Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

Our primary use case to date has been hosting virtual machines of public branch exchanges (PBX) and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) for our customers' Voice Over IP (VoIP) cloud-based telephone systems.

We currently focus on two PBXs that have performed quite well on Nutanix Prism Pro: Asterisk/FreePBX and 3CX. We are also in the process of implementing cloud-based security systems for our clients and expanding to also offer desktop as a service so that our clients can fully implement a bring-your-own-device policy for their offices.

Nutanix Prism Pro has improved the way that we manage our systems due to the way that the solution is built. Hyper-converged Infrastructure offers us the speed and reliability that is very much needed in our type of environment.

It has cut down our maintenance time significantly and simplified our processes for backups. 

We have had situations before where we have to restore a customers VM on the fly due to bad management of the client, where they would actually break the system and with our old solution, restoring could take upwards of two hours, whereas now, it takes a maximum of 10 seconds.

There are two specific things that stand out to me in terms of what I find most valuable in this product. Number one, how simple and effective the dashboard is at laying out everything that is needed at a glance. Whether it be checking the health of your clusters and nodes or seeing the state of all of your VMs, the information is right in front of you when logging in.

Second, the support for the product is absolutely amazing. Of all of the times that we required assistance for our Nutanix cluster, Nutanix support has been there no matter the time. So far, every support engineer has been a pleasure to work with.

I would appreciate more advanced networking features in the dashboard. There seems to be a lack of GUI functionality for creating/modifying features such as LACP and VXLAN. While these features can be configured, it can only be done via the CLI of your CVM/Cluster and it can be quite a hassle. GUI implementation for these features would really strengthen the product immensely.

I would also appreciate a dashboard that allows for more customization. I would love to be able to eliminate information that I don't consider crucial from the dashboard and/or have the ability to focus on more essential things (such as network utilization) for our use.

We have been using Nutanix Prism Pro for almost three years.

We previously used ESXi. We switched because we found that there was constant maintenance needed for our VSANs and it was quite cumbersome.

While the product may seem to be more expensive at first, it ultimately pays for itself within a short time frame due to the hours saved on maintenance.

We evaluated multiple options before choosing Nutanix. These included Citrix, Hyper-V, and Zen.

Our primary use case is cloud computing for government clients of the territory, which has all its services in the cloud.

So far, the level of performance in each client has been satisfactory. This has helped to earn our organization a high reputation, with thanks to the service provided. Being a hyper-converged infrastructure and market leader, we can have many benefits and a lot of return on investment.

The main benefit is to improve and increase the portfolio of products in the Corporation. The slogan of our cloud is hyper convergent, and the results have been satisfactory.

The administration components are the most useful since, with them, we have been able to win and perform preventive measures in the administration of the hyper-converged Nutanix infrastructure.

It has a very useful and intuitive interface. Administrators trust it to perform preventive diagnoses on the platform, which helps in the administration of the infrastructure. We have been able to gain a lot of experience in all aspects of administration, which has made us a competitive organization in the Cloud Computing market.

All of the tools that Nutanix brings have supported us to improve the service provided to our customers.

The most innovative part of the platform is the set of predictive monitoring tools. They help IT administrators in preventive monitoring and as a service in Cloud Computing services.

We would like to be able to provision virtual machines at the computing level, as that would give us an added value against the competition. Being an infrastructure free of licensing and being able to count on the over-provisioning of resources would be helpful.

We have been using Nutanix Prism Pro for about five years.

This product is highly stable.

The scalability is high.

The Prims Pro tool, being free, improves the ROI in the organization. The most important thing is to have a return on investment, which we have achieved. We have also gained prestige in the face of the competition, and we hope to continue growing in infrastructure.

We evaluated other products before settling on this product. It really has its qualities and as a service provider, we have been able to compare it with other infrastructure and we have seen that it wins in all aspects.

We use Nutanix Xi Beam for cost optimization and security compliance.

Nutanix Xi Beam's executive dashboard is valuable. It provides a complete sense of the whole infrastructure, right from a costing standpoint and a billing standpoint. It also shows your compliance requirements and solution insights.

I think Nutanix Xi Beam can be more cost-effective. 

This product should have a sense of what their users need. Few systems are not business-critical, but they run 24/7. This product usually works on average utilization. It should help us by showing the peak utilization and make recommendations. Otherwise, we play a blind game of cost optimization. If you reduce the configuration of the servers' recent size and the peak workloads come, there'll be a huge outcry because of business disruption.

Integrations are mostly based on APIs. It needs to build some good level of interoperability between the platforms, like in the multi-cloud environments. Otherwise, the process infrastructure isn't fully-fledged, and we won't know what kind of workloads can be offloaded from the cloud to on-premise. This can reduce the cloud's footprint, not just from a cost-saving standpoint within the cloud, but also from understanding the whole ecosystem and the infrastructure. 

I have been using Nutanix Xi Beam for more than a year. 

Nutanix Xi Beam is a stable solution. Our expectations are a bit average and not high. In that sense, it's good.

Initially, we had tech support, but now we're solely dependent on our in-house workforce capability.

I have used a startup solution called CloudOptics, as well.

The initial setup is straightforward. We didn't integrate it with anything, but we plan to integrate it with many other solutions to bring some interoperability to it. 

We started small and then started expanding. Now it's targeting only AWS, and we don't have any difficulty with cloud deployment.

A reseller, a Nutanix partner, implemented it.

Initially, it was monthly, and now it's on a yearly basis.

I have used a startup solution called CloudOptics, as well. We had a good demo of Nutanix Xi Beam in 2018 0r 2017, and it was one of the best tools at that time. We stuck to two or three products. I think one was Tableau. We tried the Nutanix Xi Beam one-month free trial and saved a lot of dollars within that month. That's when our leadership made the call.

On a scale from one to ten, I'll give Nutanix Xi Beam a seven.

I'll tell potential customers to explore their options because there are a number of competitors in terms of competency and pricing.

Our company is a telephony provider for small/medium-size businesses, as well as large scale enterprises. Our primary use of Nutanix Prism Pro is for virtualization of cloud-based Private Branch Exchange (PBX) VoIP/SIP compatible systems that are privately accessible to our clients over the internet. We use Prism for the creation and management of virtual machines for customer use as well as for configuring backup solutions for the systems that we offer. It is one of our main tools for what we offer.

Nutanix Prism Pro and Nutanix AOS have greatly improved our organization by providing a reliable and simple solution that requires little to no maintenance in order to successfully offer a stable service to our clientele, as opposed to the competitors.

For the approximate two years that we have been using this solution, we have not once had an instance where we were left inoperable or non-functional due to the integrated high availability features that are integrated with the product. Even among experiencing hardware failures, we were able to function as if nothing had happened and we could seamlessly repair or replace key components without customers even realizing that there was ever an issue.

The features I have found the most useful are the health checks, extremely fast snapshots/restores, and the high availability service.

The dashboard for Prism Pro is extremely elegant, powerful, and simple, with everything needed at a glance, including but not limited to, the health status of the cluster, the operational state of your environment (in our case virtual machines), and ease of navigation through fields that are less common, but none the less necessary such as disk imaging and simple one-click upgrades.

There is not much to say in this regard. The system is very feature-rich and if it cannot be taken care of in the Prism GUI then it definitely can be in the ACLI.

I do, however, wish that the cluster would come preinstalled with the OS, as ours did not, and it took quite a bit of tinkering, trial and error, calls to Nutanix support, and an ample amount of time to figure out how to get everything up and running. I feel as though this can be greatly improved by providing more documentation and instructions if the system does not come preinstalled with any OS.

We have been using this solution for just over two years.

A1! As I said in one of my previous statements, even in the midst of a critical hardware failure, the solution was able to carry on as if nothing happened due to the way the High Availability feature functions.

The sky is the limit with the scalability of this solution, new nodes and cluster integrate seamlessly and quickly.

Yes, the previous solution that we had used was VMWare ESXi. While it is one of the more popular Hypervisors, it is not nearly as intuitive, or even in the same range of power as Nutanix.

The initial setup was complex initially due to the lack of the base operating system being installed on the cluster.

We implemented in-house.

It is hard for me to speculate on ROI as I am not deeply rooted in the financial aspect of our company, I would estimate that we hit our ROI a year after integrating this product.

While Nutanix can seem more expensive initially than the competition, the return on investment is much faster and all in all, very much worth the price.

We also evaluated Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix, KVM, and a new ESXi solution on newer hardware.

El producto es muy estable, también proporciona una interfaz extremadamente intuitiva, pero al mismo tiempo logra un nivel de control sobre todos los recursos. Tuvimos muchos problemas de monitoreo de plataforma ya que trabajamos con un gran volumen en términos de equipos de servicio, esto se debe a que somos una empresa cuya función principal es proporcionar servicios a los usuarios finales a nivel de soporte, requisitos y fallas. Por lo tanto, es de vital importancia mantener un mejor control de nuestro centro de datos. Una vez más, menciono que es un producto 100% recomendado.

Como una mejora, me gustaría ver una variedad de idiomas y un poco más simplificado el proceso inicial de conexión de red, a pesar del poco tiempo que tengo administrando esta plataforma en mi organización, considero que realiza el trabajo especificado en el Para los requisitos de la empresa para la que trabajo, también tengo poca experiencia en el área, por lo que recomiendo esta herramienta como el primer paso para un gran nivel tecnológico de conocimiento, mis colegas y yo estamos felices de haber adquirido Prism Pro.

Tiene una mejor gestión de la plataforma de ahorro de costos y un mejor control y mantenimiento de los recursos. No puedo pensar en ninguna mejora en este momento, pero el soporte es de primera categoría. Hemos tenido muchos problemas para actualizar desde el principio. Al principio, vi el manual de usuario del producto, pero al instalarlo y administrarlo de una manera práctica, pude ver que es muy amigable y confiable a nivel de interfaz, al mismo tiempo muy específico, muestra características de los recursos nunca observado al menos por mí en plataformas similares

Considere que es una plataforma interesante y muy amigable que permite una mayor eficiencia de gestión, permite un mejor escenario de monitoreo. Sin embargo, sabemos que la tecnología avanza día a día, una buena estrategia sería crear una aplicación gratuita, el usuario puede estar aún más interesado en la plataforma, puede controlar el monitoreo a través de teléfonos y enviar manuales o folletos de información por correo para ir a mano junto con la plataforma y sus actualizaciones, además de las actualizaciones realizadas por el monitor en cualquier lugar donde estemos encriptados.

He estado usando Nutanix Prism Pro durante seis meses. 

La estabilidad es increíble.

I have not used previous solutions

We have two different clusters in the environment one is an all flash cluster of 40 nodes and other one is a hybrid cluster of 4 nodes and are on the way to introduce another all flash cluster of 9 nodes in the environment. All the clusters have VMs as well as file servers hosted in them. 

Managing multiple clusters with mix of VMs and file servers by logging into multiple console will lead to additional operations overhead and also can cause delay in incident resolution as operations team will have to login to particular management console and carry out the remediation activities. 

First of all, the product is very stable. We did not see any breakages happen due to product misbehavior.

Thanks to multiple automations and self-explanatory dashboards, the overall operations load on my team has come down considerably. On top of this, since we are utilizing the Files feature also from both of our clusters, it is easing out the management overhead in that layer as well. 

Though the console is highly sensitive about any small alerts, which makes the dashboard through many alerts even for one single issue with the server, network, or connectivity, it is always better to have alerts even for small things than having no alert at all. 

One more thing to notice is the strong customer support team that Nutanix has. In the initial days when we were not familiar with this technology, we had raised many support requests and they helped us with all of them with outputting them into non-an issue buckets which we have seen many large enterprises do.

Reporting features in the console is so self-explanatory that even a non-IT person in the office can also understand it. Our finance users have access to this console and they will get the consumption details without having any dependency on us. Also, this dashboard is extended to our NOC team who will be able to interpret the alerts and decide on what to inform us whenever an alert pops up.

Moreover, the deployment process was so easy and smooth that post rack and stack and management IP configuration, it just took less than 2 days to configure the cluster of 40 nodes, upgrade the firmware, create file service and VM space and integrate with our infrastructure.

From an AHV point of view, I look for the feature of setting a limit for the memory allocation for individual VMs. This will help in providing higher memory to VMs for users who always ask or more and more memory but end us not using it causing other needy to be deprived of it. It will be better if they can extend this to non-AHV hypervisors and also non-Nutanix clusters so that people who need this feature but can not goto HCI currently can make use of this product. 

Also, I believe they should take a relook into their licensing model to adopt to the current situation.

We have been using this from last 1 year.

From my past 1 year experience I can say that the product is very stable.

I would recommend keeping the cluster to smaller number of members which will help in faster maintenance and upgradation activities.

We use VMware in 3 tier architecture deployments. This was the first HCI deployment in our department.

It took less than 2 days to setup the cluster of 40 nodes. So need not say anything separately about the ease of deployment.

We took Lenovo professional services team support for this deployment and they are good at it.

1 year is too short term to recover the ROI.

This will be a better fit in the age of hybrid cloud and with Nutanix adding more and more products in its offering, soon Nutanix will become a complete package to run IT. So it will be easy to scale and add modules as and when needed.

We evaluated Horizon, Cisco Hyperflex along with Nutanix.

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

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

Now when we are using, our lives have been easy

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

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

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

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

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

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

It has been more than four hours approximately.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Extremely easy to add nodes to the clusters.

We wanted away from the licensing cost from VMware.

Be prepared to have time on your hands after deployment.

Just a POC with Nutanix.

None at this time.

I currently use Prism in my work. All of our work is done within this environment as we also use AHV as the primary hypervisor. It was a resounding change since we migrated from vSphere and vCenter as a truly incredible level of simplification is achieved. One of the great advantages of Prism is its vision at a glance of our entire environment, be it a cluster of three or four nodes or hundreds of them. Finding what you are looking for or visualizing a problem is just a matter of a few clicks, so simple.

One of the great advantages is that it offers an extremely intuitive interface, but at the same time it manages to offer a level of control over all the underlying infrastructure that no other product provides. Options like One-CLick Update make the tool worthwhile on its own, as well as detailed performance metrics for each component in real-time. Its use is fantastic and managed to improve the response times of our IT department, optimize their tasks, achieve more free time to carry out other tasks, and really focus on what is important in the business. Other solutions spend a lot of time setting up an environment that, like Prism, should include everything you need to operate efficiently.

As I mentioned earlier, One-CLick Update, the dynamic monitoring of the entire environment, its simplified search, and all the reporting functions it offers to allow for really complete and neat infrastructure management. All of the additional features included allow for a very advanced level of general understanding. Virtually nothing can escape us working with the tool since every small detail (for example, an IOPS level outside of normal) can be analyzed in detail, generate an automatic report and send it to our team to immediately deal with it.

Perhaps the only point I see as an improvement would be the support of multiple languages ​​in the environment. One of the few things within which I see an improvement point could be the inclusion of multilanguage in the environment. Although it is extremely intuitive and everything is seen in a totally clear way, for some people who do not use English as the main language, it would be interesting to achieve a translation. I am not saying that it is in hundreds of languages ​​or alphabets, but if for example Spanish could be used. This would bring advantages to the Spanish-speaking world that is not used to English.

I have been using Nutanix Prism Pro for two years.

The stability in all Nutanix software is really perfect.

Scalability is one of the intrinsic characteristics of environments. It is a perfect web scale model

Technical support is the jewel of Nutanix and its products. There is no other company with this level of response and quality after Apple.

We previously used rackable servers and VMware as core software along with vSPhere as hypervisor. We switched to Nutanix hardware and its free, native hypervisor AHV, which is really cool.

The initial configuration of the entire environment and its tools was practically invisible. The learning curve does not exist, literally.

The implementation was in-house. Zero problems

In our case, the ROI was only 11 months.

It is essential to take into account the licensing terms. In this regard, Nutanix offers options that allow licensing for much longer terms than the competition and that is a great advantage.

Before using this product we evaluated vxRail as a solution, but economic aspects and compatibility problems made us go for Nutanix and its environment.

Undoubtedly a world-class solution in the administration of hyperconverged environments.

We had large testing VM servers environment on Cisco UCS with Nimble storage, and we have a large Dev environment on Azure. We have a hard time monitoring and managing both environments. And we end up paying lots of money for both. After talking to Nutanix, we ordered 8 nodes, setup and we migrated most of our Dev/Test VM servers back from Azure back in-house. We use Prism to manage all of them from single point of view, have overall picture of our whole environment. The dashboard is the best spot we check and keep it on our screen every day.

We had a test VM environment on Cisco UCS and Dev environment on Azure. From time to time, we need to transfer a large amount of data from one to another. And we have to spin up a different set of test/dev environment, which was challenging. We had many struggles with VM updates and configuration synch up. Since migrating to Nutanix, we have a single virtual platform for both test and Dev virtual environment. It's easy to transfer data and synch up the change and manage/monitor from a single point. Backup is much easier too. 

• Update management for all nodes, which included in it and it is straightforward and visual upgrade processes. 
• Calm is another good feature we are looking at to use the playbook to manage all VMs. We are likely to give a trial on that.
• File is a cool feature that allows you to share files like windows server but actually without a server and it can replicate the changes by using a build-in replication tool. I can snapshot the shared data and the user can restore the files by themselves if needed, which saves lots of effort of SD.

I still remember it was a struggle when we configured the initial network setup, that part was a little bit confusing about how exactly it works, we have two different Nutanix technicians who were on-site to help on the configuration. But both of them could not get right the first time, and we had to reset and start over again on both systems. Even after that, I was still a little bit confused about the virtual network and how each item was configured to work. I would think why do not have a single virtual IP and webpage to guide on that, or sort of wizard to guide through it.

I have been using Nutanix Prism Pro for two years. 

It is a very easy and stable solution, we have not had any issues. 

It is very easy to scale out, you can just keep adding node to have more capacity, and mange from the same prism.

Support is good. But we do not use them much.

We used Cisco UCS with Nimble storage which was over the capacity, then we got some VMs on the Azure, which we have to manage separately. So we moved everything to 8 nodes Nutanix and manage from a single point.

The setup is straightforward. Only the initial network setup is a little bit confusing.

We deployed mostly in house, but we have help from Nutanix engineer. They are very good.

The ROI is better than what we have on Azure and UCS.

The set cost is very minimal, the Nutanix pricing is good too. The file licensing should be bound into the system already.

Yes, because the UCS is close to end of life, we tried to move to Azure, but the cost skyrocketed.