Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

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 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.

We started migrating from VMware to Nutanix four years ago, and we're seeing much better performance.

We had a difficult disaster recovery situation that we handled with Nutanix Cloud Manager. We also migrated licenses from on-premises in a local environment to the cloud, which is much cheaper.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is easier for technicians than VMware, so fewer people are needed to do the same tasks. It's critical because if we do things faster, we do them at a lower price, especially if we use fewer human resources. 

NCM’s built-in playbooks have freed our IT team to focus on other tasks in some areas, but we also have our own local playbooks. This has freed up time for our IT team. Since 2023, we have spent an average of six hours completing an implementation, which allows us to use our IT staff more effectively for other tasks.

The learning curve has been smooth, and the technicians are performing a little better regarding response times. The only thing that makes a little difference is the virtualization part, which I believe is compensated by the performance part. A short learning curve is important because the infrastructure team is a bit large, so doing things with less time is better. If we take longer, then it will be more expensive.

We are still learning about cloud usage and the integrations we are targeting right now at the event. I believe there is room for improvement, especially with the prices, which are not very friendly.

I have used Nutanix Cloud Manager for four years.

We haven't experienced any downtime. 

It's easy to scale Nutanix Cloud Manager for the cloud and local services.

I rate Nutanix support nine out of 10. We are happy with the customer service.

Positive

We used VMware previously. It's okay. We made the switch four years ago when we purchased another company that was already using Nutanix. From that moment, we started working with Nutanix, which we didn't know about before.

Deploying Nutanix was a smooth experience. The technicians were fluid, and the deployment had no major problems. 

We used the help of EDVAL, an integrator company. I liked working with them

Due to the migration, we are at around 9 percent. We are now talking with them because we have VMware things we are going to migrate to Nutanix. There is a migration and expulsion plan, there is an optimal communication process with them. We are talking to salespeople about reaching around 15 percent or 20 percent reduction thanks to Nutanix's approach and scaling nature.

I rate Nutanix Cloud Manager eight out of 10. I wouldn’t give it a 10 because of the price.

We use NCM in a training environment.

The solution was picked as part of the hyper-converged platform using Cisco hardware and Nutanix hypervisor software. 

NCM was one of the vendors we compared technology-wise. It is more mature now, of course, and scalability is there. Our use case that I deployed was not around that as well. It was more around the simplicity and automation of that stand-alone system. It meets all those business use cases.

From the lab and proof of concept of NCM, it efficiently achieved low-code automation outcomes quickly.

NCM's learning curve is on par with similar cloud management solutions. This is important because we want a single platform to manage multiple domains. As the ecosystem matures, we want to be able to integrate with many vendors. 

The most valuable aspect of NCM is its ease of deployment. Nutanix provides the software and licensing to utilize Cisco's X86 hardware. It is a turnkey solution, so instead of building different infrastructure components, almost everything is out of the box.

NCM is a mature technology product, but it is more costly than some of the other solutions available, which leaves room for improvement.

I have been using NCM for five years.

NCM is scalable.

The five-year term for NCM's license cost and support was around five million. Compared to a competitive product that was almost half the cost of this system.

I would rate NCM seven out of ten.

The use cases differ for everyone, so they should evaluate NCM based on their requirements.

My use case with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) includes cluster management, cluster initiation, VM management, VM capacity, VM deployment, and day-to-day operations, as well as patch lifecycle management of clusters and the AHV.

Compared to other cloud management solutions such as VMware, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) offers a single pane of glass where a single service can manage everything, thanks to Prism Central and Prism Element metrics. The security level is a significant advantage because Nutanix supports multi-cloud from Prism Central and provides one-click upgrades through LCM. 

Additionally, we utilize a replication factor to rebuild data during disk or host failures to maintain high availability of production servers and workloads. Using the playbooks in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) significantly helps free up time for other tasks, as we encounter anomalies in our enterprise environment. The playbooks allow us to troubleshoot issues automatically without manual intervention, which in turn saves time.

As a professional certified in Nutanix for multi-cloud infrastructure, I believe there is room for improvement in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) regarding the data rebuilding process with the replication factor. It currently does not support parallelism, which results in longer rebuild times compared to external storage such as Dell PowerFlex, which has faster data rebuild speeds. My concern is that rebuilding data in Nutanix can take from one to 20 hours based on size, whereas Dell PowerFlex minimizes downtime. Despite achieving usable storage in Nutanix, I would advocate for enhancements in the parallelism of data rebuilding. The data rebuilding process could potentially be simplified, although improvements have been made by removing the RAID concept for a distributed architecture. In enterprise environments, reliance on storage remains high, and increasing the speed of the rebuild process would be beneficial. Those storage aspects can definitely be improved.

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

I would rate the stability of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) a ten out of ten, as it provides multiple features, including disaster recovery with a one-minute SLA, which is superior compared to other vendors that typically offer 15-minute SLAs. 

I would rate the scalability of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) a nine out of ten, primarily because of concerns regarding the data rebuilding process. 

I would rate it a ten out of ten for technical support. 

Positive

It's easy. With a proper plan, we can achieve it.

Pricing for Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is based on the applications and workloads we use; it is somewhat high, but it provides a good subscription model compared to VMware's core per product pricing. I prefer Nutanix because it reduces the burdens by not having to manage separate VMs or services for storage and automation, which makes it a favorable option.

Currently, I am working on Nutanix Cloud, and in the future, we will be merging with Azure using LCM. In my organization, approximately 30 to 35 people work with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) as part of a team of around 60 that operates 24/7, including SMEs. 

We are a customer and also a partner. Our clients include very large businesses, particularly big online retailers in the US. I currently work in L2 and L3 level support, focusing on SME-level tasks and collaborating with senior members to leverage my knowledge and learning. 

I find the future of hybrid management crucial, and Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) plays an integral role in maintaining hybrid solutions with its software-defined hyper-converged infrastructure, making it my choice over other clouds. 

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

There are a lot of aspects. When we have issues in one data center and want to move to another data center, we have the flexibility to fail over to the second data center in the minimum RTO. If we have near-sync configured, we can go from one cluster to another cluster without rebooting. That is a very nice feature that we are using.

It saves a lot of time. Three-tier is difficult to manage and maintain, whereas, with Nutanix Cloud Manager, we have everything in front of our eyes. We have visibility into everything. It saves us one to two hours daily.

We have visibility and uptime. We can maintain the uptime. We also have support, which is very important.

There are a lot of good features, but the best one is data protection where it replicates your data from one cluster to another cluster. It is easy to create virtual machines.

The visibility is very nice to monitor the servers, performance, data stores, and other things. Everything is visible, and you can get the reports very quickly.

It can be improved in terms of replication factors. For example, the data protection configuration is for a full virtual machine. I do not have the option to choose hard disks or some big machines. That is where we need some flexibility.

We have some Oracle systems. The licensing is a big challenge over here because it will be very costly if we go with Nutanix. Speed and availability are two important factors. Especially in the case of databases, you need speed. We are exploring more things for the databases. Currently, our databases are out of Nutanix. We want to bring it into Nutanix. We did a PoC for NDP. We are just checking it out.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager for the past five years.

Their support is good. I have been using this solution for the last five years and never faced issues with the support. Whenever I registered a case, I immediately got a call. If I do not get a call, I can escalate it, and I will get a response in a proper time.

Positive

I have worked with other products as well. In my current company, I have been using it for the last few years, and, before that, I used it in another company. We started from there. We had a three-tier solution with HPE 3PAR storage and SAN switches, like a traditional one. After that, we moved to HCM, which is Nutanix. It was good. After joining ABK, we faced some issues because it was a cross-platform. The hypervisor was Microsoft Hyperion, and the hardware was Nutanix, which is HCI. Recently, we migrated everything to AHV, and so far, everything is good.

Nutanix Cloud Manager provides flexibility. There is visibility into your servers, which is generally not possible unless you use third-party tools. One of the best parts is support. We can contact them for any issue, and they will fix everything.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is easier to use than other products. I have an overall experience of 20 years in this field, and I find it easier to use than others.

It is very easy. I did the migration of multiple clusters, and it was very easy. 

There are different models. For nodes, we have the 8035 model and Gen 6, 8, and 10. We also have the 3,000 series.

We do a PoC for everything. We explore other solutions as well, and depending on the final outcome, we choose the solution.

We do not have automation because there are a lot of challenges in our environment.

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

We used Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) with our dying legacy infrastructure that was sluggish and no longer compliant. We had a higher demand as our business operation became more fast-paced, so we needed a solution like Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) that could address all that, which was reliable with no downtime for upgrades and a single pane of glass for management.

What I found most valuable in NCM is the one-click upgrade and the analytics it can provide for hyper-converged infrastructure.

I found the X-Play feature nice, as it's basically a playbook that lets you pick an action based on what happens. The feature is also great for resolving anomalies because it reduces manpower to resolve issues manually and helps lower false positives.

Implementing automation in Nutanix Cloud Manager doesn't take long, and there's not much of a learning curve to it. Once you understand the basics and know your criteria and requirements, it should be up and running relatively fast, another likable feature of the solution.

I've also heard of the Runbook feature, and it's been set up for my organization as part of X-Play. Runbook saves time during manual intervention because it's all within the same ecosystem, so it makes sense.

Similar to other products that provide cloud automation, I find Nutanix Cloud Manager fast in terms of the speed of the outcomes.

My organization uses analytics and capacity planning, some of the good features of NCM. I find them very important in helping determine needs and demands in terms of business requirements.

The built-in Playbooks in the solution also helped free up time for my team to focus on other projects and tasks.

Nutanix Cloud Manager has also saved my organization time, particularly a week, as it lets you do one-click upgrading, which wasn't possible in the old solution my organization used to have. In the past, you had to contact different vendors for drivers, for example, and try to synchronize to ensure you were all on the same page, versus Nutanix Cloud Manager, which offered one-click upgrades.

For example, I could start the upgrade process via NCM on the weekend in the morning. There would be a progress bar, pre-checks, and assurance, and then, come afternoon, the upgrade is completed for a six-node cluster, while in the old solution, it'll take one whole week to complete the upgrade, which even comes with downtime.

I also find that it does its job well, particularly in helping the team address current automation needs while planning for future expansions, because the solution can analyze the number of VMs the team is using and whether the VMs are undersized and oversized, for example.

In terms of how it compares to other cloud management solutions for setup, learning curve, and ease of use, it's similar to Apple versus Android, where it's a matter of preference because both providers do the job. Still, one does the job more simplistically and caters to clients with low staffing, such as my team. My organization is very small and wanted to find a solution, such as NCM, that meets all criteria to help address all issues the organization usually experiences.

I also found that Nutanix Cloud Manager has phenomenal speed in delivering IaaS. My organization used to have servers that took over five minutes to boot up. Now, the process only takes less than two minutes.

There's not much you wouldn't like about Nutanix Cloud Manager because, as a solution, it simply works, and it's very reassuring. One suggestion, however, is for the Prism Pro element to have a built-in support feature that allows you to simply click a button to get support from Nutanix whenever a new alert comes in, rather than needing to call support to ask about the new alert you received.

We've used Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) since 2009, particularly the Prism Pro tier.

NCM is a very stable solution.

It is highly scalable.

I've contacted the technical support team for Nutanix, and I found the team knowledgeable, friendly, and professional. The Nutanix support team knows the product very well.

If I compare Nutanix support with support teams from other vendors, Nutanix is a step beyond, mainly because the response time is much better.

My rating for Nutanix Cloud Manager support is nine out of ten.

Positive

We used Dell and VMware before switching to Nutanix Cloud Manager. We decided to switch because our legacy infrastructure was sluggish, and compliance, servicing, replacing the parts, and the hours of work we had to devote to all that did not make the old infrastructure cost-effective. 

We also wanted a unified solution that provides a single pane of glass, which we found in Nutanix Cloud Manager. We could do our upgrades easily with the solution, without any hiccups.

I was involved in deploying Nutanix Cloud Manager and found the process very straightforward.

A professional service configured Nutanix Cloud Manager for my organization, which also involved migration from the old data center to the new one.

I was not involved in purchasing it, so I have no information on its pricing or cost.

I do feel that it's fair that Nutanix is a product sold as one but with multiple tiers, though you need to make sure it isn't oversold in terms of client needs.

We didn't evaluate other options before choosing NCM, though we inquired about VxRail.

VxRail is also a good product, but it seemed to have a more user-friendly approach, plus the Nutanix account executive was able to give a quote that matched what Dell was offering.

My organization currently tests Nutanix AHV but mainly uses Nutanix Cloud Manager to manage the VMs.

Currently, my organization doesn't feel the need to purchase other solutions besides NCM for automation needs.

The solution is deployed on-premises.

Two people from my organization, plus one from the professional service, took care of implementing Nutanix Cloud Manager.

Nutanix only requires variable maintenance. For the most part, if there's critical maintenance, the team gets an alert, but the recommendation is for maintenance to be conducted every six months or as needed.

My rating for Nutanix Cloud Manager as a solution is nine out of ten.

My advice for others shopping around or deciding on which solution to use is to first ask for a test environment to play with, plus be able to go on a reference call with similar institutions or companies identical to current clients, and not be shy about asking for recommendations or good references.

My organization is a customer.

We use Nutanix Cloud Manager for the daily administration of our Nutanix cluster. NCM provides one spot to go to for everything Nutanix related. It gives us a window into the overall health of our platform, allowing us to see everything at a glance. NCM tells us about the number of VMs running and all the other critical metrics you would want to see, such as host and virtual machine performance. It can provide a single-pane-of-glass view into multiple clusters, but we're only managing one. 

NCM gives us greater insight into our infrastructure because we have more reporting and alert capabilities. We can get a breakdown of VM efficiency and determine which ones are over-provisioned, constrained, or using up too many resources in an instance. 

Before NCM, we couldn't predict our future resource requirements accurately based on our current workload. I need to know if I will have enough memory storage and CPU for the next year so I don't have to ask for more money and get more hardware. It provides me with more analytics that I can use to improve the environment and make more educated decisions.

Features like capacity planning and runway analytics aren't too crucial for our day-to-day operations, but they're helpful when it comes time for long-term planning. We've only had this for a year, so we haven't needed to add any hardware in that time. However, in another six months or a year, we might need to add hardware to this environment if we see things are trending in that direction. NCM will help me demonstrate what we need to the accounting folks and business leaders. I can tell them that, based on these reports, it looks like we're consuming this amount of resources, so I need some funds budgeted to acquire more hardware. It's a cost-justification tool.

I'm looking forward to using NCM's playbooks as I become more comfortable with the platform. For instance, you can run a playbook to automatically shut down virtual machines during a maintenance window or allot more resources to a VM that needs them. I've only used it for reporting and alerts. It lets me know when something happens, and I or one of the other admins will resolve the issue. In the future, I would like to do that automatically. I know it can do that. I just haven't
done that yet. We'll start small and do some testing, but we haven't gotten there yet.  

From an automation standpoint, I don't think it's doing as much as it could because we aren't fully utilizing the platform. With respect to the analytics, however, We have a lot more information delivered automatically and consistently. It has significantly increased the amount of information we have at our disposal. NCM could also manipulate our environment more than what we're currently doing, but we haven't implemented it yet. 

I like NCM's X-Play feature. For example, we have a couple set up to notify us when our virtual machines require more memory, or they're over-provisioned. We automate alerts and send out reports so that we can address those. It does what I require it to do. We also have X-Play set up on the reporting side to notify us when new virtual machines are created. I need to be aware of the new machines in case we need to do anything further. 

When we're doing something new, it sometimes takes a couple of days to get our feet wet. We have to play around with it and test it on a small subset of whatever we're trying to do. It depends on whether we're automating something on the virtual machines or reporting on them. It will generally take a few days to get from a concept to automation in production. The solution's low-code automation works as expected. 

I think NCM's guest tools have some room for improvement. It's a minor pain point getting those installed and getting the virtual machines to recognize them. I know there are changes coming in the near future, but as it stands today, they could be improved. 

It's an HTML5 web interface. Sometimes you click on an action that you want to do, but the interface doesn't necessarily refresh as fast as you would expect. You need to force a browser refresh, but it would be nice if the interface would refresh automatically faster. It seems much slower than a full-blown application that you'd install on your end-user computer. 

I have used Nutanix Cloud Manager for about a year.

NCM is generally stable, aside from a few minor problems with the web interface. Our production workloads aren't going down daily, weekly, or monthly because of hard crashes or anything like that. We haven't had any outages at all. It is reliable from a performance standpoint. If we could work on some of those things related to the UI, that would be great. 

Nutanix Cloud Manager is highly scalable. I've been a part of various Wisconsin Nutanix user groups where people have upwards of a hundred nodes or more. While we may never get that large for our environment, it certainly does scale to a size that we could only ever imagine. I'm thinking we might add a node or two and an additional piece of hardware, but people are out there buying a lot more.

I rate Nutanix support 10 out of 10. It's one area where Nutanix shines. Each time I've called or opened a ticket, they've resolved the issue quickly. The support team is always willing to go the extra mile and help you out. It's a stark difference compared to what we were getting before. 

I feel confident that when we call or create a ticket, we will be connected to the right person the first time. I know that this person will be knowledgeable enough to assist. I don't recall any support cases where we've had to escalate it to someone more knowledgeable. Their front-line support helps us every time, and that's been a great experience. It doesn't take a long time to get a callback and you're not sitting on hold for a long time. I feel assured that I will get help immediately when I need it. 

Positive

We had Microsoft Hyper-V before Nutanix. Nutanix Cloud Manager has more capabilities, but there are also more things to learn, so it's a slightly more complicated solution. Hyper-V is a more straightforward solution with fewer features. There are more things to do and places to go, so you need to document more. It isn't a knock on the platform. It's relatively easy to use, but you must document more. 

Support was probably the biggest reason why we switched to Nutanix. When we had a problem with the Hyper-V infrastructure, we always tried to fix it ourselves before calling Microsoft support because we didn't want to engage with them. We couldn't get a timely response. It was a lot of run-around to get to a potential solution. Microsoft would try to blame the hardware vendors, who would blame Microsoft. It is a lot of back and forth. 

Also, Hyper-V lacked out-of-the-box analytics and reporting. It's essential to have that for justifying costs to the leadership. I must tell them, "We need more hardware, and here's why." I can tell the virtual machines are not using the correct number of virtual CPUs because Nutanix tells me they're over-provisioned. I have factual data we didn't have with Hyper-V to back up some of these things. At the end of the day, Hyper-V is a great small business solution, but we scaled it past what it's intended to do. It was time for us to make a jump to a more enterprise-class offering.

Deploying Nutanix Cloud Manager was straightforward. The initial installation took about two or three hours, but it took around a month to migrate the virtual machines from the Hyper-V platform to the Nutanix environment. We did it in phases over the weekend. 

We had a three-person team from my company. I was the primary admin, and I have a backup. We also involved our networking and security guys for various changes in the environment. 

Our Nutanix environment is deployed at one location - our main data center - and Cloud Manager covers only one cluster that contains every virtual machine for all the departments in the company. We have virtual machines for accounting and several other areas that benefit from this. 

Six people are responsible for managing the environment, but two admins perform most of the work. However, four other people also have permission to create virtual machines, run reports, etc. It requires a little maintenance. We have to apply software and firmware updates as they come out. 

Since deploying Nutanix, I'm spending less time babysitting the environment. Doing all the troubleshooting and research by myself could take six hours. We prefer to set a maintenance window in case we need to try something, and we don't necessarily know if it will fix the problem. 

With Nutanix, we call support and have them connect remotely. They can typically fix whatever problem we have immediately without any kind of downtime. That has saved a lot of time. It's a lot less stressful whenever there is a problem because I know I have somebody that I can call. It's hard to quantify that in dollar terms, but I know it has saved us a lot of time.

Nutanix costs more than Hyper-V, but the price is reasonable for the features we're getting. We have better support, analytics, reporting, and other capabilities that we didn't have before. That is more than enough to justify the cost. The hardware we purchased from Nutanix was priced fairly. The primary costs are software and support. It's a subscription-based service, which can be bad or good, depending on how you look at that. For me, it makes perfect sense. We get regular updates and can get support when we need it. 

I rate Nutanix Cloud Manager nine out of 10. NCM has been an amazing addition to our company. I have a few nitpicky complaints, but when it comes to the things that matter, the solution has always delivered. 

It's good that the solution is sold as a complete package. If we had to pick and choose the individual pieces, we might miss out on some useful features. Maybe we won't use some of them, but it's an opportunity to ensure you are diving into everything that it offers, which is quite a bit. There's a lot of great stuff in here.

Before you deploy Nutanix, I recommend participating in one of the Nutanix Boot Camps. You can sit down and work with people to see how the solution works firsthand. You can test-drive the solution on their site to experience the solution without deploying anything, so you can play with the environment to see what that looks like. Once you have played around with it a little bit, you can do a proof of concept or a demo lab to get a bit more experience. 

I would also suggest using Nutanix Hypervisor AHV instead of running Hyper-V or VMware on top of the Nutanix platform. The level of integration there has been excellent. I recommend using the Nutanix hardware. If you have a support problem, there's no back-and-forth between the hardware and software vendor. It's easy to say, "Look, it's your hardware and software. There's obviously a problem here. Let's get to the bottom of it, and then you never have to worry about the finger-pointing game."