Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

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

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

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

We started using Nutanix six months ago.

Nutanix is relatively stable.

Nutanix is scalable. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cost Governance is a SaaS solution that helps customers optimize public cloud services. Most customers don't have a clear idea about workload sizing. We measure the usage compared to what has been defined and recommend ways to optimize.

You can use Cost Governance to perform cost governance in multi-cloud environments. It supports the three big public cloud providers — Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform — and private clouds for Nutanix environments. 

Cost Governance helps customers improve cloud performance and save money. Many customers have idle public cloud resources. Maybe someone creates an object and forgets to delete it when they are no longer using it.

The solution detects all the unused resources and recommends removal. It can even remove objects automatically, which translates to huge savings. It can also save you lots of money by suggesting that you use a pre-paid reserved instance instead of buying on-demand cloud resources. 

The solution has automated reports and workflows. You can configure it to automatically send out reports to the business units responsible for managing cloud costs, so you don't need to log into the tool to get information. Cost Governance's user interface and dashboards are beautiful. The customers love it because it's easy to use. They can run it and get a report an hour later to immediately see the savings.

Azure has a public cloud offering, and it also has a CSP model that allows Microsoft partners to provide Azure as a service to their customers. Cost Governance only works on the standard public cloud, not the CSP model. When I was at my previous company, we frequently got requests for Azure CSP support. We also got some requests for Alibaba Cloud and Oracle Cloud, but Azure CSP was the biggest one.

I start working with Cost Governance (formerly Beam) a little more than a year ago. They don't have that many products because Nutanix is about a decade old. They've only begun to increase the portfolio in recent years. I was a portfolio specialist for a year, so I know most of the core solutions well.

It is Software as a Service, so there is nothing to scale. We can target customers with a small cloud footprint or customers that are huge. There is no need to scale anything because it's SaaS.

Of course, Cost governance is my first choice because I was selling it. However, I was competing with solutions from VMware and other vendors. At that time, we believed our product was much better, and our customers gave us feedback that this was the best solution.

I rate this solution a 10 out of 10 for ease of deployment. Setting up the solution is straightforward because it's SaaS. You can sign up for a 14-day free trial by going to the website and registering your public account. It takes a couple of hours for Cost Governance to gather information and perform the computations. You don't need a dedicated person to deploy, manage or maintain it. Typically, each organization has someone who oversees public clouds and cost management. 

Customers need to consider the total cost of ownership and how much they'll save using this solution. It has some advanced cost comparison features that aren't being utilized by many customers at the moment. You provide a specific workload, and the solution tells you where the workload will be the cheapest in your multi-cloud environment, including the private cloud.

For example, if you want to build an ACM, Cost Governance can say that will be cheaper if you deploy on-prem or in Azure. Most customers are not there yet, but if a customer is in that process, the value for the money will be a perfect 10.

I rate Cost Governance an eight out of 10 for pricing. There are different plans, so you can pay monthly or yearly. You can also sign a three-year contract. It's quite flexible.  I can't give it a perfect 10, because customers always want a cheaper solution.  

I rate Nutanix Cost Governance a nine out of 10. I stopped short of rating it 10 because the lack of support for CSP was costing us some sales to big companies that had those types of contacts with Microsoft partners. Cost Governance's one shortcoming is a lack of support for specific environments. When I left the company, they planned to add support for those cloud environments, but I'm not sure if they've been publicly released yet. 

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

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

It is based on-premises on our Nutanix cluster.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Among the most valuable features are 

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

We have been using Nutanix Prism Pro since 2018.

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

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

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

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

Positive

We used VMware but we migrated to Nutanix.

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

The solution is a management portal for the entire solution. You can have a look at your configuration and do different kinds of configuration monitoring management. You have the infrastructure implementation workflows on top of it, so that's the portal that will manage these underlining nodes.

It's a stable solution.

The solution scales well.

Technical support is helpful.

It's easy to set up.

Licensing could be more flexible in future releases.

We've used the solution for two years. 

It's a stable solution. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution can scale as needed.

I can't speak to how many people are using the product right now.

Technical support is great. They helped during the setup and were excellent. 

The solution is very straightforward. The deployment took about five to six days. It took about a week's time.

Anyone who is comfortable with any virtual edition of a solution with five to six years of experience will be able to manage it. I can manage the entire solution myself.

The solution is easy to self-deploy. During the initial setup, we worked directly with technical support, and they were quite helpful.

I'd like them to offer a more flexible licensing model.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using.

I would recommend the solution to others. Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten. We've been very happy with it. I'd advise potential users should first run a POC and then go for it.

We use Calm as an automation engine for deployment of the cluster software over our network. We are also using it to deploy standardized workloads on the Nutanix clusters.

We also use it to create a "self-service shop," where we can select to deploy standardized workloads and choose a certain profile for a particular server, and the Calm engine will integrate with other solutions like our IP database and CDB. Everything is fully automated.

In addition to standardized workloads, we also can say, "Give us a generic virtual machine."

It really drives up our speed tremendously for getting workloads to the customer as soon as possible. Previously, it took a few weeks to get a virtual machine in place, including deploying the virtual machine and getting the administrative parts in order for it. That process takes a matter of minutes now, if the prerequisites are in place on the networking layer. Our delivery time is incomparably faster than what it was. We're mainly providing platforms to other application teams, and it greatly helps those teams to have a virtual machine in place. Indirectly, it will ultimately help us develop and deploy applications faster.

Calm has also enabled us to react faster to the changing needs of our business, with the significant decrease in the delivery time of certain machines.

I really like the Nutanix Marketplace a lot. We publish standard workloads there and that, in combination with the Projects, allows for self-service, which is the most powerful feature of Calm.

Also, the ease of use when building new applications and offering them in the marketplace is the most elegant feature of Calm.

It also works very well when it comes to optimizing capacity and performance. It allows you to have a framework where it is very easy to automate in a standardized way and provides you the boundaries for standardizing automation. It really helps to unify the way a team works. Calm's abilities when it comes to team collaboration are great. All the workloads are deployed in a standardized manner, and administered that way as well. This is the first time we have been able to do workloads for the machines in a standardized manner. Currently, we are expanding a lot, with a lot of new virtual machines. So if we don't focus on standardization, it will become really hard to manage with a small team. Standardization and automation are very important for enabling us to keep up with the growing infrastructure.

We also use Nutanix Prism Pro and it provides us with insights into application-related infrastructure to a certain extent. But in reality, we haven't done a lot with it yet. The dashboarding is certainly elegant, but we're not utilizing the clusters a lot yet, so it hasn't been very necessary to work with it. Second-day operations are something that we're working on. The deployment is not done and transitioning to operations is in progress.

There is room for improvement in the remote script execution. The way logs are shown in Calm, it's not always keeping up properly. It's really the interface that needs attention there. I believe it is something being worked on at the moment by Nutanix.

Also, the integrated scripting language, which is a very limited form of Python, should be improved. It should be made into a more modern version of Python, and maybe other languages as well. 

I would also like to see an improved ability to integrate with APIs.

I have been using Nutanix Calm for about a year.

It has great stability. We haven't experienced issues with stability with the product.

In terms of scalability, it just works. It has high availability, and we haven't run into any issues where we have needed to scale up.

We have Nutanix clusters located in at least half of our Vopak locations. This year we rolled out the Nutanix platform to 30 locations and, in the next year, 30 additional locations will follow. Currently, the six users of the solution are involved in infrastructure development on the DevOps team. Those are the people who are building on top of Calm.

In general, Nutanix support is great. They're responsive and skillful. We're really pleased with them.

Positive

We did not have a previous solution. Calm was a brand-new implementation for us.

The initial setup of Calm was straightforward. It was just a matter of enabling the product, and that process is very well worked out by Nutanix. Our deployment was done within an hour. It was very fast.

You will see great value from it if you utilize the self-service part of Calm. The price you pay for it will only give you equal value if you use the self-service part to enable other teams. If you only use it as a deployment mechanism, I think it's rather expensive.

We did not really look at other solutions. We chose the hypervisor platform, and Calm came with it. We also looked at VMware as a hypervisor platform, but we chose Nutanix and therefore we went for Calm as well.

Nutanix excels in making something that is very complex into something that is very simple. It's really easy to work with, and the time it takes to get familiar with the product, for an engineer, is way less than with the competitor's platform.

It's very important to think ahead about what your automation strategy will look like. You should really think about creating reusable components and also have good source control and a CI/CD strategy. If you start building without thinking about these things, you will have to do a lot of rework and re-engineering to be able to scale up.

In terms of Calm unifying container and virtual machine automation and orchestration in a single orchestration platform, we're not doing containers yet, only tenants. But in the future, I expect it will do so because our next step we'll be looking into container workloads. But that's not where we are for now at Vopak. Similarly, we haven't used Calm’s AIOps and automation capabilities.