Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

We use it for capacity planning and we forecast with it. We use the workload reporting, which includes VM efficiencies, and we're able to provide reports that way on capacity, storage, and Runways.

One of the big benefits is that it helps us explain why we are scaling and why we need to do certain things. We can scale out or up and show them why. There's proof before any money is spent. It's had a positive impact.

I can go to management and say, "We need this many sort-only nodes before the end of the year to give you the capacity for what you need to have done. And I can say, "This is where we're going to use up what we have." Sometimes they'll say, "Oh, we won't need it," and we can come back and say, "It's been showing us this the entire time."

We're big on the capacity planning. We're fortunate that we're not restricted by a budget, but we do need to have things budgeted for planning purposes. We need to be able to say, "We're going to need 500 terabytes," or "We're going to need X amount of storage in the coming year." The capacity planning helps us really stay ahead of the curve.

There have been bugs. We've seen what looked like some storage inefficiencies in reports and, when we went in to look, we found they were false alarms. That was something they corrected on the fly.

Overall, it works.

We're using Ultimate within Nutanix Cloud Manager and we've been using the solution since 2017.

It's very stable.

It's also scalable. We use it across multiple locations and multiple teams. 

Unfortunately, we don't have any plans to increase our usage of it. I have voiced some frustrations, internally, over the years, that I have not gotten to expand and use the product the way it should be used. I wish we could have really given it a lot more play in our shop.

Nutanix Calm, is another portion piece I wanted to look at.

I would rate Nutanix in my top two or three in terms of support. I've worked with some vendors that are lacking but Nutanix is not one of them. I've opened a lot of tickets with Nutanix over the years, but I've rated every one of them when I have closed them, and every one has been a 10 out of 10.

When we had the bug with the storage, they approached it as "high severity."

Their support is on par with VMware; they're good. And with Nutanix, it doesn't take as long to get into the upper-tier support. When you get someone on the line at Nutanix, you get someone who can help you with any range of issues and, if not, they Slack somebody immediately.

We didn't really have a previous solution. Infrastructure-wise, we were three-tier, with storage, switching, and all that is in between those segments. For capacity planning we used SolarWinds, but we never did anything such as scaling out with SolarWinds.

We use Ansible and then we're looking at possibly moving towards VMware Tanzu. We're doing a PoC on it.

The initial deployment can be a little complex. You better bring your "A-game." For me, VMware is simple, the way I break it down and the way we work on it. At the infrastructure level, you can rebuild things easily, but in Nutanix, even when it comes to deploying nodes, or the storage-only nodes, it's a little more complex.

Overall, for the way we use it, it takes a day or two to deploy Nutanix Cloud Manager. There are two of us managing it, but I'm usually the person from our organization involved in deploying it.

We started seeing the benefits as soon as we got it. We started using the forecasting and their sales engineers, who were good, worked with us. They showed us the power in it.

Upgrades happen through Prism Central. Other than the updates, we haven't had to do much in terms of maintenance. It's pretty much hands-free.

Every shop needs more staff and, with our staffing numbers, we have usually had to employ a services reseller or we have worked with the Nutanix team.

Those services came in and set us up, all the way from physical, in the rack, to the NCM portions and bringing it online. They built the management pieces and appliances inside of Nutanix. OSI-wise, we started at Layer 1 and went up from there.

It has helped us forecast and do capacity planning. We haven't been caught in a spot where we needed storage and had to move systems around and make quick changes to get by until we could cut a check to get more storage. It has helped us in the long run. The capacity planning, forecasting, and Runways are worth their weight in gold. NCM has saved us time in IT, and that's money.

It's worth every dime.

The pricing has been reasonable.

Do a PoC, but be mindful that it's not going to cover everything.

Nutanix has always been good. We don't use it to the extent that we probably should, but the GUI is friendly and I can't list anything that needs to be changed. Overall, it has worked for what we need.

We use it for our service, running everything through Nutanix.

It is easy to access. Since it is web-based, you just punch in the API and it gives you all the servers in the company. The solution has helped optimize database performances.

Nutanix helps us save on Tier 1 storage, which is very important to us. As a company, you need backup. Working with this solution is easy and fast.

As a company, backup is very important. Anything can happen to a company so you always want to have backup. The important part is that this solution is cloud-based. Therefore, if a fire happens, you still have your backup.

Since last year, we haven't really worked after hours.

Nutanix has 100% improved our team's ability to troubleshoot operational issues. This is excellent for business. It now makes things easier for us to troubleshoot, helping us know where or what the problem is. It makes things simpler.

It provides healing to the system. If there is something wrong with the system, then it gives you an alert and decides what the problem is. It tells you in detail if there is something wrong with your server.

It is not time-consuming. It makes things easier for the company, because now you know exactly what is wrong because it tells you what it is. It is easy to access.

We use it with SQL Server workloads. This solution is good and quite fast for that.

The design could be more user-friendly. There is always room for improvement when it comes to a site being more user-friendly.

My company has been using it for about six months.

I have been very impressed with the stability.

Customer service has been good. So far, I can't complain. I haven't picked up anything that I might complain about since everything is running smoothly and has been simplified. I would rate them as nine out of 10.

Positive

This has been an improvement for me because I am used to old physical servers.

I was not involved in the initial setup. Everything was already up and running when I started using it.

It has helped us cut deployment times.

Nutanix has decreased the time it takes to snapshot and clone databases. Because of this, the business is running smoothly. Everything happens quickly, so it is quick to do things on this platform, i.e., less time-consuming.

The increased backup frequency has helped to limit data loss.

When it comes to data management, the solution has reduced time spent on operational database workloads.

We use Veeam for the backup and restore of databases.

This is the way to go. Technology is growing and improving. I feel like a lot of companies in my country are still stuck in the old way of using physical servers. Whereas, we now have something like this that makes things simple with a feature that sends alerts. In a way, it is running the whole infrastructure.

There is always something out there that can improve your life, simplifying your life. There is always something out there that you can learn about.

It has improved my life and the way the company is running. We use it almost every day.

There are about 10 of us using it, including support, system engineers, my assistant management, and management.

I would rate this solution as nine out of 10.

I use the VM efficiency to figure out what services are over-provisioned. I've also been experimenting with the reports. In addition, I've been using it as a way of collecting all the data from all the different clusters into one portal.

One of the most valuable features is the hardware and how they have set it up to be pretty redundant. If something goes down, you can just swap it out and you're back online. If a drive or even a whole node goes down, it's pretty easy to get it back up and running.

Also, you don't have to actually mess around with external storage. Everything is in one complete package. The fact that the solution is sold as one product with multiple tiers is a seven out of 10 to me, on the important scale. If you get everything from one vendor, you have one place to turn if you have problems or if you need replacement parts. The whole "one-vendor" thing is pretty neat. Regarding the hardware, when you have everything in one package, everything is good to go. We haven't needed to purchase any other solutions for the type of automation this solution is intended for.

I've used the capacity planning and Runway analytics to help forecast storage and compute needs a few times, but just to check that we are a couple of years away from even having to think about it. It has been pretty good for helping our team address current needs while planning for future expansion.

I would like to see a desktop application for administration of the solution. That's the thing I missed the most. Other solutions have a client that you can install on your computer. You can actually connect to and do the administration from an application instead of using a web portal, which is what Nutanix provides.

We have been using Nutanix Prism Pro for a year and continued using it as Nutanix Cloud Manager Starter for the past several months.

I would rate NCM's stability at five out of 10. We started having problems with our nodes about two or three months after we started using Nutanix. We were getting errors. The IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) stopped functioning. After a long period of troubleshooting, we ended up having to send one of the nodes back for a deep root analysis. They had to send a replacement and try to figure out what the problem was.

I'm sure that kind of scenario isn't very prevalent among their other customers, but that has been our experience with it. We manage 10 nodes with the solution, and something like seven of them have had this problem.

The scalability of the solution is way better than anything else. Everything is plug-and-play. That part is pretty awesome.

Their tech support is pretty good overall. It depends on who you end up with. In about 30 percent of my cases, I've been lucky to get a person who speaks English very well and is awesome in every way, knowing absolutely everything. Every time that I get one of those guys, I instantly go into the survey they send, when they close the case, and praise them in the highest way.

If the English of the support person is worse than mine, or their vocabulary, pronunciation, or even the quality of audio is worse than what I have, it's pretty hard to get my meaning across. That has happened in about 20 percent of my cases. The person doesn't understand what I'm saying and I've been forced to escalate the case to get someone who has more knowledge and better English.

And in 50 percent of my cases, they have been totally fine.

Positive

We swapped out Hyper-V with products from Nutanix to try something else. It was time to upgrade and then Nutanix seemed like a good alternative.

When we ordered the solution, we had a pretty good understanding that we would get something where we could just plug in the network and power cables, turn it on, and it would be already set up in almost every way. We thought we were only going to need to do a bit of tweaking, providing IP addresses and the like. But what we got was pretty bare. There was nothing on them. We had to go through the whole setup with Phoenix.

We had to do it twice. The first time, one of our guys did everything and it seemed to be okay. But then the guys from Nutanix called and said, "No, we have to do this together because we want it to be set up the way it's intended to be." That's pretty fair. But the guys from Nutanix actually managed to mess things up in a huge way. So we had to set it up again. And that speaks to how complicated the setup is when you compare it to the other solutions.

I set up fully-functioning VMware and Hyper-V solutions a good number of years ago when I was young and didn't have as much experience, and both were no problem. But Nutanix is a step up regarding how complex it is.

You should get a hold of someone who is crazy good and then never ever lose their contact info. I have one guy now that I email every time there is something complex that needs to be done. If we are digging into config files that are deep within the OS, I always contact him because I know that he knows everything.

I have used Hyper-V with SCVMM. Part of that has some features that are similar to NCM, but they are different products with different features. I've also used vSphere from VMware, which has some of the same features, like the overall control over your VMs, data collection, and reporting.

Nutanix is pretty different from the others because it collects everything and displays it in a very nice way. To summarize the difference, you get the feeling that Prism Pro is new and more modern. The user experience and the user interface are more modern, and it's certainly easier to use.

The other side of that coin is that sometimes it fails. It's something like Mac and PC: If something fails on Mac, which doesn't happen very much, it's harder to figure out why. You might have to contact support and get them to fix it. A PC is harder to use, but if it crashes, it's easier to find out why. Prism Pro would be "Mac" and the others would be "PC."

Nutanix isn't as easy if you want to try to troubleshoot, at least not for me, because it's all based on CentOS. It's Linux-based. With Linux, it's easier to do things, but it's way easier to royally mess everything up if you make mistakes. You have to be pretty sure of your skills with Linux-based systems to try to troubleshoot things yourself. I've been using Nutanix a lot for a year now, and I'm just barely starting to get the hang of it.

The setup of Nutanix is harder than both VMware and Hyper-V, but Nutanix is the easiest to use among the three. However, the learning curve for Nutanix is pretty steep. The interface itself is pretty good and easy to use, but if you start working with the CLI, which you have to do somewhat frequently, it suddenly becomes way harder to figure things out.

Have we experienced increased uptime since we went to Nutanix? No, we haven't. It's pretty much the same with Nutanix as it was with Hyper-V regarding uptime. What has improved is the ease of use. And there is less cabling and fewer points of weakness.

We went big on the specs for the servers so when you have what feels like unlimited resources, you don't need to set up the whole automation part of it.

We have multiple projects and multiple groups of developers that need an isolated space to deploy VMs and do testing against code, so we use the automated deployment of applications and VMs to spin up their unique environments.

It made it a lot easier to spin up these tenant environments with little to no administrative overhead.

It's super fast. It does what you tell it to do quickly.

I would like to see it be able to apply a category to a project, and then have that category applied to all the VMs that are deployed within a project. I've been asking for that for about three years.

I've been using this solution for about three years.

It has a rock-solid foundation. The only issue that I've ever seen is the software code not being fully vetted before it was deployed.

It's as scalable as the overall infrastructure. It's great.

Their support is excellent. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

We are using both this solution and Ansible. There are different components within Nutanix Cloud Manager. I've used a part of it but not all of it.

I was involved in its deployment. It's straightforward and built-in.

In the government space, we don't look at returns.

We have the ultimate license, so I don't know what it would cost individually.

If you're going to pick an automation platform, pick one and stick with it instead of having everybody look in different directions.

I would rate it a ten out of ten.

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 use Nutanix for management and capacity planning.

I like the analytics and the interface. Nutanix is easy to deploy and manage. 

Nutanix is one of two stacks where you can run everything you like. It would be nice if you could run it without the Nutanix appliance. Some clients don't use Nutanix engineering server hardware, so it would be helpful to run the Nutanix software for demos and tests. 

I have been using Nutanix for about three years. My boss started looking into Nutanix in 2013 or 2014. We were one of the first Nutanix partners in the area.

Nutanix is highly stable.

I rate Nutanix 10 out of 10 for scalability. Nutanix is highly scalable on the right version with the right hardware. 

I rate Nutanix support nine out of 10. They have specialized engineers for various clients, so when you open a ticket, only one technician will be working to resolve it. 

Positive

I rate Nutanix eight out of 10 for ease of setup. Setting up Nutanix is relatively easy if you know about networking.  It's not rocket science. You need to know the type of licenses you'd like to use and what the company shares. Before the initial implementation, you need to take time to plan. After that, the implementation could take a couple of hours or up to three days. 

I rate Nutanix 10 Cloud Manager Intelligent Operations 10 out of 10. You can operate Nutanix blindfolded. It's easy. 

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.