-fix.

We've absolutely seen a return on our investment. One way is through our uptime—how much of the day, week, month, and year our application is running. Because Nutanix is scalable and it's distributed, we're able to easily perform upgrades and keep our application running. Because of the design and implementation, we've been able to make sure that we're always running the latest version of the software, which means that we have all the latest bug fixes and security fixes. In uptime, upgrades, and security fixes, we've seen a huge return on investment. 

I've worked at my current company for four years and our business has just exploded. A lot of that increased business is due to the fact that our Nutanix environment is so stable. It's very reliable and predictable for our customers, and that translates into a better user experience. As a result, another way that we've seen a return on investment is in increased sales.

We use so much of Nutanix that we decided to do a long-term licensing agreement with them. That saved us a lot of money, but it was a difficult journey to understand what we were purchasing and to convince finance and upper management that it was something we should do. Nutanix has taken our feedback and they've worked on streamlining it and making it easier to understand and communicate to non-technical people.

We looked at all the players in the market. We interviewed them and looked at their features and we felt that Nutanix had the best offering.

Nutanix's main competitor is VMware vSAN. Nutanix built their product from the ground up, and because of that, they were able to do some really innovative things to make sure that scaling and automation are taken care of. VMware wedged vSAN into its existing offerings and, because of that, it's really clunky, difficult to set up, and it doesn't perform as well.

When we first started evaluating Nutanix, our upper management had a hard time understanding what it was and what it would do for us. It's different from a lot of traditional solutions and you have to approach it differently.

As you understand that this is the next generation of infrastructure—that it's the next generation of virtualization, the next generation of private cloud—it's a little bit easier to say, "This is going to be different. This is going to be challenging in some ways, but as far as security and compliance go, and as far as performing upgrades goes, nothing could be easier. And when it comes to getting support, they have your back. Nutanix is a company that cares about your experience and your thoughts and improving things. I've never met a company that does a better job. It is different, but it's way better than what I've used in the past.

Nutanix has invested a lot of time and money to make it a really good and solid application, but there's always a little bit of room for improvement.

I know very well that when I was started with my organization with VMware Hypervisor solution for virtualization but we were facing very frequent and unforeseen issues with VMware and due to this outage on hosted services and servers means end-user productivity loss and indirectly loss on the business.

Then later on time, we came to know about the Nutanix and its interesting features, and the HA features attracted to us to use the Nutanix as a hypervisor solution in our company.

Now when we are using, our lives have been easy

Nutanix Prism Pro improves the quality and efficiency of IT operations for the modern datacenter. Powered by the machine learning and task automation, Prism Pro intelligently optimizes capacity, proactively detects performance anomalies, and enables the IT team to automate operations tasks with ease and confidence.

Prism Pro includes a powerful application and VM-centric capacity forecast, planning, and optimization engine powered by Nutanix’s X-Fit and X-Play technologies. Prism Pro enables smart IT operation and automation by optimizing capacity intelligently, monitoring and resolving anomalies proactively, and automating remediation and operations tasks

Prism Pro’s X-Play links intelligent signals with automated actions. With a few clicks, the IT team can automate their day-to-day operational tasks. They can build automation and improve the productivity of the operation with ease and confidence and zero coding

Using X-Play, the IT team can create playbooks for common remediation or troubleshooting steps. Those playbooks can be triggered automatically based on the alert polices along with predictive monitoring based on behavioral analysis to generate actionable signals and provide early warnings

In our company, Nutanix Hypervisor (AOS) is not fully operational for some things just because of what products & services offered to our end customers we tested but we found that it is as of now not supported. We are only allowed to use VMware, but I use AOS. I think the Prism Center needs to include more functions. I know that they're including the Nutanix Era, which is the database management and disaster recovery tool. I think that Era should include everything on a single tool where you can manage everything you need inside your organization.

It could maybe have better documentation. Nutanix does have really good documentation, but it could have more details in the future.

It has been more than four hours approximately.

We used VMware, we switched just to make our life easy and work-life balance.

Nutanix is the best product in HCI solution & cost & pricing is very less what other solutions available in the market.

Keep improving and including customer demands and make nutanix more powerful HCI solution.

We are currently running a pair of production at both our home office and our DR center as well as a dev cluster. Between our prod/dev/fileshare we are now running around 32ish total nodes, and we have only had one drive failure in 4-5 years of running. The level of support that Nutanix provides and the timely response is another great attribute of Nutanix. We now are sitting right where we need to in regards to sizing, function, and design to fit our organization. We will continue to evolve and build with Nutanix.

It has allowed us to easily manage multiple clusters in multiple locations through Prism. We have multiple sites that we use to manage and run VMware at which could be a bit cumbersome with Vsphere. Since we made the migration to Nutanix we now only have active servers at three locations, and we can manage them through Prism Central with ease. If you can't see information in one spot you are going to overlook something that might fail, but with Prism we don't have that issue.                                 

The one-click upgrades and single-window management through Prism are the two greatest advantages for us.                                                                                                                

I can't think of any improvements at this time, but the support is top-notch. We have had our fair share of issues while upgrading early on, but the process now is working flawlessly. Between the initial POC to rolling it into production, everything has been smooth, and we have also added ABS & AFS to our infrastructure as well.                                                        

We have been running Nutanix Prism Pro for about four years now.

Stability is not going to be matched by anything else on the market.

Extremely easy to add nodes to the clusters.

We wanted away from the licensing cost from VMware.

Be prepared to have time on your hands after deployment.

Just a POC with Nutanix.

None at this time.

Using Nutanix, we have deployed our on-premise private cloud. We run user-based workloads, corporate application-based workloads, database workloads, and general-purpose workloads.

The file server feature in Nutanix is very good. It is one solution-worthy feature, and that was one of the key features why we went with Nutanix. Because in the same cluster, if we are getting files, blocks, as well as object storage, then that will be the best option for them to be hosted in.

The main thing Nutanix could improve is to commercialize their data fiber, which they haven't done enough. This could help them gain more traction with VMware. Nutanix is SDS, not a hypervisor like ESXi, so it's not a direct comparison. I would like to have an ESXi alternative that allows me to use it with AWS only, which is equivalent to Visa, so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

The migration of VMs across clusters needs improvement, unlike what we have in VMware. I would like to see Nutanix mature its Vmotion capabilities, which are equivalent to VMware's.

I've been using this solution for four years. 

I would rate stability a nine out of ten. 

I would rate scalability a seven out of ten. 

The customer service and support team is fantastic. 

Positive

After hardware racking, stacking, and firmware upgrading, we were able to get the cluster up and running in two or three days at the most. Once all the prerequisites are met, the deployment process is generally straightforward.

We bought Nutanix/Lenovo HVAC appliances, so the Lenovo P.S. team was present during the installation. 

There are no extra charges as long as we're not scaling beyond the agreed-upon rate.

We had VMware installed within our infrastructure. We switched from VMware to Nutanix because Nutanix is pretty simple. We couldn't handle all the extra packages.

I would definitely recommend using the solution. Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. There are still many areas of improvement in the product. 

We primarily use the solution for cloud management. We use it as a private cloud for internal client infrastructure. 

The most valuable feature of the solution is its simplicity. We have one panel from where we can see and manage all operations. This is very different from other vendors. The customer finds it very easy to work with.

They have a big community. 

It's stable and reliable.

The solution expands easily.

Support is extremely fast. 

I cannot recall any specific features that need improvement. 

Nutanix likely has a big backlog of requested features from their clients. 

We'd like the demos to be longer - maybe two to three months. Some clients need much more time for a POC. 

I've been using the solution for two years. 

The stability is excellent. We don't have any issues with the software. I'd rate the stability ten out of ten. The only issue we ever had was with an HP adaptor, not with this solution. It was a simple hardware problem. 

The solution is very scalable and very easy to scale. I'd rate the ease of expansion ten out of ten. We don't need a physical installation. The cloud makes it very simple. 

We work mostly with enterprise-level organizations. 

The technical support is very fast and easy to work with. They are helpful and responsive. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. I'd rate the ease of setup nine out of ten. It's very easy. We did need to do some specific configuration, and users do need some experience with web-based applications as they must be deployed via the web. 

The setup is very different from other vendors that tend to separate hardware, software, storage parts, et cetera. In Nutanix, everything is available in one window. 

We deployed the first time two clusters with ten others, and it took about one week. We did have a network team working with various solutions at once. 

The second time, we deployed with 11 nodes, and we managed to deploy in five to seven days. 

There were two people, engineers, that were managing the deployment process. 

Its pricing is okay. I'd rate the pricing six out of ten. We can make local payments in our country and avoid customs fees. If you have to buy hardware, you have to pay customs for the devices, and that can be up to 30% of the price. However, with Nutanix being on the cloud, you don't have to worry about that.

We are a solution partner and have existing customers. 

I'd rate the solution to others. They should buy it. It's very simple for modern infrastructure needs.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. 

We have installed a physical Nutanix box and we have created the server on it. Our infra is running on that server. We have Citrix infra, so we configured our Citrix in Nutanix only.

We were facing some issues with a vendor accessing our VDI, but after we installed Nutanix, that issue was resolved.

Among the most valuable features are 

• the one-click upgrade
• that Nutanix is very easy to understand
• that it's very user-friendly.

We have been using Nutanix Prism Pro since 2018.

In terms of its stability, it is a good solution.

The scalability is also good. We have around 4,000 users across India and we are planning to increase our node in six or seven months.

Currently, we need no more than four or five staff to operate the Nutanix infra.

We have faced some issues during operations, but when we log a case with Nutanix support, they help us to resolve them. Their technical support is very good. The support they provide is extraordinary. If we raise a P1 ticket, they will respond within 20 to 30 minutes.

Positive

We used VMware but we migrated to Nutanix.

We are not facing any problems with the solution. Nutanix is good when compared to its competitors. My advice is to go for it. We have another office in India, where they have a VMware setup, and we are going to migrate them to Nutanix there as well.

We have been using this solution mainly for our high-performance computing use cases. We had a requirement of creating multiple VMs and keeping the file server in the same nearby location. The VMs will turn all the data and their inputs and outputs will happen through the file server. We wanted something that supports virtual machine files, blocks, from a storage point of view.

The most valuable features of Nutanix Prism Pro are the user interface is quite easy to understand and it provides easy management for administrators. It is reassuring that the data is secure, even if something was to happen to it, the data can be recovered with the built-in option in the tool.

Nutanix, as of today, they do not have many of the features that VMware hypervisor provides, such as the memory layer. Nutanix is not known in the virtualization world, it is known only in the file server world. Due to this, many of the software vendors who provide their virtual appliances, do not support Nutanix as a platform. Their partnering has to improve, when the software vendor does not support Nutanix, we have to deploy Windows into the projects.

The solution could improve by reducing the alarm sensitivity and have categories that show only the critical elements on the console. Not everything that triggers the alarm. I understand these alerts but if my manager was to look at them he would be concerned not understanding they are minor alerts.

Additionally, if they could make templates to allow the provision of the images from the dashboards, instead of doing multiple steps would be a good benefit.

I have been using this solution for approximately two years.

The solution has high file and server availability, it is very stable. We had an incident with our data, due to the data getting corrupted from an endpoint issue, not from an infrastructure problem. However, through a server snapshot file, we were able to recover more than 20 terabytes of data in this solutions' native features. We did not need to obtain any other recent configuration transform data, the feature was already provided. This was really helpful.

We have scaled Nutanix Prism Pro at least 300 percent after deploying it and we are still not at the bottleneck point. Our current footprint is quite large, we are not seeing any challenges. However, each cluster will have to be kept at a finite number. If the cluster size should is too big, your maintenance window will increase for a very long time. If you can keep cluster size to a minimum, then it will be easy for you. For example, if you have a hundred node cluster and have to do maintenance, then the patching will be happening on a single node layer. Patching all the servers one by one will take too much time for us. It makes sense, in the design phase, to keep those clusters to a smaller figure, approximately 20 nodes.

We have purchased Lenovo appliances. Due to this, our primary call for support has to go to Lenovo, and then they will pass us off to Nutanix. We cannot raise a call directly with Nutanix for assistance.

The initial installation was straightforward. We brought up the whole cluster in approximately two days.

We had peer support from the OEM vendors for the deployment. 

The solution is a bit high in price for what we are receiving as features. I feel they are overcharging us at approximately 25 percent. That is something that they should change.

We explored Horizon, Cisco, HP, and many others. However, Nutanix won because the file server layer of Nutanix is more mature compared to the other competitors.

Nutanix Prism Pro is a good tool but is not for every use case, there will be a few constraints that might not make it become a single layer but it can be one of your hypervisor layers in your infrastructure.

I rate Nutanix Prism Pro an eight out of ten.