Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

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 some critical and not-so-critical applications. That's how we classify them broadly. The critical applications remain on-premise for us, while we're pushing the remaining ancillary applications to the cloud. That's how we use Nutanix Cloud Management.

We don't use it to manage cloud costs per se. We already have an enterprise agreement with Azure and AWS for cloud consumption. It's primarily to drive efficiency and migrate more applications to the cloud. Within the cloud division, we have around 52 engineers, and they all use it.

Compatibility with multiple clouds and a single control would help us. We are also getting onto GCP, and there is limited compatibility with GCP in the areas we need. We are using GCP primarily for data analytics.

We started using Nutanix six months ago.

Nutanix is relatively stable.

Nutanix is scalable. 

We haven't faced any problems because Nutanix provides an outside team. We haven't had any issues requiring L3 support, and the L1 and L2 engineers are on-site.

It was pretty easy to set up Nutanix Cloud Management because we had help from a Nutanix partner and a technician from the vendor. We had no problems getting up to speed on the solution. We were up and running in about 45 days.

We paid about 140 million Indian Rupees for a three-year cost. The price is reasonable and less expensive than managing the operations yourself.

I rate Nutanix Cloud Management seven out of 10. Before implementing, I would suggest looking at the workloads you plan to use with Nutanix Cloud Management. Depending on the workload and the criticality or regulatory importance, you should decide whether to deploy.

We use Prism Pro and Prism Central to centrally manage everything. It comes with a playbook and we use that to alter some procedures.

Nutanix has integrated storage which gives us a separate storage unit. That has dramatically decreased our rack space. We used to have a twofold rack on this solution.

It is an integrated solution with virtualization, storage, and network all together. We used to have each of those components from different vendors and we had to manage them separately. Now, we can centrally manage all of them. We can configure most things from a central location, and the automation enables us to accomplish a lot of things. We save a lot of time as a result.

Overall, the solution has dramatically improved the way our organization functions. We used to have IBM servers and Nimble Storage but there was no central management so we had to manage each host individually. We also had to manage the storage separately. With Nutanix, everything is built-in, the storage and the host together. We can do everything from one central location. That makes things very simple. 

The TCO is really good and the administration is very simple.

The central management aspect of Prism, as well as its playbook functionality, called X-Play, are very helpful for us.

We can use the event trigger in the playbook and then specific procedures are run automatically for us. That saves us admin time. Using X-Play is simple. In three steps you can define things and there is also a wizard to guide you. There's a lot of automation you can potentially do, but if you try to do something several times you might create some problems with your automation. The wizard is the simplest way to automate and the resulting automation saves us time.

We are quite a small environment. We only have two chassis and eight hosts, four hosts in each chassis, and we centrally manage them. The performance is quite good and responsive.

Overall, everything is simple, including the upgrade feature. Everything is built in one place with a single pane of glass for management.

We use Nutanix only for our dev and test environments. Our production environment is VMware, and that is totally separate. But we do transfer data between them. That's a challenge because we need to frequently bring the production data into our test environment and that's a big transfer. If we could do a cross-storage transfer, like a transfer from NetApp or Nimble Storage into Nutanix with automation, that would greatly help us.

I've been using the solution for a little over four years. I'm the infrastructure architect and I design the solution.

The stability of the solution really surprised me when I first started using it. It exceeded my expectations. I have been impressed.

Just think about the fact that we managed 15 hosts individually before, and we had to manage the storage separately. The maintenance of it was really difficult for us. We had two dedicated environment admins, and now we are down to one, a dedicated Nutanix admin. He is fully in charge of the solution and its maintenance. He also supports users and does troubleshooting for them. It has saved us lots of time that we can put into user support.

From my understanding, the solution can very easily be scaled up. The scalability should be really good.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is the next version of Prism Pro. If we renew Nutanix next year, we will use NCM. It is a better version of Prism Pro and I'm looking forward to that.

Technical support is quite good. We have a heartbeat sent to Nutanix, so when we open a support case, they normally respond really quickly and provide good suggestions as well.

Positive

We used IBM with Nimble. We also used Cisco UCS with NetApp. UCS provides central management for their platform, but we had to manage storage separately. We had to manage each host individually. That was a lot of duplicated work because we had more than 15 hosts.

At first, we moved our environment to Azure, but we found that it was too costly. That's the reason we ended up with the Nutanix solution, and we moved everything back in-house again. Azure is a totally different environment. It's a cloud solution, but we have really lengthy applications and Azure didn't really meet our requirements. We ended up with way more VMs than we required, and that really brought the cost up.

After a year and a half on Azure, we explored the Nutanix solution. We decided to use it and moved some 200 VMs back.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The only thing that was confusing  was configuring the IP address for the management part. After that, everything was fine and really simple. I'm still confused about the IP address part. I don't think that's related to Prism or NCM. It's just the Nutanix solution.

Maintenance is required because from time to time they release new firmware that may contain new features and bug-fixes. Prism has built-in upgrade features that make upgrades pretty simple too. It's really simple compared to UCS.

We brought in a Nutanix technician from Toronto, the first time. The second time, we hired a third-party consultant to come in. They were both okay. Their knowledge of it was really good. Both of them were still confused about the IP config. The initial problem was that we have a lot of events. Our internal network is quite complicated. That might have confused them.

On our side, there were three of us involved. I'm mainly on the infrastructure side and take care of the platform storage network. We also have a dedicated Nutanix admin, and one other. We spent almost a day with the consultant.

Compared to UCS and the NetApp storage, Nutanix is actually cheaper. It also has a lot of built-in features, most of which we are using, and we added a few extras.

We reevaluated UCS, but UCS still didn't come with storage. We thought that the built-in storage of the Nutanix solution, and the single pane glass management, would greatly help us. It would reduce our administration time a lot and allow the programmers themselves to provision VMs. That would also help us.

Be sure you collect your requirements accurately and be sure to consider growth. We didn't do that at all and, about eight months after we bought the first one, we ran out of resources and had to add a second one. So carefully estimate your growth and give yourself a lot of room to grow, including space and CPU capabilities.

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.

We are currently using Calm to automate our infrastructure and platform provisioning, including going into infrastructure-as-code, standing up environments, and triggering deployment processes.

We aren't looking for it to automate application management to a single platform because we are spread across Azure Pipelines and Octopus Deploy and multiple methods of automating our application deployments. In the last year, we have standardized what we are doing with Calm in terms of infrastructure automation. We haven't stepped into application life cycle management with Calm. We are mostly focusing on leveraging Calm as our platform and infrastructure provisioning orchestrator.

It is based on-premises on our Nutanix cluster.

The Runbook automation makes it easy because we can do a lot of operational tasks in a single click. Our hope in the future is that we can tie it into our AI operation software, wherein these runbooks can be called through APIs and that it can lead us to self-healing. But it really helps us in reducing manual intervention and manual effort in operations. We've just been proving it out in certain cases and it looks very promising. We haven't set it up fully and gone to the extent of fully automating all of our operations yet.

The beauty of Calm is that although it's built into Nutanix, it is not just for automating what's in Nutanix. We've also used Calm to trigger API calls to external systems and services, to orchestrate other automation. For example, we use F5 for load balancing. Using Calm, we are able to call APIs on F5 to configure load balancing for our applications. And from Calm we are also able to trigger Octopus Deploy, which we use for deployment automation processes. Overall, we are able to configure and trigger other orchestration or automation tools from within Calm. It creates a line, nicely.

We also use Calm with Azure DevOps, which is our central orchestrator. That is where we have our CI/CD pipeline. Azure Pipelines in Azure DevOps, triggers Calm for environment provisioning and then comes back and executes test automations within Azure DevOps pipeline.

Using them together absolutely helps speed up the integration and delivery of applications in two specific ways. One, as I said, is that we were able to pull in Calm and tie it into our existing pipeline. We did not have to retrofit or build pipelines from scratch just for Calm. It naturally fit into our pipelines. The second way is that we also use Azure DevOps as our source control and repository tool. We are able to store infrastructure configurations as code inside Azure DevOps and Git repositories. When Azure DevOps triggers Calm, we are able to pull configurations from the source repository and pass it on to Calm, so that our provisioning is truly from the configurations that are stored in the source repository. We are able to really perform infrastructure as code.

As an example, we recently had to stand up an environment for a new project and we were able to do that in under two weeks, including deploy and deliver. In the past, that same project would have taken two or two and a half months. And after completing that initial end-to-end process in two weeks, we can just clone and replicate it multiple times. So there was the initial decrease in deployment time, and then, depending on how many times we replicate that environment, we are gaining more and more savings.

We also make use of the solution’s support for scripts and API. The initial hours of setting them up created additional overhead, but once that was done, because of how well it works with APIs and scripts, it definitely reduced manual effort, over time. Say we spent 10 hours setting up a script or an API call. Every single time that particular application is deployed, if that script saves us one hour, we have to deploy it only 10 times to start getting a return on investment. We deploy many of our applications many times, so our savings are exponential.

The blueprints and templates are very nice and easy to use. They are very valuable because we can configure the entirety of an environment as a template and reuse it multiple times. In our delivery process, we have multiple environments going all the way to production, including dev, test, staging, and performance environments. We have to stand up the same environment again and again, before taking it all the way to production. Having a template, which is fully configurable through parameters, is really useful. And now that we have those templates and we can stand them up fairly easily, we are also able to decommission an environment when we don't need it because we can, again, click a button and stand it up fairly easily and it becomes a standard process.

One thing that comes directly to mind is how they manage version control. I would love to see Calm create a built-in source control feature, one that we could tie into a repository and it would self-manage changes in versions. All the version control is built within Calm right now. I would love to see that integrated with an external repository and make it easy to tie it into GitHub or Git repositories.

I have been using Nutanix Calm since early 2020, which makes it a little over a year now.

We have had issues with bugs or version mismatches, more so because Calm is part of the bigger Nutanix ecosystem. If someone upgrades AOS on one side, there can be a mismatch with the version of Calm we have. Nutanix has this huge ecosystem and Calm is just a virtual layer working with Prism and AHV underneath.

This past week, we had a bug. After working with Nutanix support we figured out that we had to upgrade AOS to get rid of the bug.

Overall, Calm has been solid at what it does. We are early in the intake process. We are not fully mature with Calm. When it comes to issues and bugs, there is a solid path of escalation and we get good support. We feel comfortable where we are right now and we also feel Calm has been solid in what we have been able to achieve so far.

It's a great technology and it's part of the larger ecosystem which scales really real. Because of how it is tied into the Nutanix ecosystem, I am confident that scalability, and maintainability, will be very easy and smooth in the long term.

A lot of our technical support comes directly through our technology partner, Reliant, whose consultants are certified by Nutanix. Reliant will work with someone from Nutanix professional services, and that person from Nutanix has been working with us over the past two years during our journey.

When we have to go beyond them and raise a support ticket with Nutanix support, they have been very good as well. Their overall engagement model is good, and we have multiple ways of reaching out and getting support.

For infrastructure automation, we had no solution. In the past, one of our teams had tried vRA on top of VMware to try to achieve automation, but it wasn't quite successful. Up until Nutanix, we had no automation, other than a little bit of automation to assist a group of individuals writing a PowerShell script. We never had this level of focused, end-to-end automation.

The reason we picked Calm is that it's tied into the Nutanix ecosystem. We are leveraging everything that comes out-of-the-box from Nutanix as a solution, to take full advantage of the full capabilities of the ecosystem.

Setting up the Calm module and getting it running was pretty straightforward. We got that done in under two hours. 

But if we are talking about setting up something within Calm, like a blueprint or a runbook, if someone is completely new to Calm it takes about two to three weeks to get used to it and to set everything up. After that, it becomes very easy.

Calm has an initial learning curve to get used to the modules and how Calm ties into the rest of the Nutanix ecosystem. Once we got through that initial learning curve, it became fairly simple. We have a choice of either using PowerShell or Python to do our custom scripting and the UI itself is intuitive enough. My team of sys admins and automation specialists took about two weeks to get used to it, before they could start making good use of it. And anyone new who starts to use it takes an initial two to three weeks period to really understand the implementations. From there on, it's just organic growth and knowledge.

When we brought in Calm we were going through a full infrastructure modernization project which included bringing in Nutanix and all of its components. We had professional services from Nutanix take us through all of this, and we had a plan upfront. Calm was coming in as part of the whole Nutanix ecosystem. The Nutanix professionals helped to the point that we just had to install the modules, enable access, and we were done.

In terms of our staff involved in the deployment, the entire team was consulted and informed, but there was just one person required. Because it's on our servers, Nutanix professional services needed one person from our side in system administration to give them the necessary access and to work with them in setting it up. 

We don't maintain a lot so that doesn't require much staff time for it. There are regular updates but they aren't too frequent. It probably takes one person about half an hour in a week to maintain, which is very negligible. We are going through a huge intake process right now and that means most of the effort involved is in getting everything automated. There's very little maintenance effort.

We have five or six individuals trained and using it actively. We plan to get up to 15 individuals trained and actively developing blueprints and runbooks in Calm. When it comes to consumption, I'm hoping we can get up to 50 users using the self-service feature in the next year. From there, we'll have to see how much more we can expand.

We worked with Nutanix professional services, but we assigned this whole project to Reliant, our technology partner. Reliant, in turn, engaged Nutanix professional services. We had technology consultants from both Reliant and Nutanix helping us on this.

Reliant has been a really good partner. They've done most of the heavy lifting in getting Nutanix in and setting it up. It's a strategic partnership and it has worked really well for us.

We haven't calculated any kind of ROI number. Anecdotally, there are two spaces where we expect to be seeing ROI. One is on the provisioning side, because everything will be automated and that will result in a lot of reduction in manual efforts. There will also be a lot of reduction in the overhead costs of the ticketing process and assigning of tickets.

The other main area should be that, because we can spin up and spin down platforms and infrastructure on-the-fly, there will be a reduction in the load we have in terms of static environments, meaning things that were stood up but never decommissioned.

The pricing is fair. We got a really good price to start with. We'll have to see over the years how it turns out.

In terms of additional costs to their standard licensing fees, there's the effort involved in training and upskilling employees to be able to use Calm. That's an indirect cost. Regardless of what new technology we would bring in, we would have to pay that cost. That cost has been minimal. The Nutanix University helps a lot as it has a lot of training programs, and the software itself is intuitive enough. The cost is well worth it.

There were a couple of solutions we are looking at, and we are even evaluating some right now. In the past, we looked at vRA, because we were on VMware, but from the time we switched to Nutanix, we focused heavily on Calm, especially because it comes out-of-the-box from Nutanix.

vRA and Calm are apples and oranges because they have different underlying technologies and different ways of handling automation. I don't think it would be a fair comparison. We didn't really put any effort into trying to compare them.

Anyone who is looking to implement Calm has to sit down and put forward a vision. If they're just blindly thinking, "Here's an automation solution. We'll bring it in and it will magically solve all our problems," that is not true. It requires some amount of initial design thinking. We actually went through a workshop. We specifically sat down and said, "Here's what Calm is offering us and here's how we will fit it into the existing pipelines in our ecosystem. We were very clear, in those initial few months, about what we were trying to achieve. That really helped us in the long run.

There are two things we have learned in this entire process. One is to look at the software and figure out what gap it fills, rather than trying to make one tool solve all of our problems. We were very cognizant of that from the beginning and it has worked out nicely. The second thing is that while we have focused heavily on one particular use case to make it production-ready, we have not invested enough time in exploring more of what Calm does. We know blueprints and automation, and we know runbooks, but we haven't fully explored everything that's available. We'll have to put more effort into exploring it further.

We are currently using the solution's one-click self-service feature in a proof of concept. We are looking to create marketplace items to start using it more. We expect it will help simplify our operations. Once we give that one-click to our end users, they won't have to create a service desk ticket, and that ticket won't have to go through different processes and then reach the tech team so that it can stand something up. If the end-user needs something they will be able to click a button to get their environment and it will be done in 10 minutes. That would be in place of logging a ticket, that ticket going to the service desk, the service desk figuring out which team to assign it to, that particular team prioritizing it, and then actually doing the work. It could be that the work, even if done manually, would only take one hour, but the entire process could take a week or two weeks.

Every organization will have its own set of tools. It has been interesting to see how Calm fits into ours. I don't believe there is a single solution that will solve all of the problems, but the way we have leveraged Calm is to make good use of its abilities to fill gaps inside of our automation ecosystem. It required an initial vision and design for how we were going to fit Calm into our pipeline. It did a really nice job of fitting into our ecosystem. We did not have to go out of our way to redo or reinvent the wheel to get Calm to work in our environment. It nicely fit into our existing pipeline where there were gaps. That is where I rate Calm highly because it's very flexible enough to fit into an existing ecosystem. 

If we had no existing tools—if we did not have Azure DevOps and Octopus Deploy or anything else—and we just had Calm, I don't think that Calm would be able to solve all of the problems. We would have to look for additional tools to fill gaps. In our case, it worked well because we had tools that were already doing a good job, but there were gaps. Calm came in and filled all those gaps. It has acted as a single orchestrator and it is able to orchestrate multiple other orchestrators. It has tied everything together.

We evaluated Calm primarily as an automation platform because that's what it is. I work for a service provider and we represent a lot of customers.

Our journey with Calm started because we wanted to decentralize our platform of services to customers, because agility is one of the biggest concerns. As a service provider, we have very rigid practices because we follow ITIL processes. If we're managing a customer's environment, we need to have controls. The unfortunate reality of controls is that they add rigidity, and that works in contrast to the agility of cloud where customers want to be able to adopt and migrate and move quickly, based on their businesses needs.

We're developing Calm in a way where we give customers choice and flexibility, so that we don't have to consume workloads for them. We give them Marketplace, and part of Marketplace is that we publish open source applications, as well as managed applications and unmanaged applications. These applications could be as simple as a stack of load balancers, middleware, and database. Or it could just be an operating system. It's really the customer's choice. We've given them a platform, similar to the way public cloud providers do, a marketplace where they can go consume, but in our marketplace, that consumption can be on their platform. We provide a shared platform like a public cloud, and the hyperscalers, so they can consume it in Amazon and Microsoft Azure as well.

Part of our journey with Calm was that we wanted to speed the process up, but at the same time, have a standard catalog in that process, and let that catalog evolve with our customer feedback.

In our organization, we are both a partner, a service provider, and reseller of Nutanix. We have a very strong relationship with them. We have adopted Nutanix as a standard for our service provider cloud, which is located in five data centers in the central United States. In these environments, we have deployed Nutanix for our own services and shared services, and we are also selling private cloud, based on the Nutanix platform, to our customers. With these deployments, we are standardizing on Calm as a centralized management marketplace. So it's doing a couple of things. It's letting customers consume against their own platform, and it's allowing customers the access to be able to consume hyperscale and/or our shared platform if they choose to do so.

Our journey, right now, is balancing between managing operating systems and our managed service practice for our customers. We're trying to automate that managed service practice with Calm and their blueprints and the openness of scripting that they support, so that we can automate adding an application, an operating system, from our catalog. It goes through an ITIL process of creating a customer asset in our service library. It grabs values of that asset—naming conventions, components of the infrastructure, et cetera—and puts them into the customer's asset library.

These are all bits of underlying automation that you normally wouldn't necessarily have to do, but as a managed product we do so on behalf of the customer for inventory purposes. And that's just one aspect, what a managed platform does. The other aspect is an unmanaged platform. A customer can say, "I want to do 10 things and I'm managing them myself, and I'm going to probably destroy them when I'm done." We wanted that ubiquitousness, so a customer can choose whether they want something managed by us or managed by them, but where we keep the experience for doing so the same. It's a standard journey instead of their having to open a ticket and request something and then wait for a period of time for it to be executed. We're trying to remove ourselves as friction.

Our use case for Calm has been wrapped around giving customers a marketplace to standardize their experience and to determine what the components of that standardization are, which includes workloads that we manage, workloads that the customer manages, and those two scenarios can be on their private cloud, our shared platform, or the hyperscalers.

The beauty of the Calm platform is that it's really an open platform so you're not locked into a language that you're forcing developers and your team to use. We're working on enabling a DevOps journey inside of our company where we're not forcing people to adopt a tool and use a framework that they're not familiar with. We're allowing Microsoft people to use PowerShell. We're allowing our Linux teams to use shell scripts and Python. They have their choices. It's also allowing other components, like JSON. Our DevOps team that uses Terraform and other technologies uses JSON as a component for infrastructure automation. Blueprints allow all of that functionality.

You can also create a library of these scripts so that other team members can use what you've already developed to help speed and accelerate the automation journey. That is the next step for us. We're getting all this source that is very decentralized today—where people write their scripts, they store them, and they're not really a shared platform—and we're using Calm as a mechanism to bring it all together. The next step will be to integrate Calm with our source library and CI/CD pipeline. That is a forward-looking statement. Those are things we're working on. The DNA within our company, historically, wasn't as a software development shop, but we're transforming that now and using Calm as a mechanism to get there.

We have long-time customers, and our method of managing their workloads has been very traditional. When a request comes in, we go through a process of provisioning and deploying that request. We've enabled Calm on their platforms, so when a request comes in, one of our engineers executes the request, but instead of manually pulling triggers for the customer, to execute that request we now use Calm to deploy the customer's request and allow the automation to do the rest. We have scenarios with some customers where we are completely hands-off. They come to us and they say, "I want 10 of these and 20 of those." We execute that request for them using Calm, but that experience is somewhere on an order of magnitude of a fraction of the time that they used to have to wait previously, to have that request delivered.

In addition, by using Calm, we have the ability to keep these blueprints and images up to date. Previously, we had an automation process that built these images but they were constantly having to go through a management lifecycle. With Calm, we have been able to streamline that lifecycle so that what we're providing our customers is really the latest and the greatest.

Calm's abilities, in terms of team collaboration, come out in our standard marketplace or platform where teams are using the same experience. It's the same UI, so they're able to talk through their experience and talk through what they run into. We're using some of the functions of Calm to build project teams so they have the same access level and the same control. They're sharing the platform together. That gives them the ability to collaborate better across the platform.

And Calm is an HTML5 interface. It's all web-based applications at this point. Given what's happened over the last 12 months [as a result of COVID-19] and that everyone is remote, it's a lot easier to collaborate because it is all HTML5 and web-based. Our teams don't have to worry about legacy tools and applications to try to work together. From that perspective, we haven't really lost time in the journey because of all the recent events. We've been able to keep on working and keep on moving things forward.

In terms of Calm's ability to optimize, the analogy we use is a T-shirt because we have an extra small, a small, a medium, and a large. Those are really just subsets of components of the underlying infrastructure: this many CPUs, that much memory, this much storage. We use that to catalog our resources. The beauty of that catalog that we're building is that it is consumed against an infrastructure. By "T-shirting" these consumption models, we're able to maximize the available capacity of the environment that these workloads are sitting on. By contrast, when you randomly consume, which was typical in the "old days" where you would manually provision something, you provisioned them to non-standard tiers of infrastructure. That meant you were not consuming a platform linearly and that you were usually under-consuming something. You would make an investment and not maximize the output of that investment. By standardizing our "T-shirts" with Calm, we have also standardized the infrastructure that things are consumed against. So when our customers invest thousands of dollars on both infrastructure and tools with us, we allow them to get the maximum utility of that infrastructure investment, by using Calm as a mechanism to consume against it.

When it comes to application development and deployment, we have a series of management tools that we provide to our customers but those tools have a backend. We're trying to build automation into those tools so that they can be deployed and distributed automatically. We're using Calm to centralize and deploy those scripts automatically, in a distributed way, down to customers' private clouds and other environments. The intent is to build an application catalog with our customers so they can consume against it, using the Nutanix Marketplace to purchase those applications, very similar to what Amazon and Microsoft marketplaces are like. We're easily seeing a 20 percent improvement, and probably more, in that application development. That's a conservative number.

Calm is also transforming the way we QA and operate—the whole nine yards. Our process for delivering an application, an environment, goes through what we call a readiness exercise, a validation exercise. In the software world you would call it an SDLC stack where you go through dev, test, UAT, and release. That can be a very static and manual process, and it's very hands-on. What we're doing with Calm is transforming the process. We're saying, "Well, instead of manually doing the exercise, why don't we build triggers in our automation so that we can validate whether things are working properly or not along the way." We're making it a continuous validation process and an automated validation process. We're going through that journey right now, but when it ends, in all likelihood it will cut our validation time in half. We probably spend half our time validating an environment before we hand it over. If we automate that validation, we don't have to actually spend time doing it. Currently we spend time meeting with teams to do acceptance of our validation. So all that time will be freed up because we won't need a meeting to talk about validation.

Overall, we've gone from deploying workloads in 45 minutes or 90 minutes and we've taken that down, in some cases, to seven minutes.

The greatness of the Calm platform is that it removes itself, in a sense, so it's unknown to many people. It's a marketplace. You consume resources. If you design it properly, it obfuscates itself. Part of our challenge in the journey working with customers is to have them understand that that is what you want. You want it to be simple. But usually making something simple on one side is fairly hard to do on the other.

We use Calm's one-click self-service feature and it's really transforming the team's efficiency. The teams are used to being reactive, which is typical of what you find in IT organizations and service providers. Customers run into problems and teams react. What we're trying to do is reduce that slope and be more proactive in approach. The one-click ability is enabling us to take some of those activities and put them into operation, versus people manually responding.

We have a very close relationship with Nutanix and I have a very close relationship with the Calm team. I've given them a lot of feedback around multi-tenancy. Because we're a service provider, multi-tenancy is a big deal. 

Another aspect is that, while there are multiple clouds supported, we want less friction around the ease of delivery. We want the ability to integrate other clouds, unify the accounts.

Identity access management or IdP are other areas we've talked to Nutanix about, to move toward more of an identity access model, not just with the ability to use IdP to authenticate, but to also attach our back controls to the IdP so that we can have that centralized and decentralized model with customers.

And we want the marketplace and the blueprints to be a little bit more "brandable," for lack of a better word. This is really a service provider play, but we want the ability to make that a little bit more brandable so that we can scale that marketplace. We want it to be easy to determine which cloud you're selecting when you're picking something from the marketplace to consume. 

We also want to show cost to the customer. We want a model that says, "Well, if you consume that, this is approximately what it's going to cost you, depending on where you consume it, which cloud you're consuming it in."

I've been using Nutanix Calm for about two years now. We evaluated it just over two years ago. I was familiar with it in its early stages.

We haven't had any issues with Calm. Nutanix is really embracing that reference architecture within other aspects of its core applications. Calm is a containerized application that Nutanix deploys within their platform.

Calm has the ability to autoscale resources, so that if you need to scale up a resource, you can build those mechanics into your blueprints. We're consuming that ability internally, for testing purposes. We've talked to our customers about that and we're going to introduce it to them as that agility becomes reality.

The challenge is whether their applications have that "breathability" or not, and whether they are familiar with that. We want to be careful on the autoscaling aspects for customers because not all customers have web-scale applications. A lot of them have traditional applications. But we're definitely adding that to our subset of tools and resources so that there's an automation lifecycle with the ability to scale out a resource. Calm definitely has that capability and we've been using it for a while ourselves, evaluating and testing it. We're trying to work that into our discussion with our customers.

Overall, Calm is highly scalable and we haven't had any performance issues with it. The specifications numbers are in the specs, but we haven't hit anywhere near that. Those tolerance ranges are fairly significant. If you were to ask me about this a year from now, I might say that we will hit some scalability issues based on adoption. The good news with Nutanix is that they're constantly looking at this stuff as well. We're in constant communication with them about the platform.

The people in our organization using Calm include our DevOps team, our "high-end" engineers on both Windows and Linux, and our architecture team. That's roughly 20 people who are using Calm or developing within it. Those teams also work with customers against the Calm platform. We're now working on the next half of the journey, which is to bring the rest of the company along, extend our product catalog with Calm, and to start showcasing it to customers.

Nutanix technical support is a top-notch team. It's really one of the best experiences we have had and that I've personally had. When we call into Nutanix, their SREs are just phenomenal. Their discipline is absolutely amazing. We can get through escalation if we need to and get to a team, whether that's Calm or any other team, in a very short period of time. And that extends, for us, into their product team, into their engineers, or their QA if we need to.

It's an amazing experience to go through with Nutanix. Their knowledge is phenomenal. Their agility is phenomenal.

And with the Nutanix platform, they have the ability to see everything remotely as well, through logs. The platform uses a tool called Pulse which collects all the background information. It's a follow-the-sun approach, depending on what you need and what your escalation is. They can hand that ball around across the globe to get you to your result.

It's not that you'd ever want to have to call in to support for a problem, but with the way they have built the platform and the great team they have built, if you do have to call in, you can really feel comfortable that they're going to get you to where you need to be and they're going to get you there quickly.

Before Calm we tried many solutions. At some point tried Morpheus. That was prior to my joining our company, although I had previous experience with Morpheus. One of the challenges with Morpheus were some of the core things we have talked about. It was a completely independent platform. We had some API issues with it, as a service provider, and it didn't necessarily accelerate our journey. It unified things, because it was one interface, but the core, underlying infrastructure pieces weren't necessarily transformed as a result of it. While the experience became unified, it still took 30 minutes or 45 minutes or an hour to get something deployed. Whereas Calm now sits on top of a whole new ecosystem and that ecosystem has transformed a lot of things. 

We played with the VMware tools for a period of time, but those are expensive tools. It was very expensive to adopt that platform. We were trying to figure out the best mechanics for accelerating the platform without adding too much cost. That's when we started our Nutanix journey.

Nutanix makes the deployment easy, just like everything else that they have in their software stack. It's a very simple deployment model. It's part of the Nutanix software tool chain.

We have a combination of a uniform implementation strategy for Calm and taking different customers' requirements into account. We work with our customers to get feedback. We've started with a baseline of operating systems, primarily, because most of our customers are still in the traditional consumption model. And we're complementing that based on their feedback. We're also working with Nutanix because Nutanix has a large customer base as well. We've just really started that journey.

When we adopted the platform, we engaged Nutanix's services team so we could accelerate our journey with them. We had nothing but a great experience with them and their team. We were able to get Calm and core components of the platform up fairly quickly and get base applications going. 

Now we're taking that framework and applying the aspects of our business to it.

The biggest thing with Calm is that it has helped to fill a hole in our journey: How we were going to automate across all these different environments in the cloud, and without necessarily having to go build and develop a platform.

We're a service provider with a very strong relationship with Nutanix. We have multiple mechanisms of licensing Calm. From our perspective, the pricing is flexible and it's also unique. As a service provider, we can talk to Nutanix at a different level around how we license Calm.

You typically license Calm against your environment or you can license it by the workload. That makes a lot of sense, because workloads can live within your private cloud or the public cloud, it makes no difference. With any deal with Nutanix, they provide a certain number of seats with your purchase. So you get to use it from day one. I believe you get 25 seats with a purchase. There's nothing stopping you from embracing the journey because you've already paid for it.

My advice would be patience. It's very exciting and sometimes you want to jump in with both feet and go really fast. It's not that I'm against that, but my take is that it's such a capable platform that you should take on things that you can achieve and then achieve them. Take on activities that you can succeed with and show that incremental progress. Sometimes you want to take on too much and go big-bang. As enticing as that is, take on pieces of Calm and succeed with them, and let the platform evolve. Don't try to wholesale adopt it too fast. If you're more traditional in nature and you're doing typical project management, your windows could be big. Those steps up can be huge. So you want to make sure you show some incremental progress.

There's a plethora of automation tools out there as well as methods for how you build automation. Most of these platforms are frameworks and you have to build your own methods and use your own sets of tools. And when you're a service provider, and I think this would apply to the enterprise, cloud is an ubiquitous platform. In today's world, cloud is a ubiquitous term where companies don't necessarily look at just a cloud. They look at a cloud ubiquitously, because while you have three or four major hyperscale cloud-platform providers, they all have their different sets of software-based tools. In some cases, one cloud does certain things really well, while other clouds do other things that are better.

Limiting yourself and your business to one cloud might not be your best choice. And that has historically been the case in a lot of companies' journeys, but that situation is now evolving. Now, you don't just look at one cloud. Suppose you're a company that is heavily invested in Microsoft solutions. There are certain aspects of Microsoft, either your technology or your financial investments, which behoove you to use Microsoft Azure because it's beneficial to you. But there are certain things in the lifecycle of your software development where Amazon might be a better fit for certain aspects of what you do. In today's world, companies are evolving and they're open to the flexibility.

In that scenario, how do you decide your tool chain? How do you decide to invest in the use of tools from one platform provider or the other? Part of that assessment is cost and this is where Calm comes in because, as a lifecycle automation manager, it doesn't care which cloud you provision. You have choices. And the good news is that you control your source. So you don't have to use the tool set that Microsoft provides and then try to automate into Amazon from it, or vice-versa. You can try to develop those tools to automate by yourself, and a lot of large companies have made that significant investment in software—both in resources as well as capital. But these are platforms that consist of a lot of tools which have costs wrapped around them. The beauty of Calm is that it gives you your choice. Nutanix uses the expression "freedom of choice." That's really the conclusion we've come to, as a service provider. Part of what we want to do is give our customers choices. We want to help them along their journeys and help them make good choices, both technical and financial. And of course, those two pieces work off of each other.

Calm's support for scripts is a tale with two stories. First, it's exposing the scripts to a lot of people within the team. They can now use the same sets of scripts and augment them to do a specific function, versus starting from scratch. It may save them from having to research something. We have a library of these scripts that we're building.

Second, it's a step back before it's a step forward, because the team members have to get familiarized with this mechanism and with the delivery blueprint. We're ramping things up to get everyone slowly trained on the platform and to get them used to the platform, and that takes time. The mechanism of delivering the scripts is different from what they're familiar with. We're probably 10 percent into that journey. We've got a core team that has been working in it. Now, we're trying to extend that across other areas of the organization. Once we get everyone to participate and get a standardized library of scripts, we will see a very significant reduction in time. We'll see the agility of building applications a lot faster. 

What Calm has done for us is it's enabled the rigidity to be lifted. We're looking at a lot of different ways of changing things. It's a transformative tool. If you embrace it and adopt it properly, it opens the door to developing a life cycle process and the tools to use around Calm in terms of a repository and pipelining. Calm is also bringing us to discuss mutable and immutable infrastructure. Do we need to use tools like Puppet or Chef as a version control? Or, now that we have Calm, and we can strip out an application-ware or a middleware or something else, and start moving into a quasi microservices journey, does that infrastructure now become more mutable, where you can just destroy it and recreate it? Why try to save its configuration?

These are core topics, and they are big. It's traditional and nontraditional. This is a journey that Calm enables. If you embrace it, a lot of things become transformative with it. When you look at all those things, in many cases, you have to take a couple of steps back. But can you embrace Calm and do a lot of things right upfront? Of course you can. How quickly depends on your company size. We have a fairly large organization and we have a lot of customers, so we have to think of all those moving parts in embracing the journey. The good news with us is that we're going to be able to extend Calm to a lot of our customers. Calm will be a platform that a lot of customers will be able to use and embrace.

It's a great platform and I would rate it at eight out 10. The difference between eight and a nine is in the different things that we're asking for as a service provider. An enterprise or a commercial business might look at it slightly differently, but for me eight is a great score. It's a score I don't usually give out. Calm is a great team. They have developed a great platform and it's continuously improving. I look forward to seeing a lot of people adopt it.

One goal was to automate things. We had a lot of tools, but we needed a centralized tool. Calm helps us to centralize the deployments of our VMs. 

We have a subsystem installed on Nutanix and we have blueprints for setting up this subsystem very easily. Also, for Kubernetes clusters, we use now CaaS from SUSE and we also create Kubernetes clusters with Calm. Our strategy is to make blueprints for all the virtual machines environments. It's an ongoing process.

Our first project was to create subsystems. This was really an accelerator because we have three environments and over 50 machines. Once we had a sub-template, it was very easy to migrate to Nutanix, to set up a system. Before Nutanix it took days and now it's maybe one or two hours. It's really fast when you use these templates. It creates all the preconditions for an installation. And with that, we were really able to move the system very quickly to this new platform.

The solution automates application management to a single platform, but we're still working on it. 

Our goal is the standardization which Calm makes possible. It's important, from a strategic point of view. We would ultimately like to achieve "infrastructure-as-code" so that we can always create an environment as it initially was. It would be like Kubernetes or container-based where you can destroy something and build it again and it's like it was before. When you have a platform where you can automatically create things, you are sure that nobody will manually change something in it. It's all managed with this framework, and you are sure that when when you need to create the same system it will work, because it is all scripted. The whole "cookbook" for making that machine is there. This is also a requirement: that nobody goes on a virtual machine and installs something manually. It must be scripted with Calm. That gives you insurance that you can build the same system again. For us, that's really the future: infrastructure-as-code. 

This is also a good way for creating the same machine on the cloud, or wherever you want, and to be assured it will run because the building of the machine is in the script.

Also, the solution’s support for scripts, API, and domain specific language has reduced the IT man-hours to deploy and support applications. It's hard to estimate how much time it has saved us, but I would say around 60 percent. We are new on the Nutanix platform and we have not created a lot of the blueprints ourselves. Another company helped us to accelerate that. We went into production with it last year and we see the capabilities that Calm gives us.

Before Calm, we didn't have a specific tool for orchestration. We had some templating things, but they were spread out over various technologies. Now, we have one, centralized solution to manage all the VMs that we have. This is the strength of Nutanix, that you have one starting point where you can do everything. You have all the tools in one platform. Before, we had one tool for this process and another tool for that process. It's helping us a lot.

Calm has also enabled us to react faster to the changing needs of our business. That brings me back to the subsystem I mentioned earlier. We were thinking we would need more time to migrate it, or that we might need to create a sandbox system for testing. But with the subsystem, it was very quick. Calm helped us a lot to make it happen. 

Also, when it comes to cluster systems, we work with the open source version of Couchbase. It's very easy to create a Couchbase cluster. Similarly with Jenkins, we have blueprints for DevOps. If they need a Jenkins environment, we can easily scale out for our Jenkins workers. It really makes life easier because we have a GUI and can scale out. We can say, "Okay, we need two more slaves," and it happens. It really accelerates things.

The scripting, where you can use libraries, is a valuable feature. We don't really make the blueprints, as we have a third-party company that makes them for us. But it enables calling APIs in the blueprints. When we create a machine, we use IPAM from Infoblox and we can get an IP address. It's one platform to script and we can then use all the APIs to complete the scripts. It gives us a central management tool from which we can do a lot of things automatically.

Also, it's easy to use, overall. I'm a Linux guy, so a lot of it is familiar to me. I feel comfortable when I use it. It's not really hard or complex.

And when you have applications that can run on more than one machine, you can easily use blueprints to scale out the infrastructure. You can start with two web front-ends, a web service and then you say, "Okay, I need a third one and a fourth one." This is very easy. It's one click and you can scale it, but you must also script it. It only gives you the framework to do that. So for performance, you can use Calm to scale out and scale in.

But the Nutanix platform also helps you find out if you have some performance problems or oversized machines. But to resize it, it's more that you would use playbooks in Nutanix for that, and not Calm.

It's also a very good tool for team collaboration, but in our use case we don't use Calm for that. We are not that big. We create the machines or the application; it's not that we deploy services so that another service can deploy their machines. We are still centralized, in that sense. With Calm, you can do this: With the templates, the services that need new VMs can make their own VMs, but we do not have this requirement for now. It's only used by the IT team here, which consists of 30 people.

As I mentioned, we use now CaaS from SUSE; it's SUSE's Kubernetes. But it's now changing. They have bought Rancher and I think that CaaS will be replaced by Rancher. So currently, to manage a Kubernetes cluster we have SUSE. But with Karbon we can manage Kubernetes with Calm. But I don't don't know how much we can do with Calm there. There could be room for improvement, although I'm not entirely sure. It's on our agenda to look into Karbon in relation to Calm and what we can do with them together. I don't know how deeply they are integrated. It's not necessarily something that is wrong.

Karbon is a new product. It's been around for about two years. The integration is growing. Last year is when it started working with Calm. It's more a concept still. My wish is that it will really be supported, but I cannot say for sure.

Again, I'm not saying something is wrong here. I think it's a very good platform, but there is always room of improvement.

I have been using Nutanix Calm since last year. We started in 2018 with a proof of concept to go to a hyper-converged platform, and then we chose Nutanix.

The stability of Calm is very good. We have not had problems. We are enhancing our clusters now a lot because we did a proof of concept for two years and last year we went into production. We are really happy with the platform and we are really accelerating and enhancing it.

We are a company with 700 employees. In Nutanix's world, we are not a big player. I don't think that we are ever going to push the boundaries.

We are also using Nutanix Files cluster. We are also planning to go with Era, which is a SQL management platform on Nutanix. It's really that Nutanix is providing a platform strategy for us. We are replacing all the other virtualization infrastructure that we have with Nutanix.

Nutanix technical support is great. It's very fast. In the beginning we had an issue and they were very quick. The support team from Nutanix, compared to others, is amazing. They provide help really quickly. Support is really one of Nutanix's strengths.

We had some templates in XenServer, but they were more a type of predefined image so that when you installed it helped start the machine. We also had Salt scripting, but we didn't have tools to manage them. We are not a big company. We had something like 500 virtual machines and we had templating tools and a lot of manual tasks. So things were semi-automated. We had images for certain applications, but when setting up the machine, we had to manually finish the setup.

One of the drivers for us to go to a hyper-converged system was that we had a 3PAR SAN which went out-of-support. So we had to make a decision about whether to buy a new SAN or to go with hyper-converged where you can grow with the need. And this became one of our preconditions. We wanted a system that does not use traditional SAN. We liked the idea of hyper-converged.

We bought a little machine and did a PoC to see how Nutanix works. We already knew it was a good platform because we had heard good things about it. When we tested it, it was very good and very fast and fulfilled all our needs. That made the decision for us, that it was the right platform. It became a part of our company strategy. 

It was a good decision for us because now we can also replicate the whole cluster to the big cloud providers. You can have a Nutanix environment on all the three of the big ones. That means that we can buy a Nutanix cluster on Azure or Amazon cloud, for example. Then we replicate our cluster to that cluster in the cloud, and then we can switch over. With Nutanix, we can easily deploy a virtual machine in the cloud, but then we are using the cloud provider's functionality. But now Amazon, Google, and Azure make it possible to rent a Nutanix cluster. So if we replicate, and an airplane crashes into our building, we can switch over to the cloud. For us, that was also a statement that we were really going with a good platform. In Switzerland, a lot of big companies are using Nutanix now, well-known companies that are going hyper-converged.

For me, the initial setup of Calm was straightforward. It comes with Prism Central and Prism Central is a one-click installation, and then you have Calm. It's really easy. The whole Nutanix platform is really easy to manage and to update. When you have Prism Central, you have Calm already. You must buy the license for the blueprints, but it comes with Prism Central.

If you need cluster management, if you have more than one Nutanix cluster, you need Nutanix Prism Central and with Prism Central you have Calm.

Our deployment strategy is "one-at-a-time." We touch one system and make blueprints and then we go on to the next system. We migrate machines to Nutanix without a blueprint, but the goal is that—even though we have a lot of virtual machines and use cases, and this is an ongoing process—all the new projects, as well as when we touch an old project, will go over to a Calm blueprint, to make life easier. You cannot make that shift in one day.

Our overall strategy is to have Calm as a central tool to deploy virtual machines, with a requirement that nobody manually create virtual machines. There should be a blueprint first. 

There are times when it might not make sense, if you need just one machine for a particular use. It could be more work to make the blueprint. But I think it's worth making even these little machines as a blueprint, so that you can always create this machine everywhere, including the cloud, without documentation. And that's another point. As you know, when you write documentation, as soon as you're finished it's already old because things are changing.

We are still building our infrastructure, so it's early for us to look at return on investment. But there will be a return on our investment because we are not buying another SAN. We have saved a lot of money, because the SAN system is very expensive and also requires very expensive switches. So we are definitely ahead there.

Also, we had a lot of XenServers on hosts, and going with Nutanix allowed us to reduce the number of hosts. The new system is very performant and we don't need as much hardware to get the same performance.

In addition, although it has nothing to do with Calm, Nutanix helps by giving us a good overview of what is oversized or undersized. We can look at it and see, "Oh, this machine may be underused or overused," and we can free up resources. This is also an ongoing process. We see that a lot of machines are oversized and we can make them smaller. We save resources for other machines that way. But that part is Nutanix itself, through Prism Central.

Calm comes with Prism Central but you enable features by buying the license for them. You buy by the blueprint, how many blueprints you need to manage.

We also looked at HPE. We compared Nutanix with that solution. We decided then to go for Nutanix and do a proof of concept. The HPE solution was more limited in the nodes it could handle.

We work really closely with HPE. All our servers are from HPE. So HPE proposed a solution to us, But when we compared it by doing a SWOT analysis, part of our consideration was that Nutanix is a newer platform. It empowers a lot of things. It's a different technology.

My advice is "use it." To use Calm, the precondition is that you have Nutanix. To me it doesn't make sense to have Nutanix on-premise and then not use Calm. Then you would have to use SaltStack or Chef or whatever other management software exists for managing virtual machines or physical machines. If you go with Nutanix, it makes really sense to use Calm.

SaltStack and Ansible are also good, but it doesn't make sense to use them when you have Calm. With Nutanix you have one platform where you can manage everything. Calm gives you a lot of possibilities because you can script and easily integrate and control the whole Nutanix cluster with APIs. And you can easily integrate other services because you have the ability to call Python scripts very easily.

For us, it was very easy because we didn't have a lot of existing scripts. Other companies that have a lot of Salt scripts or a lot of Ansible scripts have to recreate them in some way. So we were in a good situation.

We now have 14 blueprint templates, and still growing. We are coming from the Citrix XenServer platform. We are not automatically creating a blueprint. It's ongoing. We had a lot of virtual machines on the Xen platform, and we have moved them over, but we don't automatically have a blueprint when we do. You must create the blueprints. We do them one-by-one. When we touch a system again, we create the blueprint for it. That way we can scale out, scale in, and make test systems.

There is a template for creating a machine, and then you manage that machine with this template. But when you have machines from another platform, like the XenServer virtualization platform, you can move it over, because Nutanix is also a virtualization platform for running VMs. But then you don't automatically have a blueprint, so you have to start a new project to make these blueprints. The strategy is that we will have all the code for our infrastructure so that we can build all our system out of blueprints.

I cannot say Calm is providing centralized control of all our applications because we have some legacy systems. We have IBM iSeries, which is another technology. But with Calm we can centralize all our x86 machines.

It's still early time and there is room for improvement. I give Calm a nine out of 10. I cannot give it a 10 because other platforms are also really good. Ansible and SaltStack are also powerful. It's more an issue of strategy and the fact that it is very easy to use. It's not a complex tool. They make it easy to use. Other frameworks are more complex to use, but may also be more powerful. But for our purposes, it fits exactly what we need. We haven't been blocked from doing anything we need to do with Calm. We haven't had any showstoppers.

Compared with other tools, Calm is newer and the scope of what you can do with it is still growing. They improve things. They make it easier to handle.

70 to 90 percent of the use that we have for the solution is to get virtual machines running. We are also starting to use different aspects of Prism. For example, we just started to deploy their file storage solution. We weren't able to so far (within the last year), because there hasn't been much time to deploy projects on new technologies.

We do use the capacity planning. If we were to speak about the algorithm side of Nutanix, we use the compression algorithm for the compression that's in the storage and the storage deduplication algorithm. We find them really powerful. The capacity planning is a good algorithm, but it's a pretty simple one. It's just a projection of the expected growth of your cluster, so you can forecast if you need to buy more storage, compute, etc. 

The true power of the Nutanix algorithm lies within the storage algorithm: the deduplication, erasure coding, and compression. They are really powerful. We were actually quite surprised, because the experience we had before was only with storage arrays. Basically, when you buy a device that is purely dedicated to storage, you expect it to really perform in that area. That is pretty normal. 

When you buy a device, like Nutanix's hyper-converged solution, and it sells you on the fact that it has a really powerful algorithm for storage, you say, "Alright, it's like when you buy something that can do everything, but it's not really doing everything well. It's doing it okay." When we actually started pushing data on the Nutanix service, we saw that the compression was very good. We didn't expect it to be that good. Therefore, the algorithm for the storage side is well-thought-out and works really well.

The most valuable feature for us is the way we can use it with virtual machine to spin them. It is lightning fast compared to what we had before. The day-to-day tasks on a virtual machine are really fast. We have the economy of not having too much complexity in the menu and design of the solution, and information is accessible pretty quick. The best feature is really how simple it is to interact with virtual machines. 

The Prism features on the backup side have made it so much easier. Now, when we want to backup our VMs and do a cross data center backup, we utilize two clusters located in two data centers in Paris. For each virtual machine that is running, we have what they call a protection domain, which takes a snapshot of the VM and sends it to the other cluster. In the event of a cluster failure on one of the data centers, we can just press one button in another data center on another cluster in Prism. This will spin the VMs that have been backed up from the primary data center to the secondary one and make them run. It is a one-button recovery plan, which is pretty amazing.

There are a lot of features that could be added or, at least, made better.

There are two kinds of Prism. 

1. Prism Element: Which is what's installed on each cluster and running each cluster individually.
2. Prism Central: Which you use to connect to all your Prism Elements, meaning all the clusters. Then, it centralizes your view of your infrastructure. We have found a lot of bugs in the interface. Sometimes, when you do an action, it says to you that it's 100% done. However, in the background, the action is still ongoing, and you have no visual update on how long will it take. 

Just this morning, we took an image from Prism Central. That image was installed on one of the clusters. In Prism Central, you have one feature that enables you to place the image on multiple clusters. You just have to select them, and say, "I want my image of my virtual machine to be on all my clusters." So, when I want to spin a VM on an individual cluster, I will find the image. What is happening is that when you use the feature of image placement on Prism Central, you select the clusters on which you want to push the image, then you validate. Once you validate, it says, "Alright, the image update has been done successfully," but in the background, it's actually placing the image. Therefore, you have absolutely nothing visually that tells you whether it will finish soon or last a lot longer. You're just there, sitting and waiting for an update that you have to visually see on the interface by refreshing the interface. 

Imagine if you were to copy a file from one directory to another directory, but you have nothing to tell you whether it's ongoing or will take five minutes, ten minutes, or an hour. You just have to wait in the other directory for the file to appear and see that it's copied. This is not down to the functionality. It's down to the design of the user interface.

If you want to convert a virtual machine to an image, you have to do it via command line. Why is there not a button on the Nutanix interface that does this? 

We have been using it for almost a year.

The stability of the Prism solution is another thing that we have found to be a bit of work. For example, the Prism Central and the appliances use 97 percent of the CPU and RAM of the virtual machine. We don't know why. There is a memory leak somewhere that makes it overuse the memory. Nutanix is aware of this. It has been ongoing for a year, and they still haven't fixed it. I just don't get it.

Scaling is easy, rapid, and pretty straightforward. Now, we have two clusters consisting of 16 nodes on each cluster. If we were to extend the cluster, we would just order a new node, rack it, and image it to have the same version of the operating system off the Nutanix cluster. Adding it to the cluster is really straightforward. Then, Nutanix takes care of everything, because it's going to use the node to deduplicate blocks of storage. It's going to use the node to store VMs on the node. The automated services on Nutanix are really good.

There are mainly 20 users utilizing it, with a maximum of 30 users. We have a SysOps team, which does like Level 1 administration, who uses Prism for their day-to-day tasks, e.g. renaming the server, creating a new server, moving a server from one node to another node, or augmenting the capacity of the server to extend the disks, CPU, or RAM. There is also the SRE team, which is the engineering team, and we do the much more complex tasks. For example, when we work on the design of a new solution, we will present storage directly on the VMs. We do tasks that are a little more complicated than the other users.

I have been in touch with Nutanix support. They have been really fantastic. The only thing that is an issue is that we are in Europe, and when we open a ticket in European time, we get a response off-hours from India. If you are in Europe and you open a ticket during European business hours, you should probably get someone from Nutanix in Amsterdam who responds. Sometimes, we open a ticket up at ten o'clock in the morning and get a response on our ticket at five o'clock in the evening from India. How come it wasn't seen by the European teams first? It's a European company with a European headquarters. You have to specifically request for your tickets to be handled in your time zone for someone from Europe to contact you. 

We are the classical customer. Before, we were using a normal three-tier hosting solution, which consisted of having a stack of storage, a stack of network, and a stack of hypervisors for the compute and memory. We thought it was a burden to maintain, because every time when we had to do updates or security patches, we had three stacks to maintain. Whereas, when we switched to Prism, we benefited from its hyper-converged solution. This meant our time maintaining and keeping the solution up-to-date was divided by a great factor. That brought us to Nutanix.

We originally came from VMware. We also had some Hyper-V also, but we were originally a pure VMware customer for our virtual machines. I have used VMware for far longer than I've been in the IT industry. Nutanix was my first experience other than VMware. It is day and night for me. I would much rather use the Nutanix product line than the VMware one.

There were two factors for moving from VMware to Nutanix. 

1. We had to renew our infrastructure. It was getting a bit old, so we needed more power in order to also forecast the growth of the company. 
2. The simplicity of hyper-converged makes it a leader. For example, it's a bit like when you cook in your kitchen and have all the ingredients, then you have to assemble them and cook them. I compare Nutanix to those new machines that came out where you put all your ingredients together and you just press a button, then it cooks it for you. It is really a little bit like that. It is like everything is hyper-converged, so in one block you have your storage, compute, memory, etc. When you want to expand your cluster, e.g., if you want to add more VMs or more storage, then you just buy one block, plug it in, and link it to your cluster. That's it. You don't have anything else to do because it's all automated, where it was a burden before when we were under VMware.

This solution seems like going from a complex, cross-embedded solution to something which is a Next Generation website. The design is very intuitive; it's easy to find information in the different menus and things like that. The user experience is much better compared to other products.

In the gambling industry, you have a lot of regulation from different countries. One of those regulations states that you have to be able to send all the logs of your Prism to a separate server, what we call the syslog server. On Prism Central, this doesn't work. We have opened a case for it, since this is a basic feature nowadays. We spoke to Nutanix, and they said that it will be in future updates. We did an update, following their support, but once we did the update, it wasn't fixed. 

Nutanix suffers tiny glitches, when you put them one behind another, make the experience just a pain. However, the main features work well. There is no doubt of that.

The initial setup was straightforward: You receive the servers, you pick up the servers, and you rank them. Once you rank them, you plug them into your network. After that, you plug in your computer, you image the cluster, and deploy the appliances. It was a two-man, two-day job to deploy 32 nodes.

We did a high-level design, a low-level design, and a network design, respectively, then we opened the deployment project. It was pretty classical straightforward. Nutanix was pretty easy. The hardest part of the work was in thinking the design of what you wanted, e.g., how many nodes and clusters. We studied the capacity used by our old VMware infrastructure and forecasted the future growth of the company to integrate in how much Nutanix we were going to buy, how many nodes, and how much compute power. Deploying the actual physical hardware and cluster mechanics was easy. It was really a piece of cake.

When you deploy the cluster, make sure you set up the networking. This is really important. If you don't do it right, you will have to come back to it later, and that could be a pain.

Do the testing extensively before you go to production. We spent two days deploying and one full day just testing that the deployment was correct.

I was involved in the deployment of the clusters. I was in the data center to deploy the servers. I was there when we deployed the Prism appliance. I was involved every step of the way (from A to Z), even in the migration from VMware to Nutanix. 

The adoption rate is 90 percent. We also have some cloud and SaaS/PaaS services. Otherwise, the whole company sits on Nutanix. Right now, we have nine million users using our application and placing bets. At the highest peak, we can have a rate of thousands of logins a minute on our infrastructure. When there is big games, e.g., Champions League Games.

Imagine that we have a lot of people placing bets or surfing the website for the offer. Our infrastructure has to respond really quickly. For example, if a customer places a bet and the game finishes, we have to pay that bet quickly so the customer is able to replace a new bet for the following game, the day after, or something else. The stability of the infrastructure, its resiliency, and capacity to take in load is really important. 

Since we switched to Nutanix, we have had fewer bottlenecks and issues during the big game nights. We are using Nutanix and our infrastructure and rely on it for our business.

We have felt the ROI. We don't spend so much time on administration as we did before Nutanix. Before, it was fastidious to update all our VMware, clusters etc. We had to do that every three months. Right now, in Nutanix, it takes us half a day. It is one person who presses a button and goes onto some other business. Nutanix takes care of the update.

We're not using the Prism Pro solution; we are using Prism Ultimate. We have the highest level of license.

Be careful when you buy Nutanix. You get to choose if you're going with Dell, HPE, or Lenovo. Make sure you choose the right one for your company. The vendor is a critical step. 

Don't unlicense your Prism licensing. Pro is the strict minimum for real infrastructure. Go with at least Pro and not with the starter. Ultimate was the best choice for me. 

We did an evaluation with HyperFlex, which is the Cisco solution. It wasn't good at all. Whereas, Nutanix is sending you a hyper-converged infrastructure, and what you see is, what you get. With HyperFlex, they're selling you the same idea, but once you get is not exactly what you expect. It's blocks that you have to assemble yourself in order to make it a hyperconverged solution, while Nutanix is truly a hyper-converged solution. Nutanix gives you the appliance and server, which you just rack and off you go. 

We tried using Nutanix Calm and Karbon for the Kubernetes cluster, but we didn't find them to be as easy to use as we expected. When we heard about Calm, we almost thought that we could do automation at a level that would be similar to Puppet, Chef, or SaltStack. When we looked at the features inside, it wasn't exactly like that. Since what we have to do is pretty complex, doing it under Puppet for the orchestration and things like that, this seemed to us much easier than doing it under Calm.

I think this was because communication was off from the Nutanix side and our understanding was off from our company side. We expected it to be a product that it was not, so we haven't been able to use it. We did try to have a look into Calm, but we haven't found a use case for the product. The use case that we have in the company requires us to direct to another product, which we decided would be Puppet.

We are heading towards a DevOps culture. What will happen is that we're going to head more and more towards hybid datacenters. We might increase our usage of Nutanix.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.