Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

My main use cases right now involve migrating two of the most critical server VM servers that we have; one is our secure server, which has a lot of data in it, and the other one is an application server that hosts the critical application for my business.

I am currently using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) to manage our infrastructure.

I'm using the local storage in Nutanix, and I'm using the move and the prism sensor to administer the closet.

Regarding specific functionalities, we already have micro-segmentation in Security Central to analyze the traffic that's crossing between those servers to be able to firewall application policy between those applications that are working on those servers.

I really appreciate the console, the centralized administration, and the ability to quickly attach storage between operations.

Management of our infrastructure has improved because it's simpler to administrate, and it's easier to understand what is happening with each server in our environment, allowing us to analyze the data and consumption of each component operating within it.

The cost governance feature allows our CTOs and CEOs to have an overall structure of knowledge about what is functioning and what we are doing in our infrastructure.

We are not using a lot of self-service because we are new in that area, but we understand that we could integrate that feature into our local development to allow us to test and operate our local infrastructure.

Until now, I have not encountered many challenges; during implementation, we had to focus on the data we have, ensuring we validated it to be clear on what we could migrate before and after the migration.

I don't see a need for improvements in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) at the moment; however, I would appreciate better performance.

I would like to see integrated analytics in the dashboard that accurately displays graphics, such as CPU usage, the overall health of the infrastructure, and specific virtual machines that we refer to frequently.

I don't think the solution's cost visibility feature will affect us immediately, but over time I believe it will provide better benefits, help us reduce losses, and allow us to move forward with old projects and servers we are currently using.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for only a month, as I am a new customer in Nutanix, and I already implemented it at the beginning of last month.

I think Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is the most reliable solution in our environment right now, and we are confident that despite any potential losses, we will not experience any downtime in other parts of our environment or services.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is very good for scalability; we are currently considering introducing Nutanix to other sites, perhaps in our co-location and possibly towards the end of the year for new acquisitions to enhance scalability.

I have received very straightforward and pleasant technical support from our partner so far; I haven't had to escalate any cases, and I am confident that with their and the provider's support, we will get a good response if we encounter any incidents.

I would rate customer service and technical support a 10 right now.

Positive

My deployment experience was very positive, as it was fast and straightforward, allowing simple integration into our existing infrastructure without affecting our operations or causing breakdowns while migrating servers.

My experience with the pricing, setup costs, and licensing was good because our partner supported us by explaining the benefits and features of each option and what we could expect from the implementation. I understand that the Nutanix solution is cost-effective.

The biggest return on investment for me when using this product is the fast deployment and the rapid integration and migration without impacting our operations during the migration.

I believe we will see measurable outcomes from using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), including reduced costs and more efficient IT management in the future.

My experience with the pricing, setup costs, and licensing was good because our partner supported us by explaining the benefits and features of each option and what we could expect from the implementation. I understand that the Nutanix solution is cost-effective.

We considered two other products before adopting Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM).

One was from HP, a simpler option, and we also looked at some from Dell.

The main differences between the two options were cost, the full package offered, and the level of support we would receive from the implementation partner.

It has made things much more efficient. I would say efficiency has increased approximately by 80%.

To maintain that rating of 10, it's important for us to receive good responses during any situations and ensure collaboration with the partner and provider while keeping the pricing consistent.

We are analyzing the impact of the Runbooks feature on automating our IT processes, considering that we think we will be working on making some dashboards or using some of them to advance the rest of our Nutanix project.

I rate Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) 10 out of 10.

We use it primarily for general workload for the virtual machines, reporting, and getting the capacity reports.

In terms of features, we have general availability with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), allowing me to manage my Nutanix cluster the same as I could on-premises, and the fact that I can quickly and easily stand up servers is very beneficial.

In Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), the planning feature in reporting is very useful, as you can create a particular scenario that provides potential resource consumption of your current cluster and can help interpret workloads, which is great for forecasting how long depend on the current capacity and whether you need to purchase new hardware.

We can give developers access to a self-service portal. It's very helpful. You can grant access and give people the power to manage issues themselves. 

We've found we've generally saved time by using Nutanix.

Nutanix gives us access to a single pane of glass by which we're able to see everything. 

It is important to mention that while Nutanix claims improvements in licensing over the past couple of years, I find it a bit annoying, as it still does not work as intended. If there are licensing errors, for example, being told I have 96 cores licensed but Nutanix Flow not licensed despite having assigned units, it complicates things unnecessarily.

We have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for about three years.

I assess the stability and reliability of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) with a few issues where downtime occurred; once it was related to power when the whole console went down. 

We had two instances where a network outage caused cluster reboots, which I would prefer to see handled differently as the VMs rebooted to ensure data consistency. 

This behavior differs from VMware where VMs would not necessarily restart, and I am unsure if there is an option to configure the network to prevent this.

Scaling with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is not as straightforward as they claim, largely due to the assumption that you have IPv6 enabled on your switches, which we did not. We encountered challenges while adding extra servers to existing clusters; however, we sorted it out with the expertise of the support staff, even though it was beyond my knowledge and experience.

I would say my experience with customer service is a nine out of ten, as I never give a ten. I do not know what a ten is. There is always room for improvement, and they are definitely high quality. There is a feature that allows you to escalate the call. Since 2019, I've only had to escalate twice. 

Positive

We had used VMware. If I had to deploy the same and used VMware or Nutanix, I would choose Nutanix at the same cost due to the number of features.

For the first deployment of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), we had a third-party help us with setup, while for the next clusters, I handled it myself. The latest deployment involved a partner due to time constraints. It requires some knowledge and experience, however, once I watched the first setup, I was able to do it myself after that.

Migration is also possible to do by yourself. Between Nutanix generation six to generation nine, we were able to move VMs. 

For the first deployment of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), we had a third-party help us with setup, while for the next clusters I handled it myself.

The cost reduction has provided some ROI. 

For those evaluating Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) as a solution, I advise not to be afraid to move from VMware and to run some proof of concept, as that was my case. People tend to stick with known technologies, and I understand their reluctance, but change can be beneficial. Comparatively, having similar hardware and paying less with Nutanix while getting many features that work well is appealing. 

In our case, we pay for 60 features with VMware but use only ten, while with Nutanix, we get 25 features at a better price. 

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

My use case is for legacy cluster migration. We have removed the legacy cluster. We are using a Nutanix cluster to increase availability because it is a very good product with everything in one box: storage, network, and compute. We migrated from physical hardware, which was out of warranty and expired, and migrated the application to the Nutanix cluster.

The best feature of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is Life Cycle Manager. When upgrading your infrastructure, there is nothing to do. You just have to pre-check it, and the process is automated. It will check one by one for availability and fault tolerance. It is an auto-run job, and if anything finds an issue, it highlights it in the pre-checks, so that feature is very good.

When comparing Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) with other cloud management solutions, it is good because we are using many things, such as UCS Manager, VxRail, VMware, and vRealize in our infrastructure. The support and SLAs are good, and it is very easy to use, especially when upgrading. The administration is very easy.

Everything required is already in place. It's easy to use, and there is good customer support. For my use case, it's fine. There could be slight improvements in support because sometimes they are not able to understand the issue.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) since 2022 or 2023, when I was at HCL.

It is stable; I never saw any problems.

I would rate its scalability as nine out of ten considering our clients are enterprises.

Technical support is good. There is no issue. They meet the SLAs. They also have a feature for auto generating tickets. With the pulse monitoring feature in Nutanix, a ticket is generated. It's a good feature. We also immediately get an email from Nutanix.

Positive

As an administrator, I am using different products, but Nutanix continues to grow. More customers are deciding to go with Nutanix. They have deployed and migrated legacy clusters to Nutanix. We are still using a VMware hypervisor, but the usage of Nutanix is growing. Companies are moving to deploy Nutanix clusters in their infrastructure.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) makes it faster to work. As administrators, we recommend solutions to the client, but the client needs to decide whether to go with UCS, VMware, Broadcom, Nutanix, Azure clouds, GCP, or AWS. Many cloud solutions are available in the market. We are working in IT support as administrators in multi-cloud infrastructure, where we are using Azure, AWS, Nutanix, and Broadcom products.

It is easy to deploy Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM).

Most companies have a hybrid infrastructure with on-premises and cloud environments. The cloud provider is Azure.

Its implementation takes months in terms of planning, designing, deployment, etc.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is cheaper than VMware and other products.

I would recommend Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) to other users because it is easy and cheap compared to other products. I would rate it a nine out of ten.

I am working in the lifecycle manager in the Cloud, which includes Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), and I'm working with the PCS at Tata Consultancy Services on project works, such as NCC upgrade, Foundation AOS number upgrade, and Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) upgrade activities.

When comparing Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) with other platforms, NCM is very user-friendly, and we can work primarily in graphical mode. The functionality is very intuitive in NCM compared to other platforms such as Azure, AWS, and VMware environments.

During this two-year period, I have learned that Nutanix is a very interesting platform for enhancing our knowledge in the Cloud. For example, while upgrading the Nutanix storage, such as NCC AOS firmware and ID rack, we encountered multiple issues, and with help from Nutanix support, we learned exactly how Nutanix works. It is very expandable; we can save on it and upgrade at any time. According to my understanding, if something is going to expire, we can easily identify and rectify that issue on time.

The playbook is a very good platform because it contains pre-defined paths, and if we want to perform something, we have the playbook as a template which functions as a pre-defined activity.

The pricing could have some changes; compared to other platforms, pricing enhancement is important, and Nutanix does enhancements quarterly.

I have 14-15 years of overall experience in the IT field, and I have more than two years of experience with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM).

Stability is very good because we have NC2, and there are no issues while migrating any VM to other hosts.

Nutanix is a scalable solution.

I never need help from colleagues, only reaching out to Nutanix support when there's a significant challenge, but they provide SOPs and links to help resolve issues.

Positive

I would give Nutanix a rating of 9 out of 10 because I love working on the Nutanix platform. Though I don't have extensive experience, people are choosing Nutanix because of its user-friendly nature, with more graphical activity rather than command line interfaces.

In comparison to VMware, where you have to log in and run multiple commands, we can perform 80% of activities on the graphical user interface in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). I recommend my teammates and others to choose Nutanix because it is very user-friendly, and we have multiple ways to enhance our knowledge related to infrastructure. Every activity can be performed without issues if good practices are followed.

Our use cases for the Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) include managing multiple sites and multiple customers under this site, as I delivered to multiple customers in Canada. 

The type of customers I see with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) are primarily middle industries for technologies or manufacturers, as it is currently not for government customers.

The most valuable features I have found with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) are related to Disaster Recovery, specifically the Nutanix Disaster Recovery solution with Prism Central, and Flow micro-segmentation. Flow micro-segmentation is part of the Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) networking capabilities, and most scenarios are related to standard clusters with Disaster Recovery, including environments with both Nutanix AHV and VMware.

The importance of faster outcomes for their environment is significant; for example, when I delivered the Disaster Recovery solution, we included automation for auto-configuration of VMs and resizing of VMs, which replaced many tasks that were previously done manually. The implementation of automation solutions helps free up time for their IT team, allowing them to manage more of the application part rather than the infrastructure, especially for stability and automation tasks from Nutanix.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) could continue to improve its network with micro-segmentation, as their current solution for East-West traffic is not as mature as VMware's NSX, and they need to develop this area to better support the infrastructure. More integrations with other cloud storage would definitely be helpful, as many customers want to use their existing SAN storage solutions for backups or other functions when migrating to Nutanix.

I have experience with Nutanix since 2015.

I find that the support from Nutanix is very good, as I have worked with them many times. For the support aspect, I believe globally they provide good support; they respect their SLAs, respond in a timely manner, and can assist quickly by connecting remotely when needed.

The Nutanix setup, learning curve, and ease of use are essential considering that customers appreciate simplicity and centralized management, which is a significant factor compared to VMware's multiple products and interfaces.

I don't have a clear idea about the speed of outcomes from low code automation because after we complete a delivery service, the customer leads the automation part, but I haven't received complaints compared to other products like Ansible or Terraform, and what I have used has been responsive to their requests.

Regarding how I would assess Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for helping my team address current automation needs while planning for future expansion, I often deliver this solution to the final customers who manage their own environments afterward, but I have worked on automation tasks such as automatic resizing of VMs. 

In my experience, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is a good tool for meeting automation needs; it is the easiest to use for automation, and from Prism Central directly, you can automate many tasks and integrate scripts for your application layer. My company is a partner with Nutanix. For the overall rating of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) as a product, I would give it nine points.

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.

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 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.