Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

We provide Test-VMs to users. Currently, we deploy only Windows-VMs from Windows 10 1803 up to 20H2 and Server 2012 R2 to Server 2019. The blueprints consist of a base Windows Image (which is used as a template for the VM to be) and several tasks you can define and use remote PowerShell to get whatever you need to get done, like install additional software, set registry keys - you name it. Each task is then executed in the defined order and results can be reviewed even during execution time. Hardware specs can be made configurable, so users can adjust the amount of RAM or CPU core count but can also be set to static.
We recently set the machines up to configure customary passwords and give users an email notification when the machine is ready to use. Also we differentiate machine networks based on the users department to separate machines.

Previous inquiries took us almost a full day to prepare the VM to the liking of our users. Now, the deployment time is below 15 minutes and users can do it on their own! That leaves us to only update the blueprints if new requirements come in or new Windows Versions are published. As we have now predefined setups the testing team can rely on common ground for their product tests. Development teams can experiment with alpha versions in a secured environment (separate VLANs) without harming production machines.

The self-service for users is key to this solution because the creation is done solely on the users' terms and time. No waiting for IT or such.

Previously written scripts can be checked in a library and be reused for other blueprints.

Blueprints can be made available per project so each user sees only items tailored for their specific use case.
You can also Setup multi-machine blueprints to Support 3-tier applications with reverse proxy, Web Server and database Server, or any other concept there might be.

As always, the Nutanix support team assists with any obstacles you might come across. This led to various enhancements we and all other customers had benefits on.

There is now runbooks to use for things like automatically patch machines.

The list of blueprints and applications could be more configurable so you see all the fields you need and not just some predefined fields which are not customizable now.

There are lots of pre-defined blueprints in the online marketplace but often it is a trial and error to get the pre-defined blueprints to work due to some firewall issues. But that may because of our internal firewall being too restrictive.

More support for VMware environments would be great. Most blueprints are tailored for Nutanix AHV or the cloud providers. Hyper-V is currently not supported.

We have used Calm for over one year now.

Calm has no issues with stability. But Calm is heavily worked on by Nutanix, so any issues there might be are fast resolved and updates often help to mitigate problems. Given Nutanix unique 1-click-updates nature, updates are just as easy and reliable. It is advisable to wait for 2 - 3 weeks before upgrading to the latest and greatest so can look if any x.y.z.1 hotfix updates are published to avoid .0 glitches. But they are rare with Nutanix in general and Nutanix support is very helpful if you run into any of them. If you're in doubt simply ask support for help to see for yourself and be ready for your chin to hit the floor ;_) . Reading release notes before doing updates helps a lot to figure out what to expect. Another source for guidance is the compatibility matrix to look for any cross-requirements with Prism Central or AOS version of your target cluster (the cluster you deploy the Calm VMs on).

Scalibilty is second name to Nutanix. Scale-out of Nutanix Calm is just another node on the target cluster if things get sluggish.

Since Calm is dependent on Prism Central  you could simply scale-out that too. Nutanix has sizing recommandations for that, conveniently packed at Identify Prism Central requirements - Virtual Ramblings. Up to 25000 VMs should fulfill most requirements.

Nutanix support is outstanding. As stated above, it does not matter which continent you reside.

Nutanix NPS score is 92 -> https://customer.guru/net-promoter-score/nutanix

Our previous solution was hand-crafted VMs which cost IT a whole day or more depending on the requirements. That is why we had to find a more automatic approach. Nutanix Calm broke the duration down to 15 minutes. You even get a notification when the machine is up and running with Name, IP-Address and pre-selected password to get started.

Initial setup is simply activating it in Prism Central and configuring your target cluster which has to be connected to Prism Central as well, of course. So it is pretty straightforward. From there you can use some of the marketplace blueprints to see how it is done or just see on youtube on nutanix university calm - YouTube

We hit up our Nutanix partner for implementation to get up to speed as fast as possible. Implementation was half a day and we went on with setting some machines up. Expertise was great as we new them from the start and they just get what we want. Thanks to

ErikSterck!

This solution is greatly supporting a user-centric IT with less OPEX. Our ROI was covered within 18 month.

Setup can be done with Nutanix documentation by yourself to save up some money. Getting a consultant to support on the first steps has its perks, though. But you can always count on Nutanix Support to help out with questions or contact community. Does not matter if where your location is. We had outstanding support from europe, india and the US support offices.

Licensing should be a no-brainer but since there came up various options you should take a close look on the feature matrix to see what is in it and if you need it. Nutanix Calm has a 25-VM-license per customer for free. You only need to license Prism Central Pro node licenses for the cluster you are running Calm against. Every nutanix partner should be able to assist with this.

Other solutions are rare when considering to what extent Nutanix Calm covers the lifecycle of VMs. To answer the question: no, we did not evaluate other solutions. Calm integrates so nicely into Prism Central that any other solution appeared rather bloated in comparison. Also other solutions have problems with day-two operations (altering configuration).

Take a tour for yourself online: https://www.nutanix.dev/ad/at/

You shoud REALLY try this. It is just 5 minutes of your time!

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.

One of the use cases is that we do site-to-site replication, DR. Everything is controlled through Prism Pro: DR replication, runbooks, retention policies. We also use some of the playbooks for automated actions.

Administration of our virtual environment has been streamlined. We can go to Prism Pro and look at anything from VM performance down to our DR. We can customize dashboards to get what we want to look at on a daily basis, all in one place. We've put some of the critical things on the custom dashboard like disk latency performance. It's like a one-stop shop to manage our entire infrastructure. It has cut down on management efforts significantly. It has saved us about eight hours per week.

The most valuable feature is definitely the disaster recovery portion, which they call Xi Leap. It's included in the licensing. Before, we were on a solution that charged extra for DR software. And with Prism Pro, not only can we manage all of our other infrastructure in addition to our DR, in the same console, but we can set up recovery points. We can also set up scripts to run, so it gives us everything we need to have a solid DR plan in place.

It's very similar to Prism Element. It's very easy to use. The navigation is all on the left side and it's broken down into categories. It has a fast HTML5 interface, so you don't rely on any Java. Nutanix stays with its one-click mindset on this as well. There are very few clicks to get where you need to go. Overall, it's very easy to use and administer.

Prism Pro comes with capacity planning and runway analytics. We use those features, as well as provisioning and VM analytics that will tell us which virtual machines are using too many resources, or not enough resources, so we can right-size them appropriately. They're definitely very useful. By right-sizing the VMs we're not wasting CPU or RAM. The runway gives us an idea, for our budget year, about whether we might need to add another node to support our capacity. That is all very helpful.

The machine learning can be improved. There are a lot of false positives at times. For example, I'm actually looking at some alerts right now, that some service was restarted multiple times. It is like the same alert, spammed over and over again. But really, it turns out that that event didn't happen.

We purchased it back in 2015.

The stability has been very good. We haven't had any outages or downtime with it. Even after upgrades, it comes right back up. We haven't experienced any issues with reliability or uptime.

It's very scalable. We just have one Prism Pro VM. I know you can scale out the setup where you have multiple Prism Pro instances if you have a bigger environment. Our environment is small so we only needed one Prism Pro instance. That made it simple for us to get it up and going. If you do have multiple instances, they act like a cluster to balance out resources and manage different clusters. You can definitely scale out.

Nutanix's support is well-known and they are really good. We haven't had an issue where they haven't worked with us. We call into an entry-level support and they're very knowledgeable, unlike some other companies you run into where tier-one support can be hit or miss. We've had good luck with them. We've opened over a dozen cases too.

Back in the day, we had VMware and they had a similar Java-based interface, but that was five years ago. Our VMware licenses were coming up for renewal and we felt that VMware was too segregated. They were more of a traditional infrastructure where they separate the storage, separate the networks, and separate the hypervisors to manage. Nutanix, being hyper-converged, has everything in one portal.

The initial setup of Prism Pro was straightforward. All you do is click a button in Prism Element and go through a wizard. Give it an IP, it downloads the binaries, and deploys it for you. It's very simple. You just put in the network information for Prism Pro and, within a few clicks, it's done.

It only took about 30 minutes to deploy.

We didn't use a third-party. In our company, in addition to me there are four others who work in Prism Pro. The others include an infrastructure manager and three system administrators.

We have seen return on our investment with Prism Pro in terms of man-hours and ease of use. We've drastically reduced the time it takes to perform various functions and to handle management, especially when it comes to DRs. Our savings have mostly been in employee time.

They can be very flexible. Pricing is always negotiable. You really need to analyze if you need the features or not. Do you need Prism Pro or can you get away with the basic Prism? You can also do a test drive of the features through a Nutanix-hosted cluster. So you can try before you buy. Work with your VAR on pricing because they'll be flexible.

We looked at SimpliVity. They're now part of HPE, but they were on their own company back then. SimpliVity requires you to have VMware licensing, so you also had to buy VMware. Nutanix has its own built-in hypervisor included. SimpliVity also had a hardware card in their server that could be a single point of failure. Nutanix is mostly software, which pretty much eliminates that failure domain.

Try it for yourself. You can have a PoC where you can have a cluster on your site. There are different avenues to test it out before you move forward.

I think a lot of people get stuck in their ways with VMware or a traditional method. Don't be afraid to try something new. IT is always changing. Technology is getting better.

We're using it very extensively. We deal with all of our management from it. We check on our VM, deploy new VMs, manage reports, manage DR, manage playbooks, and we do our IT as well, for capacity planning and future runway support. We're 100 percent on it. We're completely off VMware, so everything is on Nutanix.

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.

I'm one of the administrators in our data centers. My title is Site Reliability Engineer, so my use case is that of a user and getting it to administer machines and monitor application performance.

The purpose for Nutanix, in general, was to reduce our footprint within our data centers, to scale down to a single point for all of our compute and storage, which it does very well. We're using Prism Pro to access all of the different clusters; we're able to get to them through one interface.

Based on information that we're able to derive from the application, we have utilized another monitoring tool, Splunk, and we're able to retrieve data on a frequent basis. We are able to find information about different VMs, or historical data regarding the process of those machines. That has been greatly beneficial for us to determine problems with our application; when machines move if there's an HA event and what those machines are; if there's a failure, what machines were involved in the problem, and where they're migrating to. It gives us a great deal of detail and it has helped improve our processes to determine where problems lie, where machines are going and what's happening with them, in near real-time. It's helped our troubleshooting process a great deal to have that information at our fingertips.

The most valuable feature for me is being able to find a machine, regardless of which cluster it's located in, as quickly as possible, and being able to work on it. A lot of times we are called upon to troubleshoot an issue. That usually means there's a problem that needs quick attention. Being able to find machines, ascertain their status, and do so in a timely manner, are processes that are very critical to our business needs.

I've used other products that are similar in nature and they can be very complex, but they have good documentation to back it up. Nutanix is no exception to that. Their documentation is quite extensive but can be challenging to read if you don't know the product firsthand. Still, it is very good at describing the features and functionality that you're looking for. But something to improve upon might be the ease of access to documentation, and helping users understand which information is going to provide the detail they need to complete their job.

The integration with Splunk is a little lacking, and this is something that we've worked on with Nutanix quite extensively in the last year or two. It didn't really have a good integration. They built some dashboards, where they were trying to kind of recreate Prism. Prism is its own utility; it works well for what it does. But it doesn't provide us quite the detail that we are looking for or the historical data that we were after. So we had to build our own custom apps for Splunk. Since doing that, we have been working with Nutanix to try and improve, to some extent, what they put out for the public. But in general, we've done some of our own customizing of our own dashboards. 

So the integration itself has not been great, but the work that we have done on our own towards Splunk has been really good. On the plus side for Nutanix is that the API calls it has that allow you to retrieve information about their product are incredible. The amount of data that you can retrieve is immense. The downside would be how to best utilize that data once you have it. That's where it's lacking, and I know that they're taking strides to improve that.

The types of data I'm referring to are CPU statistics, memory usage; when there's an HA event; where machines were located and where they're being moved to. At times, if a node fails or goes down for any reason, or there's a memory failure, it has to live-migrate those machines somewhere else. Being able to identify what those machines are, where they're going, and what impact that has to the infrastructure, is a real help to someone like me. That helps me to know what the impact is going to be to our clients and how quickly we can get the system back up to a stable and fully functional state. If we had a problem with the server, being able to look back in historical data and determine what led up to that event is another use for the data. We have roadmapping graphs that show growth in storage and CPU usage, for predicting when we need to purchase more. There's quite a lot of information there that we use to help with our job.

One thing I would really like for them to do is to correlate multiple machines together, multiple VMs, and get a bigger picture of CPU usage or memory usage. That's a real challenge in Prism Pro that we overcome utilizing Splunk. That might be something they could work on, but we found ways of utilizing the data that they provide already through REST or API calls and having access to it through a Splunk interface.

I've been wanting them to improve and mature their Prism interface. With our utilization of Splunk, I found that we tie those together pretty well. Having them revamp the entire product to try and make it better would be a real challenge.

I have been using Nutanix, in general, and subsequently Prism Pro, for the past three years.

By and large the stability of Prism Pro is very good. 

I do feel that we seem to run into a lot of problems with memory DIMMs within the Nutanix servers. Maybe they're overly cautious, but we do seem to get frequent failures for nodes that are removed for possible memory issues, or just the possibility that there could be a memory issue. If overly cautious is a downside, they're overly cautious. But if that means that our systems perform well and we don't get errors of data corruption, then it's all for the better. 

Their systems are very resilient and their uptime is very good, as they automatically live-migrate machines off to different nodes in the same cluster. They do that very well.

Having the cluster live outweighs having a single node fail, and that's the whole point of having multiple nodes. From that standpoint, the last time we had a system down because of the Nutanix was probably two years ago. And the cause was a network issue, which was something outside of their control. One cluster could not talk to another cluster and it went into a panic state and started shutting down VMs. It wasn't that Nutanix went offline. We had a network issue. They went into a protective mode to protect the data. That may be leaning towards the overly cautious, but we had zero corruption with any of our actual VMs. It did bring our application down, but everything was functional once we got the network issues worked out.

The scalability is fantastic. Anytime you need more hardware, you just throw it in and it consumes it and starts working with it. 

The only downside is the size of the clusters. As you start growing out towards 20 or more nodes, it becomes unwieldy and slows down the administrative processes. Users and administrators have to be aware that they have to scale out their clusters in addition to scaling out nodes when they have to increase capacity. That just goes along with understanding how the systems work and where their peak performance is at, and making sure that you build out correctly.

We have about 20 users of Prism Pro and they range from automation technicians to engineers to site reliability engineers, to those who actually administer the system. We have two staff for deployment and maintenance of Nutanix. Their roles are to maintain and upgrade and monitor the Nutanix infrastructure.

Our shop is 100 percent Nutanix. We do have some bare-metal servers that have functions for other applications, but all of our compute runs on Nutanix. So our use of it is rather extensive. We utilize it in all of our data centers exclusively.

Their support is second to none. Anytime you have an issue, they know what they're doing. They get the right people involved and your issues are taken care of in a very timely manner. Their support is fantastic. I hate giving people a 10 out of 10, because I think there's always room for improvement, but their support is really close to a 10. They're responsive and knowledgeable. And when they don't know the answer, they quickly get to someone who does.

Previously, we were running on Hyper-V from Microsoft. We found that it didn't suit our needs. We needed the compute, the storage, and everything under one roof, which Nutanix provides for us. Also, Nutanix's solution is more elegant than Hyper-V because you're able to bring multiple servers together into a cluster and maintain your VMs in a cluster of servers. That's as opposed to a single point of failure with one server or one array or the like.

I wasn't deeply involved with the initial setup, but I think that it was fairly simple. I do know that anytime we need to add more infrastructure, the integration with additional nodes or adding a new chassis is extremely simple and well laid-out. They excel at that.

We did work with an integrator and we had two sales engineers from Nutanix who assisted with that process. They were fantastic. Nutanix is a great team to work with.

I'm not privy to the numbers, but I think our ROI is quite high for Nutanix.

The contributing factor is, being able to have all of our infrastructure in one location. We use Nutanix not just for the software, the hypervisor, but for the entire solution. We're utilizing their chassis and their nodes. Having that all in one place, and being able to just add more hardware as we grow our infrastructure, is incredibly useful. It allows us to grow as we need and when we need. That alone allows us to dictate what drives our costs — when we need compute, how much compute we need — and allows us to stay ahead of our growing client base. 

In addition to that, their uptime allows us to have the performance and reliability that our customers demand.

It's cost-effective. It's not necessarily cheap, but it's also not inordinately expensive. It comes down to how much you use it to offset some of the costs. If you're all-in with Nutanix, and you have a lot of nodes, it drives down the cost.

I know Hyper-V was a consideration. We may have also considered VMware.

Do your homework and make sure to get some engineers involved at Nutanix who can assist you. You'll run into issues that they can help steer you around. Nutanix is willing to help if you are willing to ask. The system is not without its complexities. It has a lot of features and there are a lot of things that you can do with it. If you engage the professionals at Nutanix, they can steer you in the right direction. You should utilize them.

Prism Pro can be quite complex, if you want it to be. At its heart there are a lot of features available. If you utilize it for simple purposes, then you can get simple answers. The ease of use really depends on what level of technicality you want to have with it. But in general, the interface is well laid-out. There's a little bit of a learning curve in making sure you're going to the right location and knowing what you're trying to locate. But otherwise, I feel that the interface is well laid-out and intuitive to use.

Some other things they've done recently, like having events tied back to documentation, which is something that they are working on right now, have been great.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using the solution is that you get what you pay for. Nutanix has been a great company to work with. As I said, their support is fantastic. If you're going to use someone for your critical business needs, make sure that it's a company that's going to stand behind you and help make your job better and easier.

We leverage virtualization most of all. Prior to this, we had 5 virtual hosts using 4 SANs and dedicated network resources. Our back up solution for this was also a bit clunky as we had to back everything up daily so we had a disaster recovery in the event that we lost a SAN due to hardware failure. Our hardware had aged us and was in need of replacing. Having 4 nodes in our cluster allows us to have replication and if 1 node fails that is no data loss but in an entire san fails that falls into disaster territory

Prism Pro has given us a central administration of our entire virtual environment. Everything can be managed and updated through Prism. Being able to turn features on and off with one slide of the mouse is such a great feature. It allows us to manage storage and containers as well as the actual machines through one pane of glass. No need for any additional software. Pulse is in my opinion is one of the best features. Having the cluster monitor itself and notify support of any issues is a plus plus. 

Customizable Dashboard allows each admin to have things the way they like. Admins can just add the features they use most and remove the ones they don't. Alerts and tasks are easy to see and access.

Capacity Runway which shows us behavior trends. We can analyze trends from the past and predict future growth. It can also address potential capacity issues in the future based on past growth. This also includes the VM behavioral learning engine which allows us to plan for future growth at the single VM level. This is helpful in preventing over or under-provisioned VM's

I would like to see a P2V feature like Move or Xtract. The interface for migrating from one VM infrastructure to another is one of the best but going from a physical machine to a Nutanix VM is a bit too challenging. Especially if you are migrating a busy SQL server to Nutanix. No matter how you convert this you will lose transactions done during the actual migration. This can also be a bit challenging when trying to upload the disk images after converting the disks P2V. Uploading is primarily done via a browser. Most browsers cannot upload files in the TB area. There are ways but nothing straight forward. This really needs to be addressed in the future. 

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

We used a different product but the annual was adding up and our equipment was due for replacement. Nutanix was a little expensive for the initial outlay but when added up over a few years in made financial sense.

The only advice I give people is to make sure you understand your support contract with your vender. If you buy direct from Nutanix then you deal direct with Nutanix support. If you buy from a vender such as Dell you must go through Dell support. Then Dell support contacts Nutanix support and it gets a bit messy in my opinion

We were a VMware environment and looked at HyperV.

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.

Our organization is utilizing Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure for the majority of our infrastructure applications software, systems software, print processing software, and web application software as well as all of our core it infrastructure applicaitons and processes including alerting, monitoring, logging. Our only exceptions are currently our large data base implementations and our accounting edi batch processing solutions which are said to require ultra low latency and high performance network and storage.

Nutanix Prism Pro has improved the quality and efficiency of our organization's infrastructure team operations throughout our entire datacenter. Nutanix Prism Pro is powered by machine learning and task automation and it intelligently optimizes capacity, proactively detects performance anomalies, and enables our infrastructure team to automate operations tasks with ease and confidence, recapturing valuable time we can utilize elsewhere within our organization. Traditional Infrastructure Team Operations Management tools were built for traditional static infrastructure. These tools often overwhelm infrastructure teams with overly obnoxious alerts. In dynamic and scalable modern data centers with high performance and diverse workloads, infrastructure teams need simplicity and accuracy to achieve high productivity. Prism Pro automagically mines large volumes of system data to generate actionable insights and enables our infrastructure team to automate remediation of everyday tasks for performance management and capacity optimization.

ONE-CLICK UPGRADES! - Nutanix Prism Pro provides robust upgrading Nutanix clusters mechanism that has long been a delightful experience delivered via one-click upgrades. The one-click process hides a lot of complexity by using advanced automation and consumer-grade design experience. Historically, each cluster had to be upgraded one at a time. While the process itself was simple, this constraint still extended the length of time required to complete upgrades for multi-cluster environments.

Advance Search- Nutanix prism Pro offers to search Nutanix infra related entities as a content format. For example, it shows for VMs who is using memory equal to or greater than 10GB,VM memory =< 10GB. This is a very advanced feature that helps to get deeper details of Nutanix cluster entities.

The Life Cycle Manager tracks software and firmware versions of all entities in the cluster, integrated both on Prism Element and Prism Central.
LCM consists of a framework and a set of modules for inventory and update.
LCM supports software updates for all platforms that use Nutanix software.
LCM supports firmware updates for specific platforms.
From Prism Element, you can use LCM to update AHV, NCC, Foundation, BIOS, BMC, DATA Drives, HBA Controllers, SATADOMs, and M.2 Drives (G6 and later). From Prism Central, you can update Calm, Epsilon, Karbon, and Objects. When you run a firmware upgrade on multiple nodes, the LCM updates one node at a time to prevent any downtime in your cluster. Before the upgrade starts, all the VMs on that node are migrated to another host and the node enters maintenance mode. Always make sure that your cluster can tolerate a node failure by having the data resiliency status as “OK” in Prism Element.

LCM could be our second favorite feature right up there with One-Click Upgrades if it worked as smoothly but We have had a few issues with LCM but those appear to have been related to OEM hardware vendor not in sync with Nutanix software, not sure how this could be improved in the future.

We have been utilizing Nutanix for fifteen months.

We have found Nutanix solution to be very stable; we have never experienced any downtime with these solutions and aside from a few LCM hiccoughs we have never had any performance impacts utilizing this solution.

We have found Nutanix solution to be highly scalable; the Shared Nothing Distributed Architecture works well for our implementation.

Nutanix support has definitely been best in class there has been more than one occasion where we have contacted for support with an issue and tech/engineer has noted unrelated issues and insisted on resolving either during the session or at our earliest convenience.

Previously we utilized traditional hardware-software infrastructure solutions Nutanix is our first hyperconverged infrastructure solution.

I was not involved in the initial rollout of our first cluster sets but continued rollouts of new clusters has been straightforward.

Our implementation efforts have generally been a joint effort between vendor team and our in-house IT personnel the level of expertise has been quite good although there have been some communication breakdowns along the way.

Unfortunately I can not provide exact ROI calculations but we continue to invest in converting our traditional infrastructure to Nutanix HCI.

Unless your organizaiton is in a very limited niche don't pay the hypervisor tax it just isn't worth it.

I was not involved in the initial shortlisting of HCI vendor solutions.

Our organization has been pleased with the Nutanix HCI solution overall. The majority of our issues have been related to non-Nutanix hardware underlying the entire solutions so if We had it to do over again We would probably choose to go with Nutanix hardware.