Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

We use the solution mostly for management. We also use it for disaster recovery on Nutanix clusters to keep a small group of servers running. We wanted one area so we didn't have to manage everything separately.

We use Prism Ultimate. The most valuable feature of the solution is the ability to run and open the management console from one place. We do not have to log in multiple times. We have all alerts for our clusters in one location.

The biggest benefits of the solution are cost savings and time savings for the management. The solution has a tool that helps you figure out your growth and how many nodes you would need to move to a different number of users. We've used that a few times, and it's been helpful.

It is a good product, and it allows us a lot of flexibility and the ability to do things quickly without needing much expertise. The product is pretty intuitive and easy to learn. When we first started, my team and I were able to use the solution after taking some basic classes.

The licensing procedures are not smooth and easy. I have to call the licensing support every year to renew our contracts because they keep changing the licensing models.

I've also noticed that some features in the on-prem products either do not work in the cloud product or work better on-prem. When upgrades do not run from the cloud portal, I must go back to the on-prem product.

We have been using the solution for five years.

We have not had any issues with stability. We've not had any downtime.

Support is very responsive. I've had very few issues with them. They usually give me the answers right away. The support site is very helpful. The site has a knowledge-based search. When we enter tickets, it gives us some good advice right then and there. I've been able to use it many times to avoid having to wait for somebody to call.

The support’s knowledge and expertise are top-notch. If the person I'm talking to doesn't know the answer, they quickly find someone who can help resolve it.

I wish other cloud solutions’ support were as good as Nutanix Support. Nutanix Support has been able to solve our issues quickly, and they're very patient and friendly. I've had to call them various times on weekends. They're always willing to help.

Positive

We worked with Nutanix to deploy the product. They were amazingly helpful in setting up and running the product. It appeared like it would be complex, but they simplified it. With a few clicks of a button, the product starts building and running scripts on the back end. It was really easy for us.

We also did a proof of concept, ran it for a couple of weeks, tore it down, and built a new one. Both times, the solution was up and running within a couple of hours. Four employees in our organization were involved in the deployment. Most of the maintenance is done on the back end. My team did not do any upgrades. We maintain the clusters.

One of our biggest returns on investment was disaster recovery. We had disaster recovery in a separate data center where we had to have an equal amount of hardware for both sides. Now we just have a couple of small nodes running in the cloud. So we're saving quite a bit of money doing that. We've also been able to maintain the same number of people supporting the solution, so we haven't needed to find experts in Nutanix to get it running.

The pricing has become an issue in our company. The tool is expensive.

We've been happy with the speed of outcomes. We haven't had any issues. Faster outcomes are very important to our organization. We're very sensitive to how long things take and how much energy and effort our staff and end users need. Our VMware is totally separate from Nutanix.

The solution has definitely helped validate the capacity requirements that we have and make sure that we have the equipment we need. We've been able to monitor and see how our use goes up over time, plan for future purchases, and ensure we don't have any outages.

Our company has been growing. NCM’s capacity planning and Runway analytics is very important to us. It helps us proactively forecast our needs in the next six months. The management appreciates the ability to forecast instead of having a knee-jerk reaction at the last minute.

We can't standardize certain things in the organization to use playbooks. I'm hoping to get to a point where we can use them more. The tools available in the solution are very helpful. The tools help us look at past trends and determine what we will need in the future.

The setup was easy. The learning curve has been a little bit steep because there are so many individual products. We haven't taken the time yet to sit down with our sales team and the support to review our options. I feel we're not using the solution to its full potential. Compared to other products, the learning curve is very similar. It has a licensed web management tool that can be accessed almost anywhere.

It's fairly important to us that NCM is sold as one product with multiple tiers. We're more likely to use features that are included. We push the team to try new things and find better ways to do things. So if we had to evaluate every single one right at the beginning and then try to figure out which ones we'll buy, it would slow down the process.

The acquisition and support costs of NCM versus other cloud management solutions are comparable. The solution works well. I haven't had any issues where I've had to wait and be frustrated. It's definitely been very usable and quick. NCM Ultimate's deployment time is comparable to or faster than other cloud management solutions.

Anyone evaluating Nutanix should get some training and figure out what all the parts do and how they work. They should make sure to size the clusters correctly. We ran into some issues early on with nodes and clusters since we didn't buy enough from the beginning. We run the solution on our central environment.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use Nutanix Cloud Manager for monitoring. It gives us visibility into our customers' workloads. It's easy to workload right on Nutanix, but you must be able to monitor how well it's running and the migrations occurring inside. 

Most of our customers have on-prem environments with NCI & MCM, so they can have a Nutanix cloud cluster inside one of the big hyperscalers. With NC2, you can use your existing Nutanix licensing or procure a cluster in the hyperscaler that looks and smells like what you've got on-prem. You have the CapEx model, where customers get their budget at the start of the year and buy what they need, and the OpEx model, where they pay monthly. This caters to both customers. 

Most of our cloud-based customers use Azure because they are Office 365 customers, and Azure is the path of least resistance. However, we do have GCP and AWS customers. In the case of AWS, it's more about the available tooling. 

Cloud Manager lets us have more informed discussions with our customers. We can tell them that their virtual machines are underprovisioned or overprovisioned. They can get more from their investment. The customers have already purchased the hardware and the licenses, so they are wasting resources and money if their machines are too big. If they are too small, the customer should make them bigger.

The capacity runway is useful for monthly and quarterly service reviews. We have a report that we can present to customers estimating their future needs. For example, we can say, "You will run out of memory in six months at your current trajectory." 

Cloud Manager enables those conversations. We provide each customer with a meaningful dashboard where they can easily see all their clusters and which ones are hot. 

Cloud Manager's data protection policies are nice. Sometimes our customers provision their own workloads. Regardless of whether they provision their workloads, we need to know that the data protection policies automatically protect their VMs locally and/or to another cluster. We don't need to have a conversation about data protection. It's already there.

GPU monitoring is crucial because we do a lot of desktop virtualization. It can tell us which desktop uses the most resources or has too many allocated resources so we can right-size them. The reporting is honest, which I find refreshing. Many vendors will tell you that you need to buy resources, whereas Cloud Manager helps us identify over-provisioning so we can get resources back.

The pre-defined reports are simple. We can very quickly get a report showing which VMs are running, the latency, resource usage, etc. It gives us that information fast. If we migrate data on Monday, we'll have a week's worth of reporting telling us how it went by Friday. We can also get end-of-the-month reporting. 

Cloud Manager's low-code automation features are excellent. We previously used vRealize Automation, which requires considerable effort to do simple things. With Cloud Manager, we can do things with one click. Currently, our workload is primarily VDI, so it doesn't fit so well, but I'd like to increase the usage. So many customers are using Cloud Manager just to manage their hypervisor environment, but the platform has much more to offer. This is a good example of where repetitive tasks can be automated. 

Humans make mistakes, and automation is a big help. It also helps when you don't need to be a rocket scientist to develop automation. You don't need to know much about coding, but it's helpful to know a little and understand what you're trying to achieve.

Our workloads are generally static, but automation is needed to make those changes safely when they change. Automation saves time if you are migrating and provisioning new workloads.

Long gone are the days when you had specialized admins who would be solely responsible for Nutanix environments. Most of us today are generalists. We have a breadth of knowledge, not depth, so filling the gaps with low-code automation is critical.  Reducing the number of clicks needed is great, but consistency is more important. We must ensure that all those workloads are built the same way, so all the expectations are the same.

I've had some challenges with the latest versions. I think the resource requirements are a little too high. The resources that Cloud Manager needs begin to account for a larger proportion of the resources the customers buy. In the announcement for the version they released today, they said there would be a lightweight version, so hopefully that has been addressed.

We have used Cloud Manager for about four years. We've been using it since before it was called cloud manager. 

I've never had any issues expanding clusters or upgrading. Nutanix is undergoing architectural changes and shifting toward microservices. That has been challenging because it's very different, but when it's up and running, it just works. 

As a VDI customer, we have 25,000 VMs, but that is not necessarily that many. We must be mindful of the limits, but we can design around those, so it isn't a problem. 

I rate Nutanix support 10 out of 10. Their support is nice because they'll often connect you with a technician you've spoken with before. I like that because if you call at the same time, you'll get someone in the same region, so you'll probably know who that person is. That's critical because relationships are important. 

Positive

We've worked with other solutions. I've always said that Nutanix is like IT for Dummies, and I'm happy to be considered a dummy. With other platforms, you need to deploy another management solution, but Nutanix provides basic management out of the box. It takes a couple of clicks to implement microsegmentation and data protection. 

The thing I like the most about Cloud Manager is that it's high availability by design. You get three nodes, so you don't have a single point of failure like you do with other vendors. When you log into it, the front page tells you whether you'll have a good day. If it's all green, you can have a cup of coffee because everything is fine, but don't pick up the phone if everything is red because it's all broken. 

I love that I don't need to work hard to find my information. NCM is a delight to set up. It takes a few clicks to deploy out of Prism Element. Anyone can use it because it's web-based and intuitive. You can monitor things at a high level with the click of a button. Generating basic scheduled reports is easy, so our C-level managers can see how their investment is performing. It's as intuitive as possible and all in one dashboard. 

Monitoring is a pillar. We need to monitor our customers' workloads for availability. If a customer doesn't use Nutanix, we'll go with something else, but NCM is the go-to solution for Nutanix. It's never a conversation about whether to use NCM or something else. 

The deployment is straightforward. You give it a few details about IP addresses, etc., press a button, and go make a cup of coffee. It's all done when you get back.

We've seen a return using Cloud Manager in the form of time saved. Time is expensive to our organization, and we've preferred to invest in tooling in recent years rather than people. We've saved a lot of time because we don't need to work as hard using Cloud Manager, which enables us to work smarter. 

It's always difficult to discuss Nutanix pricing because the cost varies wildly depending on the customer and the region. Desktop virtualization is simpler because there is a defined scope. You can tell the Nutanix salesperson how many users you have. In a more traditional environment, it's always best to have NCM for monitoring because you'd be crazy not to. 

We didn't evaluate anything else because Nutanix solutions always work better together. You may already be paying for Cloud Manager in your licensing, and the way Nutanix solutions complement each other is crucial. However, we say in the UK that you shouldn't be marking your own homework, so a third-party perspective could also be helpful. 

I rate Nutanix Cloud Manager 10 out of 10. 

We use Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for the hyperconverged platform and to be able to centralize all our workload in a resilient platform.

We have integrated NCM with our service portal to provide seamless delivery of services, from the demand portal to the deployment of virtual machines. Both the help desk and service desk can manage everything from clusters to disaster protection and protection groups using the same API. We also have integrated IBM into the system.

Regarding Calm, which I am familiar with since Nutanix acquired it, it has become a very useful feature. However, the main concern currently is the licensing issue.

The challenge with Calm lies in its licensing model. We deploy it once, but we cannot manage it afterward, and we cannot purchase more licenses than what we have. When we deploy an application, it consumes a license, which limits our ability to use Calm as intended. Despite this challenge, Calm is a great tool for managing the life cycle of an application.

We use various APIs to enable automatic project delivery and one-click upgrades for all nodes, ensuring minimal downtime during the process.

I cannot give you an exact amount of time saved, but I can say that we have been able to reduce the number of people managing the platform by more than twenty percent since we started using automation and a simplified management approach. This is the best figure that we can provide.

The first use case is the hyperconverged platform with back-end storage.

The file management feature is also useful to us. Currently, we are also using Object Store.

Although we have evaluated Calm, we have not yet implemented it as it does not seem to be a valid use case for our role as a broker of IT solutions. 

We do not manage Azure workloads or life cycles, and it seems to be more suitable for developers.

For instance, let's consider File. The benefit of using File is that you can leverage both block and file use cases on the same platform with a single admin console. This makes it a valuable tool for managing storage efficiently.

Consider Files, for instance. Its value lies in the ability to leverage both block and file use cases on a single platform with a unified administrative interface.

We are able to simplify our storage infrastructure by replacing some of the older file system platforms. By using public cloud stores, we can offer new storage capabilities on the same platform, which is beneficial. We can also link these storage capabilities to our Splunk application, making it easier to manage and analyze data.

The primary benefit of using a unified platform is to simplify the management of the platform and reduce the skills required to manage it. 

With the natural attrition of skilled workers, companies must do more with fewer resources, and the most skilled people often lead the company. 

By using a unified platform, we can complete tasks that may have required highly skilled personnel in the past. 

This does not diminish the value of skilled personnel but allows us to accomplish more with fewer resources, which is beneficial for us in terms of simplification and cost-effectiveness.

The solution is designed to be easy to onboard and learn, even for those who have never used it before. This is because it is a unified platform that encompasses multiple technologies, reducing the need for users to learn and maintain multiple systems. 

The unified platform is also very user-friendly and clickable, similar to the Windows environment, making it easier for users to navigate and maintain.

This simplicity also enables the service desk to provide level-one support, which covers basic tasks and troubleshooting, leaving more complex issues to the experts. 

Additionally, the unified platform streamlines the support process, making it easier and more efficient for the service desk to resolve user issues.

The flow and management capabilities of the platform could be improved to handle additional features and functionalities, especially since the company currently uses some other solutions from a competitor. 

With the right enhancements, NCM could be capable of handling more features than the current hypervisor and offer a more comprehensive and robust platform for the company's IT needs.

While VMware is no longer part of NCM, it would be beneficial to include additional features such as AHPs, HyperAnalyzer, and similar capabilities found in VMware's ESXi. These enhancements would add value to the platform and increase its competitiveness in the market.

To maintain a competitive edge against ESXi, it's essential to have a dual bundle strategy, which is what we are currently pursuing. Having feature parity at a comparable level is important for us to succeed in the market.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for more than five years.

The stability and resiliency of NCM are among the main factors that have kept us using it.

The operational method and process have remained the same since the beginning.

We have continued to use NCM due to its consistent operation method and process, as well as its unchanged UI look and feel over time.

The reason for our ability to scale and extend the platform is due to its scalability. With multiple data centers across different regions in North America, Europe, and APAC, we have a global platform that allows us to add a new team each year to manage it worldwide.

Scalability is another strong point of NCM. We don't have an excessively large cluster, but rather a big one that is very stable, and we can scale it as needed.

Currently, we have over two hundred nodes deployed across various countries, with the majority located in France.

We do not have a direct support agreement with Nutanix as we purchase the entire Lenovo infrastructure. However, our experience with their support has been very positive and valuable.

I have direct contact with the new Nutanix team and they are always available when we need them, providing us with valuable support.

I would rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

There is always room for improvement. 

There is some turnover in our supply chain, with changes happening once per year or once per two years. We experienced a significant shift in personnel in the last two years.

Previously, I worked with Symptivity. It was the first Hyperconverged platform.

Symptivity was a good solution, but at the time Nutanix was just emerging and VMware's VSAN was not yet available. Since then, Nutanix has continued to grow and expand its offerings, while Symptivity did not see the same level of growth.

In my opinion, Nutanix stands out from its competitors because it has invested heavily in developing its platform and expanding its offerings to cover various areas. Moreover, Nutanix has also obtained certifications from different vendors, including Red Hat, which has enabled it to be recognized and accepted in the industry. 

This was something that was lacking in the past, and it has helped Nutanix gain an edge over its competitors.

Nutanix has done an excellent job of ensuring that its platform meets the requirements and standards necessary to be used by a wide range of customers.

I was part of the initial deployment team during the early stages, but at that time, the offering was not the best. However, I am still involved and play an active role in the ongoing growth and development of the platform within the company.

The platform met our expectations and was straightforward to deploy and onboard. We experienced no issues as long as we continued to use ESXi.

We were able to observe how easy it was to handle Nutanix in comparison to Simplivity at that time. This is because we faced a lot of issues with Simplivity, but we did not face them with Nutanix.

Although we have seen a return on investment, it wasn't as high as we were expecting. This is because running ESXi on top of the new device platform incurs additional costs in terms of run operations, resiliency, and new capabilities. 

While there are already some benefits, there is still room for improvement in terms of simplifying the platform to further increase ROI.

In my opinion, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is expensive.

Based on what we have, we always aim to meet our pricing requirements and we are open to discussing and negotiating to get the best price possible. However, in my experience, I didn't find the pricing model for Calm to be satisfactory. 

As a large company with numerous instances, the pricing for Calm was not favorable for us. There is definitely room for improvement in this area.

I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) a nine out of ten.

Initially, we deployed one cluster. Then, we deployed another two to three clusters. The main use case was to have a single console with all the alerts as well as viewing each cluster from a single pane of glass. That was one of the primary reasons for moving to this solution.

We are on the latest version because our company states that we need to upgrade every 30 days. Therefore, we are on a 30-day cycle, using the latest version of it. If Nutanix releases a new version, then in the next 30 days, we are on that version.

That solution gives requirements based on usage. It has helped us with workload and capacity planning. This is helpful for us to effectively plan. 

The main selling point was the one-click centralized upgrade. Upgrading our clusters is a very seamless, straightforward process. We don't have to go through each individual server or cluster. We just do it in one click using Starter. Without logging into individual servers, we can do an upgrade. This makes our 30-day patching cycle easy for us, rather than going through a painful, time-consuming task.

The Capacity Behavior Analytics has been a good feature that we have been able to use.

It provides centralized upgrade simplicity as well as getting alerts and updates on a single pane of glass. That makes it very easy rather than missing any notifications or alerts. The alerts help if you don't log in everyday since you are notified of everything in Prism Pro. 

We use the capacity manager, which we rely on. It gives us centralized management, and that is key for us. Everybody logs into the centralized console to find out if there is a problem. If someone needs to do a deep dive or troubleshooting, the central management lets them narrow down to the task or performance issue that they are dealing with.

There are some cases when there are multiple alerts for the same issue. For example, if I forget to put it in hosting maintenance mode, then I start getting multiple, duplicate alerts for the same host, which we don't want. If I have already received an alert, I don't want another alert. So, there are sometimes false positive alerts because of update activity where we forgot to put it in maintenance mode, then we get multiple alerts or emails. 

We have been using Nutanix Prism Pro for a year and a half. We have been using the Nutanix Cloud Manager version for the past several months.

The environment is pretty much stable, though at a year and a half, it is still new for us. In my experience, it is stable. We find it a very stable solution compared to other vendors. I think we have the best solution.

We worked with the Nutanix Community team to find some templates. Based on our organization's specific security standards, we then created a standard template that we use when deploying.

Finding any type of documentation in the support portal is easy. Everything is available online. If you are stuck with something, needing documentation or some kind of guide, those are readily available.

The tech support has been really good. I have worked with Dell and their support is not as easy to use when you need something, have to find a solution, or are stuck on something. Whereas, the Nutanix support is very helpful. As soon as you open a case with the support team, they provide support based on the case's priority level. The Nutanix solution and support are better than Dell's.

Their technical support has been knowledgeable. They understand us as a customer: our issues and what we are looking for. They are able to provide support in a timely manner based on the kind of support ticket that is open. I would rate them as nine out of 10.

Positive

Previously, we had purchased Prism Pro but had not installed it. When we started increasing the capacity of our clusters, we installed Prism Pro. Then, in the next three to six months, a lot of things had been fixed and streamlined.

Previously, we had a Legacy platform. We would have to do a hardware refresh when hardware went end-of-life. A lot of time was spent doing upgrades. We were having problems with hard disk failure when the environment got to the end of its support life. We wanted a solution that was less time-consuming and more efficient, bringing more simplicity. That is one of the reasons that we moved in this direction.

Moving to Nutanix from our legacy platform has saved us a lot of time (30% to 40% of our time) to focus on other things, such as troubleshooting.

I was involved in the initial phase of setting up the test drive and doing the proof of concept. Also, I was part of the migration. 

We used the Nutanix tool for our migration. We had a deadline and talked with the application owners, which went smoothly. We were able to migrate the workload from our legacy platform to Nutanix. It took almost six months of time to move our workloads from our legacy platform to the Nutanix platform, but it was not that complicated.

We worked directly with the Nutanix support team.

It saves time since it is a single pane of glass. Our efficiency has increased because of that. We don't have to log into multiple servers when we do upgrades. We can do it on one console. This saves us eight to 10 hours a month. Upgrade activity on servers, which was offloaded to the Nutanix platform, used to take hours on our Legacy platform.

We looked at VxRail because we were thinking about having a Dell hyper-converged platform. However, Nutanix Prism Pro was more comfortable. 

One of Nutanix's best features is monitoring a cluster, which is useful. Anyone can manage it. Specifically, you don't need to have someone with VMware or hypervisor background to do it. It is not rocket science; it is very easy to manage. It is easier to manage because it provides centralized administration of the entire environment, instead of having something like multiple vCenters. With this solution, you don't need to log into multiple consoles.

There was a talk earlier that we will plan to use the monitoring automation, but since we have other tools that we use for automation, we don't have X-Play. However, that may change down the line because we want to add more clusters. So, we may need to think about how we can update our license to have X-Play.

We have plans to add Nutanix in our corporate infrastructure too. There, we will be using VMware in Prism Pro for our corporate environment.

Nutanix has a partnership with Red Hat. Therefore, there are some Ansible scripts that we use. Because we have Red Hat Satellite, we use that to leverage some sort of automation for our deployment servers.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10.

We mainly use it for infrastructure as a service. We use it for managing the clusters and hardware and running the VLCM updates. We do not use it to manage files and all the embedded because we have other solutions corporate-wide for it. It is pretty much being used to manage the infrastructure of the clusters and make sure that we have all the licenses applied to all the different clusters around the world.

We are multinational. I have clusters right now but not on all 53 plants. We have some Acronis data centers. They are called Co Lo data centers. We have a couple of those data centers with Nutanix in them. We have one in Tokyo, one in Ashburn, and then we have a couple of data centers in Mexico with Nutanix. We also have some in the US, some in Portugal where I am from, Italy, Germany, Asia, China, and Japan. We are around the world, and we use Prism to manage all those data centers.

Centralization is the main benefit. We are a company that is growing a lot due to acquisitions. Each of the companies we acquire does not use all of the same hardware or solutions. The mission of my team is to design and deploy solutions for all the new companies around the world and make sure they adopt our solutions. This is good to showcase to them what we have and make them see that they can manage their own side of the world. They can get granularity there and be able to support all their business locally. We still can have a backup team, which is my team, supporting them in case there are issues. There is always someone looking at it if something goes wrong. 

We do not have to be alerted by an outage. We can work on an issue before it happens or as it happens. Sometimes, when people get up, the issue is already fixed because we can do all that remotely. NCM allows that.

Nutanix Cloud Manager has saved our IT time. We got our weekends back. Previously, having a different type of infrastructure with Cisco UCS and VMware, updating the Cisco component, the EMC storage, and downloading everything sometimes was a week's worth of work. We had to do upgrades on weekends because we could not do it online. Since we started using NCM and LCM out of NCM, we went from one-day upgrades to one hour. Earlier, we were running it for a one-year period, and now we are running it every month and that is a complete cluster upgrade. There is no downtime and no business complaints. We just warn them that we are doing this. We have total confidence and total trust that it is not going to be an issue.

In terms of ease of use, I use a lot of hypervisors, and there is nothing that can be compared to it, whether it is VMware, Hyper-V, or even Azure. The Azure portal does not have a one-click to update everything. If you look at the on-prem things, I have Cisco UCS, Lenovo, and IBM servers that I use in VMware. There was no single panel where I could manage all that together. There were always different things to manage. You needed knowledge and training. Nowadays, a new hire can come in, and I can tell them to run this every week. They will be able to do it without training.

It frees up the staff that I have from having to deal with heavy troubleshooting. It is one less worry for me. We have 53 plants operating 24/7. We have problems on a daily basis. We have attacks. It is a huge asset not having the burden of dealing with upgrades because if we do not do those, we are open to vulnerabilities. With NCM, we can focus on everything else. Worrying about updates is a thing of the past. Anybody on the team can go ahead and take a look.

The single pane of glass is valuable. Seeing all my clusters there and getting all the alerts in one place helps to manage our global infrastructure. To me, the ability to view or see everything in one single place is very valuable.

We are also able to do lifecycle management and run updates. We have got our weekend back. That is very important. IT guys never have weekends. With Nutanix Cloud Manager, we are able to run updates during normal business hours. We are able to do it with the click of a button. Not having to worry and not having to see how it is running on the other side of the world makes a huge difference.

We have clusters not only with HPE. We have some with VMware to use Cisco Call Manager for VoIP. That only runs on VMware. They upgrade the ESXi host but not vCenter, which manages the ESXi host. It would be great if there is a way to include vCenter on the VM because you run the updates, but you do not update vCenter. It complains that you still have not updated it.

We started using the first version when it was called Prism in 2018. 

The technical support from Nutanix is excellent. It is not always the same experience. It differs. Sometimes you get someone who is very experienced on a given module or hardware. It depends on who you get, but even if you do not get the fastest guy at the first call, you will get it once the escalation happens. We have not had a case where the issue was not completely solved with a definite solution. I am very happy with Nutanix's support. 

We work with a lot of brands, and it is not always like that. Even with Microsoft, when we open a ticket, the first person is going to tell me to try things that my team has already tried before. We have to tell them that this is not the first rodeo that we are at. We have done this. We need to go beyond that, but they still have to do their due diligence. They do not care about that. They still want to run their script till they get to it. Nutanix is different. We tell them what we have done. They know we are certified. They take that into consideration and go to the next step, which is troubleshooting.

I would rate them a ten out of ten. They are by far the ones we like to work with.

Positive

The price depends. I struggle a lot with that because I manage a budget. Not all businesses have the ability to spend that amount of money. When I have a plant that needs 10 VMs running, the smallest cluster I can offer them for high availability is a three-node cluster. It is going to cost me a hundred thousand dollars, whereas I could get a Dell box with 6K Windows Standard installed on it and get Hyper-V running and a couple of VMs, but there is no high availability. We had plants that were running like that because they did not want to spend the money. We had a ransomware attack. In the case of sites with Nutanix, we were up in a week, whereas in the case of the sites with that kind of hardware, we were up three weeks later. They then understood the importance of having proper hardware that can support resiliency and high availability.

It is expensive when you are looking at small locations that need low-latency workloads, but for larger locations, as compared to other guys, even using VMware, it is not that expensive because if you add it all up, it is going to be pretty much the same value. You just need to look at a similar size solution to be able to make a comparison.

We do not use low-code automation. We support manufacturing plants. We do not have to deploy and stop VMs. We use Red Hat OpenShift for some containerized stuff but not a lot. We have some websites for looking for products. We do not have any need to build VMs and destroy them and build them again. It is pretty much what we do on our Azure footprint. We have 400 VMs there. We do not have automation there. We never build templates. We build one or two VMs per month when we get requests. My team builds those VMs even for our developers so that we have cost and check. We do not need to use automation at this point. We appreciate the automation of life cycle management and all those rapid tests that we have to make, but that is the standard automation we use.

I do use playbooks out of Azure but not out of Nutanix.

I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a ten out of ten. I have no issues with bad-mouthing it or praising it. In this case, praise is due for sure.

We have a platform of about 300 virtual machines, and most of the technology was very old, pre-existing legacy technology. We needed a world-class hyperconverged solution that would provide us with the ease of migrating these virtual machines and allow us to have a hybrid platform in the long term. We wanted some of the things in the private cloud and other things in AWS, which is the public cloud that we have. 

We have a local partner and all the support from the vendor. It has been a remarkable experience. The product is very easy to use, and the roadmap has been executed transparently. The administration has been quite fast. There are many things that were totally neglected, and we had to open some support cases. They have been responded to quickly and in a timely manner. It has been a success.

We have much better performance and efficiency. The uptime of the servers has also increased a lot. We have practically zero outages. It means that our service, which is key in the health industry in our country, is much more stable and has much better public reception. We are one of two companies that provide these transactional services so that people can receive discounts from their insurers when having exams or medical consultations. We serve more than 90% of the country's population for health and connect all companies that give these discounts or health benefits. Our government has a plan with an entity called Fonasa. It is the National Health Fund, and it provides health financing services to practically the entire country. We make the connections between hospitals, clinics, and this National Health Fund to give online discounts at the time of care. Therefore, the uptime has to be very close to 100%, and this solution has helped us get very close to that number.

In my country, we have very good communications technology and data transmission speeds, but when we have a platform that is out of our reach, such as a regional AWS, we always have latency problems. There are speed problems. At times, there are crashes, micro outages, etc. A very good thing about Nutanix is its speed and performance. We are very eager to try the new features it has. We started with a specific project focusing on the most critical production and the budget. This year, we will be able to cover the entire platform and all the server hardware and utilize all the features of Nutanix Cloud Manager. We are going to do several things in the short term.

Faster outcomes are important taking into consideration that people are seeking medical attention, and there are many people. When the time comes to make the payment, they access our transactional services through the authentic application by using a fingerprint or making payment online. If we do not have a platform that is very fast, there is a delay and slowness in all clinical centers. When the lower layers that are not in Nutanix begin to suffer service degradation, all the health service centers automatically start calling us and telling us that the service is not working as it should, and people start to get impatient. Therefore, one of the critical pillars for what we do is that all the processing is done very fast.

Using Nutanix Cloud Manager’s built-in playbooks freed up time for our IT team to focus on other tasks or projects. One of the reasons why we decided on this solution was the amount of prior knowledge that exists. It is not only in terms of the knowledge base and the use cases of other clients but also in terms of everything that helps you. There are pre-built capabilities to make your operations much faster and spend a lot less man hours to manage. We have managed to free up resources and dedicate ourselves to more complex tasks. The playbooks also help me to be able to have a backup within the team. It is very easy for anyone to take the playbooks and apply them, and I can dedicate myself to other things.

In terms of time savings, at first, there were less time savings because we had to "oil the wheel", but now, I have been able to relieve 25% to 30% of people's burden. When we manage very old legacy platforms, we need a lot of specific knowledge and a lot of hours because what we do takes time. If I need to create a machine, I have to load a backup. It takes a long time. I lose a lot of time while the person is monitoring the process. On the other hand, with Nutanix Cloud Manager, it is very unattended. I click on it, and I can do other things because I know that the process will finish in a timely manner.

We want to grow, and we want to have more cores, more nodes, and a 100% migration at the end of this year. The truth is that everything that the solution offers helps with this roadmap and its execution. The migration is very fast and well-supported. We are very happy.

There is the ease of being able to use templates. We can create virtual machines from scratch very quickly. We can use a script or make a copy. Generating backup is very easy. Training is also available to achieve a good skill level. The learning curve is short.

We need to get more training and achieve much more consistent training. There is training, and there are courses, but in local terms, we are missing something that would allow us to have a more widespread training program. That could be an improvement area for me.

We have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager for six months.

It is as per very high standards of the industry. It is at an almost perfect level.

I have not had the need to take advantage of the scalability, but I am hopeful that there will not be any problem. I am hopeful that it will be quite smooth. The product works quite well. They have been on the market for many years. It is already a very solid product, and growth is supported.

There is a very large knowledge base. The response times and service are also very fast. We have opened very few tickets, and they were resolved quite quickly. When we opened the first ticket, we were inexperienced in the support flow. Walter helped us by making contact with a technician who called us by phone to resolve the problem online with us. Unlike other products that only offer communication via ticket, we had a phone call that helped us solve the problem very quickly. That turned out very well.

Positive

We had Rancher. We were about to use VMware, but almost our entire platform was on-premises. We had virtualization but on-premise. It was difficult to administer.

We still have a significant percentage of the platform on-premises. We have already migrated 50% to 60% to Nutanix. For the regional services that are in Ecuador, Colombia, and soon in Mexico, we have AWS.

I was there when the project started. I believe that every implementation has some moments when there is difficulty. That is why one has to have a partner who knows the product and is experienced in migrations and initial implementation. In our case, it was not so complex. The equipment was arranged, and the initial setups were made. The IT team was trained, and the provider helped us with all the migrations and environment preparation. They also trained us and helped us to learn. I did not see any problems along the way that made us say " Oh, we will have to replan.” It was quite smooth, and deadlines were met.

We used a local partner who brought me to .NEXT24. The company is called W-Systems. They are a local partner that offered us the solution and through which, we acquired Nutanix.

Their technical staff helped us throughout the implementation, and we have had very good results. Their representative, the general manager, Walter Zunkel is the one who invited me to attend .NEXT24. We have been attending sessions and talks, and we have been able to do a lot of networking, it has been very productive and very beneficial.

It allows me to lower the fixed costs that I have per data center. There is also the possibility of relocating the man hours that I have freed up to projects of much more complexity. That may not be an immediate monetary return, but it does allow me to make a better investment of my team's time.

It is an expensive solution, but one has to make the trade-off between what you want to achieve and what you are willing to pay.

There is a return on investment in a short time. When you make an investment of this magnitude, you expect a return within three years, but it is much earlier here. I measure it in terms of what payments have decreased for the data centers. I am closing one of the data centers because I no longer need to have those physical machines, so that is a saving, and it allows me to leverage the expense that it has. In terms of cost, you have to make a large initial investment, but it provides a good return on investment.

We evaluated three alternatives. We had VMware and the other two, but I was not part of the decision-making, so I do not know which other two products they considered.

I was not involved in the evaluation from the beginning, but I saw the results. When you make a comparison and choose a vendor with whom you are going to have a relationship for many years, you have to evaluate the cost. You have to evaluate technical capabilities, and you have to evaluate benefits related to the business.

I believe that one of the things that made Nutanix win by far in the proposals is its ease, short learning curve, and very natural, organic, and intuitive adoption within the team. The costs were not so high. These solutions are obviously not cheap, but one has to be prepared for that. For me, it is cheaper to pay a lot of money for a good solution than to have to explain to the government about a service that was down for several hours. Nutanix is ​​a platform that has a very short learning curve. Growth occurs in a very organic way. There are all new features. It is not necessary to educate ourselves much. The dashboards are super easy to build. The fact is that it is a world-class solution. I am very happy with it.

Nutanix Cloud Manager's setup, learning curve, and ease of use were important when deciding on a cloud management solution. The most important thing is the learning curve. I need people to start producing very quickly. The integration characteristics, the compatibility, and the backward compatibility with legacy technologies are other important things. The ease of migration and integration is also important. It is easy to take technologies that are no longer in use, make an evolution, and migrate them to Nutanix. It should also be easy to integrate components that are on other platforms or other architectures. These were several features that made us decide on Nutanix Cloud Manager.

I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a nine out of ten. There is always room for improvement.

We work in the public sector, which includes local governments, fire departments, and transportation. The most interesting use case is that we have set up a private cloud with two sites where they are replicated, and from the same console, we have synchronous replication using 1M Ethernet. The RPO is zero.

Our clients like its simplicity. That is a great value. We moved from a three-layer infrastructure to a private cloud infrastructure. It has resulted in a lot of simplicity which is reflected in the availability of services.

Simplicity is the biggest value that we can see. This is super important for us because the technical team is dedicated to looking at the data and how to generate value for the business instead of worrying about the technology.

Using the built-in playbooks has freed up the time for our IT team. Instead of managing storage, CPU, and memory, they can dedicate their time to thinking about the needs of the business and attending to those needs. We have had clients who reduced their operations time by 60% to 70%.

Nutanix Cloud Manager helps your team a lot to address your current automation needs while planning for future expansion. You have a forecast of how your infrastructure is being used. This allows you to have visibility of what actions you should take to avoid reaching day zero. It helps you a lot.

Its installation is relatively simple. The administration is very intuitive. You have an HTML 5 interface that you can use on any device. I have clients who manage their infrastructure from their smartphones, no matter where they are. Its being very intuitive has helped us to deliver 4-hour workshops. We had an interesting case in the sector of transportation in Quito, Ecuador. A person who provided support and was with the help desk went on to manage the data center with just a 4-hour training. He went from being help desk support to being the data center manager, all with Nutanix. That easily gives an idea about its learning curve.

Nutanix Cloud Manager’s setup, learning curve, and ease of use were definitely important when deciding on a cloud management solution. In fact, we have been growing in infrastructure, and it has been maintained precisely due to the ease of use and small learning curve. It frees up time from the daily issues of looking at technology. The customers are happy and continue to grow.

Simplicity is most valuable because, with a single click, we have visibility of the entire infrastructure. We can focus more on the availability of services instead of being aware of the CPU, memory, or hard drives. With one click, we can see the availability of our services.

The interoperability with different clouds can be better so that one can even integrate the infrastructure of different clouds. They can interoperate better with other clouds because currently, you have to buy Nutanix resources in the cloud.

It has been four years as partners and service providers for our clients.

Its stability is very good. We did not have any issues for which we had to stop our services.

It is a very important aspect of Nutanix solutions.

It is efficient and fast. It is in Spanish, which is an advantage. There is always the option for technical support in Spanish.

Positive

In Ecuador, Nutanix began to introduce itself in 2016 in such a way that the customers moved from traditional infrastructures to Nutanix right away.

We have both kinds of deployments. We have clients who have private clouds, and then we have clients who have hybrid clouds. Our clients use Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

As a company, we do the implementations autonomously. It is simple. I do not personally do it. Our technical team does it. We can do the deployment or migration of about 15 to 20 virtual machines in four hours, so investing about four hours to move an entire legacy data center solution to a Nutanix Infrastructure is more than fine. 

We have an implementation strategy. We follow the best practices. We have a trained technical team, and they follow the objectives.

If you compare it with a traditional model or with a native cloud, then definitely the best alternative is to make an investment in Nutanix solutions. The return on investment varies depending on what you compare it with. In Ecuador, in the public sector, they force them to buy a three-year licensed solution. So, if you compare it to three years with traditional or cloud-native infrastructure, the Nutanix solution is definitely a winner.

For Ecuador, this is a sensitive issue. It is a small economy, so the issue of budget is very sensitive. You find many small businesses and government clients who do not renew, for example, support or guarantees, which raises the risk level for them. We are always advising them that it is necessary to renew the services or infrastructure.

We evaluated many solutions before switching to Nutanix Cloud Manager. However, once the customers get to know Nutanix, they always prefer to stay with the solution.

Our customers choose Nutanix for the experience. Our customers have stayed with Nutanix because they did feel a change before and after. Before Nutanix, managing storage required time and working on weekends outside of business hours. Having to shut down the services to make firmware updates of different components of the data center was an issue. Now they can do this during business hours without the risk of services being unavailable.

Overall, I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a ten out of ten.

I use the solution in my company to manage around 27 clusters. It is all a single pane of glass to manage them and monitor them in a way that is not really associated with cross availability but more in the area of whether there are any impacts, alerts, or any such related stuff.

It is difficult to speak about the benefits I have experienced from the use of the solution because the product serves as a central point. Having a centralized single pane of glass is important. 

My company can also see our Pure Storage and ESXi landscape in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), even though such products may be third-party or foreign imports. You see everything in one control plane, which greatly adds to our value. The tool's ease of use is good because a lot more people can access Prism Central, allowing all to do simple operations without needing a lot of training, etc. The tool's user interface is intuitive.

The solution's most valuable features revolve around the single pane of glass it provides, which helps me see all my infrastructure and quickly manage VM operations without having to go to individual clusters. Some of the tool's good features are having one central place to monitor for alerts and one central API to interact with other clusters and deploy VMs.

Nutanix Cloud Manage helps our team address our current automation needs while planning for future expansion. Our company uses capacity monitoring, and it is quite valuable to see the growth and a view on resource consumption and get an alert if it predicts some kind of resource shortage coming up maybe. The runway in the tool is really helpful, but anything else apart from it is not there yet in the product.

Comparing Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) versus other cloud management solutions for setup, learning curve, and ease of use, I would say that Nutanix's learning curve is quite small, and the ease of use is quite high. The aforementioned area consists of the biggest advantage associated with the tool, especially since you don't have to have a degree in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) to be able to use it and get started or get a feel for it. The tool is quite easy to use. When deciding on a cloud management solution, the tool's setup, learning curve, and ease of use were not major but maybe small factors why my company chose Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). My company chose Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) because of the natural progression of our company's engagement with Nutanix. My company also uses Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) with Prism Central.

The product can be improved in terms of stability. The update process has to be more tough, meaning it should be more bulletproof. The switch to the CMSP should have been more thought out, tested, and validated by Nutanix. More frequent updates would be good in the tool. Better role-based access control would be good for the tool. Better documented APIs that can be used across all Nutanix products can be a good improvement. It would be good if you could have multiple Prism Central and combine them at a centralized point. From an improvement perspective, the tool should offer a real high availability platform because it serves as a central point, and you need it.

The stability of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is an area of concern where improvements are required.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for six years. My company is a customer of Nutanix.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) used to be a very stable product in the past. The versions released by the product before 2023 were great, but after that, I see that there is a big technical gap in the tool.

It is not kind of a scalable solution for now. The product could be used to scale up in the same cluster, but it was not something that our company wanted. My organization wanted to scale across clusters. For now, as far as I know, the tool's scalability part cannot be considered as a feature, but it may have new functionalities coming up in the future.

The solution's technical support is great. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

There weren't many solutions that my company used to use in the past, apart from maybe a few products for the central management of infrastructure components like a vCenter traditionally, and now we use it in parallel to Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) and not replacing it with any other tool.

Six years ago, the product's initial setup phase was easy, and since then, my company has been running the same installation process. With day-2 operations, like upgrades, which were normally easy, I see how a lot of the features have changed presently, including the whole architecture underneath, and because of this, my company has faced some challenges with the product.

There is no strategy required to deploy the project since it is very intuitive.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

My company uses the product in different locations and data centers.

My company did not seek help from an integrator, reseller, or consultant.

The ROI I have experienced from the use of the solution stems from the fact that it is easy to use, and the entry border of the tool is quite low, so a lot of new people can easily use it. With the tool, you have one single pane of glass across multiple infrastructures.

Nutanix changes its licensing models frequently, and it is difficult to figure out how and what is included in which package. The problem lies with how frequently the prices and licensing models are changed and the names provided for the packages. As per the main focus of our company, I would say that having Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is the cherry on top for us.

I have not evaluated The other products in the market offering the same features as Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM).

In terms of the importance of faster outcomes for our organization from the use of the tool, I would say that fast is not always best, but if you have a very good process in place, fast is good as long as you follow the process.

The use of Nutanix Cloud Manager or NCM's built-in playbooks has not freed up time for our IT team to focus on other tasks or projects. I know on paper and maybe for management, the tool's ability to have built-in playbooks and how it frees up time for the IT team so that they can focus on other projects sounds interesting, but at the end of the day, you don't want a lot of those things to be completely automated unless you have very strict quotas in place which also needs good housekeeping. In a historically growing environment, following the aforementioned areas is not always possible, so you may not want such automation happening, but what is nice about it is that I can forward all the alerts that are generated in Prism Central using a webhook to any kind of messaging kind of application, which removes the barrier of having to check on it. It is quite nice that with the playbooks, I have some low-code way of having some kind of automation going.

Considering the versions of the product before 2023, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Considering the versions of the product after 2023, I rate the solution a five or six out of ten.