Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) serves as our single pane of glass to manage our resources for both our on-premises and cloud deployments of Nutanix.

Since I started using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), the best features I have noticed are similar capabilities to what we had with VMware vRealize Manager, which allowed us to manage our environments and growth capacity requirements for the future.

Faster outcomes are important for our organization because all IT leadership wants AI adoption and our ability to detect and predict anomalies, so it is crucial that we can quickly generate that data through this platform.

In terms of room for improvement in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), while the product has a lot of automation capabilities, the knowledge to do that does not seem to exist with our system integrators, such as Indian IT companies like TCS and Infosys, so perhaps they need to conduct more knowledge-sharing sessions with integration partners to help us at Philips take maximum advantage.

Using the built-in playbooks with Nutanix has not freed up time for our IT, as while the feature exists, the knowledge seems to be lacking with our integration partners.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for almost one year.

My experiences with Nutanix technical support have been quite good; they are helpful and responsive.

I switched from VMware to Nutanix because it was a management decision not to continue with Broadcom after VMware was taken over by Broadcom.

Regarding deployment, we did our deployments in partnership with Microsoft and Nutanix Professional Services, and it involved directly running the scripts and making it happen, which was not very difficult.

The process of deployment took us less than a week to set up the environment.

Approximately four people were involved in the deployment from our side.

In terms of finance, using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is cost-wise comparable to what we would have paid Broadcom if we had continued with VMware solution, as it did not come at an increased cost; however, I do not think there are any savings as such.

When comparing Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) versus other cloud management solutions, I find that setup and ease of use are there, but it is only capable of managing a Nutanix environment, so it is not really comparable with other cloud management solutions.

My overall experience in my field is extensive; I have been working for 25 years in IT.

I would assess Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) as having the features to help our team address our current automation needs, though there is a learning curve for the people to get started using it.

I am quite happy with the outcomes we have received using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) so far.

Faster outcomes are important for our organization because all IT leadership wants AI adoption and our ability to detect and predict anomalies, so it is crucial that we can quickly generate that data through this platform.

My overall experience with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is an eight because I am not able to fully utilize its capabilities. I would rate this review as eight out of ten.

My use case is that our entire infrastructure relies on Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) only, and currently we have our cloud environment in AWS, which is controlled with Nutanix as a hypervisor, where all our production environment is hosted.

Centralized multi-cloud management is available in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), which is very friendly, allowing me to manage all the application, infrastructure, and security in one console, which is a significant advantage for an infrastructure professional. I can rely on one application to manage all these aspects, including security, so we usually do not have to procure any other specific tools related to security or management.

In terms of operational efficiency, we were previously on-premises, and after migrating to the cloud about one and a half years ago, we noticed that our application performance improved to at least 10 times better compared to the previous on-premises setup. I appreciate the efficiency and performance of that environment, and in terms of monitoring and security, the posture management and lifecycle operation in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) are very good, providing real-time insights that make troubleshooting easy.

Built-in playbooks are quite good when creating them, but we have not enabled those options for automation due to security concerns, so we have not leveraged them.

In terms of architecture, it is quite good, and I would appreciate exploring whether Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) has an option to restore the cluster to a new region. We perform our disaster recovery and have the option to take backups to an S3 bucket, so being able to pull out VMs to a new cluster from that bucket would be a very good feature.

I rate this area a seven because this technology is new to the vendor as well, so for them, it takes time to reach out to developers and check everything in their test environment before providing a solution. Because of this delay, particularly in our production environment, we cannot afford such delays, especially since I recently deployed a DR for Nutanix and have been experiencing some issues due to these delays.

I have been using the solution for about four years including on-premises.

For stability, I would rate it a nine.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is scalable, and you can achieve scalability in a very short timeframe, which is excellent.

I would rate the scalability around an eight.

For technical support, I can rate it a seven.

Positive

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) saves me a lot of time. Previously with our old VMware setup, operating servers and performing tasks such as snapshots was complex and time-consuming, but now with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), it is quite easy and saves me almost 60% of the time.

Deployment was quite easy, and the migration part was also smooth, with good support from Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) support team, resulting in minimal downtime for our critical applications.

In terms of comparison, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is very user-friendly and the GUI interface is easy to understand. When I look at other cloud options, the terms and technology defined by Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) are very friendly, allowing a normal system administrator to easily and proactively understand the features, options, and infrastructure capabilities available.

Since migrating to the cloud, we found that the performance of the applications we host there is very good, with increases of up to 10 times, which was the feedback from the application team regarding our production server applications deployed in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM).

Overall, I compare Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) with other vendors and solutions, finding it quite good in terms of GUI and scalability, and I would describe it as excellent.

Currently, we are exploring Nutanix MST DR, which is the multi-snapshot technology we plan to deploy.

My advice for others looking to implement this product is that this whole environment and architecture is user-friendly, providing significant help for infrastructure support personnel in terms of easy and quick deployment. It is also very scalable and can be integrated effectively.

Overall, looking at the vulnerability aspects and other features, I would rate it an eight. I have provided an overall review rating of 8 for this solution.

My main use case for Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is that we are deploying Nutanix for the customer and helping them with Nutanix Cloud Platform where the customer is running infrastructure on Nutanix. We have helped them with disaster recovery automation, network micro-segmentation, and related services.

We have a very large customer where we have provided disaster recovery with self-service capabilities. This leaf serves as a disaster recovery solution where we can get automated disaster recovery in the disaster recovery environment with one click. Disaster recovery happens with the leaf with synchronization and real-time synchronization. For micro-segmentation, we are using Nutanix Flow for the network micro-segmentation.

Majorly, the customer is looking for disaster recovery and network micro-segmentation solutions. One more use case is where we deployed Nutanix file. The customer required object storage where we created S3 buckets and Nutanix file serves as a NAS and unified solution. The customer deployed their Kubernetes platform on Nutanix where we assigned Nutanix file as a read-write many. This is a very large use case for us to deploy for a customer.

The best proper feature is Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) where we can get AI Ops, where we can get help from online with the Nutanix portal as well. The second one is self-service and automation.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) uses machine learning driven inside to help optimize the capacity, detect performance and automate routine tasks, including enforcing future needs to be automatically resolved. The proactive issue detection helps teams stay ahead of outages.

Another feature is self-service automation which we are using for customers in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). Fast provisioning is one of the good features that helps my organization where my team is seeing dynamic improvement to how quickly infrastructure and services are provisioned.

Based on my experience with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), it is a very good product and very good platform where we can deploy multiple things. However, I feel that simpler onboarding and learning curves are needed as some users find the initial setup and configuration planning requires expertise. This is significant and required for the customer and there we need to improve.

One more thing that I want from Nutanix is that there is one feature that is lagging. When I am a PS partner or a SI service provider where I deploy Nutanix for a customer, I need a feature in the Nutanix portal where I can download the as-build guide or runbook from the portal as well as on my cluster on my Prism Central or from Prism Element. Somewhere this option may be included in the future where the engineer can download easily and hand it over to customer. This would help to build a fresh document.

As I already mentioned some of the improvement points, one is the documentation gathering. The as-build guide is very important for engineers or persons who are using Nutanix.

I have been working in my current field for 15 years.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is now stable.

It is easy to scale Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). We can scale a cluster with expansion cluster as well.

Customer support is also good. Response time from support is very minimal.

In my few last experiences where we have migrated workloads running on the cloud and the customer was paying X of Y amount on the cloud, after the migration from the cloud to on-premises on Nutanix, the customer has now saved cost and currently they are very happy with the solution on Nutanix. Their infrastructure is running on on-premises Nutanix with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM).

Previously, we were using Cloud One as well as VMware. Now, today due to cost-effectiveness, we moved or almost every customer has moved to Nutanix.

I work for a very large organization where 500 Nutanix nodes are deployed. In that scenario, when a customer is requested for a couple of VMs to be provisioned, we created 100 plus virtual machines. This can help with resource utilization and all the related things.

I give an example where we integrated our ticketing tool with the self-service portal where I can get notifications and automation where I can easily manage my infrastructure with automation with a third-party tool.

As I see in this current scenario and today, Nutanix cost and pricing is lower than the different OEM or vendor options.

Faster outcome is very extremely important for most organizations today. Business agility and time to market in the competition market directly impact revenue and growth. Faster provisioning is very good in Nutanix where we can deploy fast and quick outcomes with faster environment setup and fast scaling.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) has a feature called Calm or self-service where we are using automation. Before, it was that if the application team needed a VM to deploy their application, I would go to the VM creation and deploy the operating system and deploy the binaries. It would take a lot of time. However, in their self-service portal, I use the template and with one click, we can get the VM very quickly. For example, manually, I spend two to three hours to build all components where I click in the self-service and my playbook is running and quickly in five to seven minutes, I can get the VM.

I give the advice to others to start with clear objectives. Nutanix offers fast provisioning, cost visibility, governance and compliance. All of these features are available. Being with the focus use cases such as common VM provisioning workflow and standard application blueprints, which are all available. I would rate this solution 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 have been working with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for approximately three years. I work as a multi-cloud architect and solution architect on several different OEM products within the cloud and virtualization space. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) initially launched in 2022, and I have been working with the product since 2023.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) provides automation capability in multi-cloud management, automation, and security with different use cases depending on the organization. The product has different capabilities including self-service capabilities, blueprinting, and compliance, which we utilize.

Feature-wise, the self-service capabilities are quite improved from the initial version and provide governance and visibility of Google Cloud and Azure. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Playbook helps us orchestrate operations and reach the desired state, which is very helpful. The low-code automation allows us to manage VMs, remediate alerts, and handle day-to-day tasks with playbooks, enabling intelligent operations.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) has the capability for cost optimization and analysis, which helps us scale workload and perform cost assessment and optimization. This is a great feature available in the product.

When comparing Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) with other competitive portfolio products, there is some lack of capabilities. When compared with VMware Aria from an automation perspective, it lacks some CI/CD integration capabilities and integration of CI/CD pipelines.

The user interface could be improved. The UI should be more cosmetic and visually distinct, as sometimes it is very similar to other Nutanix platforms.

Stability-wise, there are no issues. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is a very good, well-known, and safely launched tool. I have not found any crash, legacy, or latency issues. The product is completely reliable.

Regarding speed and quality, I would rate the quality at five out of five on the largest scale. Support-wise, I would rate it around 4.5 for speed because sometimes it depends on the issue. If there is a P1 or P2 issue, the timeline will change. Support-wise, I would rate it 4.5 for speed, and the quality of support is five out of five.

Positive

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is very easy from a deployment perspective because it comes with the SaaS service. It is completely SaaS-based, which makes it very easy for deployment and allows for a quick start. A fast start is achievable with this product.

For deployment and day-zero, day-one, and day-two operations, around two to three people are required. This may include a system admin, and it depends on how much Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is utilized. Two people is sufficient for operating and managing the product from an operations perspective.

There are a couple of cloud management solutions apart from Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). The most competitive would be Aria automation and the Aria Suite from VMware. Nutanix is launching Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for managing hybrid cloud management environments and performing cloud management.

The low-code automation speed-wise is satisfactory. When doing an apple-to-apple comparison with other automation tools, it is quite good on the Nutanix side.

It depends on deployment. If using SaaS-based deployment, it does not require any management from the organization. If using VM-based deployment, it will require management as per VM-level operations, such as upgrades.

I am not a direct customer of Nutanix. I manage customers who have a Nutanix environment as a managed service provider. Some of our clients have Nutanix clusters, and some have VMware clusters, which we manage as a managed service provider.

We are not a partner with Nutanix, so we do not sell the product, but we suggest it based on the use case of the customer. If a client comes to us with a requirement for automation or management, we will facilitate a tailored solution and recommend it. However, the purchasing and cost are handled by the authorized Nutanix partners who are aligned with that particular customer.

I would rate this product nine out of ten overall.

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.

I use Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) to create virtual machines, connect them for storage. I use it for many other tasks, but mainly for servers or virtual machines, where I build different virtual machines, such as Windows and Linux, of all kinds.

The major attraction point of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is that everything is auto-scaling. For example, if we are trying to patch in Nutanix, when we go to the lifecycle manager and click on the patch, the VMs automatically migrate from one cluster to another cluster or one host to another host, and it starts getting patched. In other cloud setups, such as VMware, we need to do it manually, so Nutanix is more user-friendly than other cloud setups.

The best feature in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), from my perspective as a cloud engineer, is having hardware to private setup support by a single vendor, whereas with other cloud setups, we have different support. For a setup, we have a separate support for the cloud setup and a separate support for the hardware. The second feature is creating auto-scheduled snapshots; until today, we haven't found any other cloud setup for scheduling a snapshot onto a VM. These are the main points: getting full support from the Nutanix vendor, scheduling the snapshots, and auto patching are the three best features I can mention, though there may be many others.

It is easy to use. Even a school student can run Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) automation because it is extremely user-friendly. Not only developers or experts but even a college graduate can use Nutanix, as everything is understandable and the graphical user interface of Nutanix Prism is very attractive.

The areas that could be improved include the Nutanix Move tool, which is presently used for migrating VMs from one setup to a private cloud. It can be improved by adding some other setups, such as Citrix Xen, Red Hat Virtualization, and Red Hat OpenShift. There are many other cloud products that need to be added to the Nutanix Move tool, which would be really helpful for us in India, where we use different setups such as Red Hat Virtualization, OpenShift, Citrix XenCenter, Hyper-V, and VMware.

The second suggestion is regarding the different clusters in Nutanix. Although Nutanix is very user-friendly and codeless, the individual clusters cannot be logged in at the same time via Prism, which takes time and can be wasteful. We have multiple clusters within Nutanix. Prism serves as the central management interface, allowing us to access these different clusters. When we log in through Prism, it takes a certain amount of time—sometimes several minutes—to log into each individual cluster. This can be quite time-consuming.

Another important issue, especially for our customers in India and other data centers, is the need for proper VM tool reports. We require detailed information such as VM names, IP addresses, CPU assignments, and CPU utilization. This data should be exported in an Excel format. For example, if a virtual machine has four CPUs, the Excel report should include entries like: VM name, IP address, 4 CPUs, and current utilization (e.g., if 2 out of 4 CPUs are being used). We also need to capture other parameters, such as memory and disk configurations (e.g., hard disk 1 and hard disk 2), whether any ISOs are mounted (like CD/DVDs), USB drives attached to the VM, storage types (like NVM), and any RDMs associated with the VM. By extracting all this information into an Excel file, we would create a handy inventory for all the engineers. This detailed VM list would be extremely beneficial for cloud engineers and managers working with Nutanix.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for the last two to two and a half years with substantial experience. I'm not an expert in automation, but the existing features are sufficient to manage effectively.

The stability of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is rated as eight out of ten.

For scalability, I would rate it as eight out of ten.

We are managing private clouds for different clients. We currently hold 1,800 customers on Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), mostly medium customers, with approximately 100 enterprise customers and the remaining 1,700 being medium clients. 

I would rate Nutanix support as eight out of ten.

Positive

Having worked with approximately four to five different cloud setups including Nutanix, VMware, Hyper-V, and Red Hat OpenShift, I would rate both Nutanix and VMware similarly at four out of five as they provide similar features, but Nutanix is more attractive compared to VMware.

We are exclusively managing a private cloud. I work specifically with the private cloud, while a separate team handles the public cloud. However, I can confidently say that no one is currently using Nutanix as a public cloud solution; it is being utilized solely as a private setup.

Deploying Nutanix is straightforward, but as with any new system, it can be complex at the beginning.

In the past, we had vendor support during the initial stages, about two to two and a half years ago. The vendor would regularly visit our data center and provide guidance, which made it easier for us. However, understanding a new subject can still be challenging at first.

Considering my team, I have approximately ten experts working with Nutanix, while the rest are normal engineers handling basic tasks or support for Nutanix, VMware, or other clouds.

India is a hub for various customers seeking technology solutions. Many of these customers are looking for competitive pricing, but Nutanix's costs tend to be quite high. We primarily work with mid-level customers in India rather than enterprise clients. These mid-level customers are interested in services that are priced more moderately. In comparison, Nutanix's pricing is significantly higher than that of other setups. As a result, we have approximately 3,000 customers using VMware, while Nutanix has around 1,800 customers. The disparity in these numbers is quite striking: 3,000 customers for VMware versus 1,800 for Nutanix. Indian customers don't like high-priced hyper clouds, so they invest in VMware, which offers the same features at a lower base price.

I have seen a lot of improvements in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), but the package we are using has been the same for the last two to two and a half years.

I would definitely recommend Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) to other users or cloud engineers, but they may hesitate due to the pricing. In India, the market looks for minimal prices and best features.

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

Our primary use cases for Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) include working with databases, batch processes, UCS, and a lot of in-house homegrown applications. Before selecting Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), we were users of a different product and ran both products side by side for a while. 

Almost three years ago, we decided to transition all of our database usage, applications, batch processes, and UCS over to Nutanix.

In addition to the time savings, my ability to optimize the placement of the VMs and their sizing concerning compute and memory is very good. Being able to avoid purchasing more hardware or utilize solutions in tighter spaces has freed up resources for other projects, which obviously saves money due to reduced hardware needs and space on the data center, which we don't have to rent as much.

The features of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) that I find most valuable for my infrastructure team include one-click upgrades that the NCM provides, which is a super time saver for our organization. It also allows my team, the infrastructure team, to get our time after hours and our weekends back. Additionally, the monitoring is very helpful for daily check-ins. I go in every morning, check Prism, and see if it has any critical warnings that I need to look at or send up to somebody. The UI is very intuitive for the most part.

We don't have to handhold and manually do software updates or firmware updates. We can select them, schedule when we want them, and I would estimate we can now spend 75% to 85% of the man-hours that we used to spend on those tasks on feature requests instead.

The Runbook feature of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) has impacted our IT processes by rightsizing and optimizing our environment, which helps in optimizing the amount of resources we've been using so that we don't have to over-purchase hardware. It's allowed us to get a lot more density of guest VMs onto our existing platforms, ultimately saving money in the long run. I would approximate the cost savings to be in the 20% to 25% range since we can optimize our resources and avoid the need to purchase more hardware or reuse resources in the infrastructure from one implementation.

We do some automation for right-sizing VMs. We don't do a lot more with that. We're still in the process of migrating from a different hypervisor and refreshing our older infrastructure. 

In terms of how Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) can be improved, there are some functionalities in the newer releases and upgrades that are not available in Prism Central, which lacks the newest versions. A few years back, we faced some issues with Prism Central, so it would be beneficial to align the upgrades for the newer releases.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for six and a half years.

I would assess the stability and reliability of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) as very good, as we've had almost no issues. In six years, I can recall just a couple instances, three in total, where we've experienced outages due to hardware or firmware issues during upgrades, but none of these incidents noticeably affected us. We've never had any downtime related to the Nutanix product itself.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) scales with our organization's growing needs, as we've expanded from three clusters to ten clusters in a matter of six years. Some of that growth is due to our need to expand, but it's also a transition away from the traditional three-tier solution.

I evaluate Nutanix support as very good. Having worked in IT for 30 years, I consider it the best support team. One of my early calls was about a host problem caused by a firmware update that corrupted the ESXi implementation. The support agent stayed online with me until we got the host operational again, which is something you don't often see.

Before selecting Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), we were users of a different product and ran both products side by side for a while. Almost three years ago, we decided to transition all of our database usage, applications, batch processes, and UCS over to Nutanix. The main factors that prompted our move to Nutanix were mostly ease of administration and the significant amount of time it gave back to our team, allowing us to concentrate on other projects.

I would describe my experience with deploying Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) as very simple. When I first started at the company, we had a third-party consulting team that helped us implement the first three clusters with Nutanix. Now, with ten clusters in total, we've taken over the remaining implementations ourselves, so it's relatively easy to implement.

When I first started at the company, we had a third-party consulting team that helped us implement the first three clusters with Nutanix.

With Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) the time we save in man-hours is probably around 75% to 85%. The ability to optimize the placement and sizing of VMs have also attributed to a positive ROI.

I don't directly deal with pricing aspects of the solution. 

My advice to other companies looking into purchasing Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) would be to certainly take a hard look at it since it has been a real value addition for our company. It saves our infrastructure team a lot of time and allows us to focus on other projects. 

There has been some actionable feedback for Nutanix as I've noticed that after COVID, the time for resolution has dropped. This is partly due to the fact that there's so much more to the product than there used to be, leading to greater complexity. While support remains better than anyone else's, I hope the resolution times can improve back to what they once were. 

On a scale of one to ten, I rate this solution a nine.

My main use cases for Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) are for managing resources in the cloud. 

I'm currently using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) to manage my infrastructure. I'm using the self-service functionality from Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM).

We are using the runbooks feature to help automate management with very simple runbooks. The impact of this feature is that it automates deployment, so we don't have to do any manual processes to provision machines or configurations. This frees up our engineers to focus on other projects without having to manage and operate requests hands-on.

We use cost governance. This feature helps us manage costs and avoid cost overruns. It also gives us the ability to do a showback to the business, showing how much it's costing. 

It allows us to forecast budgets for projects much more easily than what we had before, which was nothing.

It's easy to use. Self-service is beneficial because it's easier for developers to assign themselves resources. It's easy to control resources and govern the resources, and it frees up support to focus on other things without having to help developers. It allows developers to self-service on their own. 

It saves time. I don't have any metrics, but typically, before, a developer requesting resources would have a three to five-day turnaround time, sometimes even longer. Now they have the ability to self-deploy on their own, which makes it immediate instead of waiting three to five business days.

Our requirements are very simple. There is nothing not working for us. It's not complex, but the benefits are that it's really easy to use. We are probably the customer who has the least number of problems. However, costs are always a concern.

I've been using Nutanix for a long time, and other complaints I had in the past were that their ecosystem with other OEM partners was more limited. It's good that they've grown and expanded to other vendors and OEMs. We were an HPE shop, so it was good when they brought in HPE as an OEM. It was very important for us, and it's good to see that they're extending that. Our Nutanix is on HPE.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for four years.

I don't believe we've had any significant issues with the stability and reliability of the Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) platform. Any issues were minor, just something that goes with learning the product and how it works. Nothing major has caused downtime.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) scales well. We haven't had any growing pains with it.

The process of expanding its usage is smooth in getting the different teams on board with how it works, so it's primarily about training.

I find Nutanix support to be great, excellent. I have nothing bad to say about it. Nobody is perfect, but I'd rate it a nine.

The handoff with support and the knowledge of the support engineer is significantly better than experience with other vendors. I've always had a good experience. I'm sure we've had a minor issue here and there with getting issues to the right person, but nothing specific comes to mind.

Positive

We were already a Nutanix shop, so we weren't really looking at other solutions. It was something that we were aware of and had a use case for. Outside of that, we were looking at Terraform or some other scripting processes, but it made more sense to leverage Nutanix's integrated solutions.

The challenges that we had were mostly on our side, getting the runbooks set up properly. There was nothing really with the technology that was a challenge. We have a hybrid deployment model. Most of our workloads are on-prem. We mostly focus on on-prem workloads, but we do have use cases in Azure.

Playbooks and automation definitely freed up engineer time. This allows us to focus on other projects and not have to get hands-on, reducing operational costs.

It goes in cycles, but depending on the project, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) has freed up 40-50 hours per project in terms of deployment. That's a week's worth of work that could be done for something else.

Licensing is always a hot topic. We haven't had any challenges around licensing and costs. Everything was within budget and our expectations. It's a hot topic because renewals and licensing costs are high. Managing costs is always a concern, as we're always being asked to do more with less.

The product is great, and I have no regrets using Nutanix. I would do it all over again. I'm not looking at any other platforms, but costs are always a concern. It's not cheap, but there are savings and return on investment when coming from a non-Nutanix shop. If you're coming in as a new customer, greenfield, it's great. If you're migrating away from something three-tier architecture where you already have storage platforms, it's harder to justify the costs because you already invested in something else.

I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) an eight out of ten, as everything can always be improved, but nothing really comes to mind.

I would recommend it to other companies considering Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) to make sure they do proper planning upfront and understand their use cases. A lot of times, our challenges are that our internal customers, who are going to be consuming, don't know their requirements, which slows down and potentially produces a poor experience. Ensure that you understand the requirements and do proper planning with the customer.

I am selling Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). Before, it was a Prism Pro license and the cluster was AOS. NCM has been the offering for the last three or four years, and I have been selling it as a product for the last seven or eight years.

For cluster management, operation, reporting, alerting, cluster runway and forecasting, there are many use cases including multi-tenancy, storage management, and compute management. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) serves as a single pane of glass to manage the entire infrastructure. You can manage everything from there without needing to depend on multiple consoles, which effectively eliminates many silos.

For low-code automations, we use Runbook and configure several runbooks. We have been quite satisfied with the results.

In challenging customer scenarios, low-code solutions or infrastructure as code are still not widely adopted by many customers. Frankly speaking, they do not have a requirement for it. They have sufficient IT staff and their changes are not dynamic or at that scale. Some customers are using these features and are quite happy with them. It has been able to reduce operation time at a certain level. Specifically for nighttime activities, such as VM memory spikes, these runbooks are capable of increasing memory on the fly without any human intervention.

We are using many Nutanix products. We are using data at rest, advanced replication, NUS. We are now deploying Nutanix NKP and also evaluating it. We are using NDB and Nutanix Files. We are using most of the products offered by Nutanix.

The setup is very straightforward, and licensing is also very clear to understand. If I compare it with VMware vCenter, VMware vCenter now seems outdated. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) has a new design and is easy to navigate. It feels as though you are working on a public cloud such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.

There is no complexity. It is very straightforward. You simply download Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) and deploy it. You just configure your IP address and one to two hours is sufficient to use it.

Price-wise, if I compare Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) with VMware vCenter, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is cheaper and has similar or more offerings than VMware vCenter.

At the moment, we are satisfied with the automation provided in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM).

When it comes to integration with Terraform, there is still a lot of improvement needed. Specifically for infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform, there are many areas where improvement is needed.

I want to highlight one area specifically: one feature for the MSP model. I want complete rebranding of Nutanix. For example, I want to build my own console where my customers can log in and create their own tenant. From the admin side, I can allocate them certain CPU, memory, and storage, and they can manage their resources but not through Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). It should be a totally separate product. The challenge I am currently having is offering cloud services using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). Many customers have their tenant, but the problem is that on the same console with the admin account, I am managing the entire infrastructure. On the same console, customers are logging in with their accounts with limited permissions. The challenge from the security side is that it is a risk because both are logging in on the same IP address. We need a separate setup for a tenant, specifically for MSP.

I have been using the solution for the last seven or eight years.

There is no complexity with stability. It is very straightforward.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is a scalable product.

Support is really good.

Positive

Price-wise, I am satisfied because as a partner, whatever Nutanix offers price-wise is acceptable to me. However, what is happening now is that very small SMBs or small companies are slowly removing Nutanix because of the renewal cost. In the last six months, I had one customer to whom I sold Nutanix five years ago. When renewal was due, the price was too high, so they migrated everything back to three-tier infrastructure, such as standard Hyper-V servers and storage.

Setup is very straightforward, and licensing is also very clear to understand. It is easy, and troubleshooting-wise it is also easy to manage.

We are utilizing oversubscription features and CPU oversubscription features, and we are selling these to customers.

In our case, we are making good money because we operate as an MSP.

Price-wise, if I compare Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) with VMware vCenter, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is cheaper and has similar or more offerings than VMware vCenter.

VMware vCenter

I have been selling Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). Before, it was a Prism Pro license and the cluster was AOS. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) has been the offering for the last three or four years. I have also reviewed NVIDIA reference architecture. I would rate this product an eight out of ten.