Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

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.

We provide Test-VMs to users. Currently, we deploy only Windows-VMs from Windows 10 1803 up to 20H2 and Server 2012 R2 to Server 2019. The blueprints consist of a base Windows Image (which is used as a template for the VM to be) and several tasks you can define and use remote PowerShell to get whatever you need to get done, like install additional software, set registry keys - you name it. Each task is then executed in the defined order and results can be reviewed even during execution time. Hardware specs can be made configurable, so users can adjust the amount of RAM or CPU core count but can also be set to static.
We recently set the machines up to configure customary passwords and give users an email notification when the machine is ready to use. Also we differentiate machine networks based on the users department to separate machines.

Previous inquiries took us almost a full day to prepare the VM to the liking of our users. Now, the deployment time is below 15 minutes and users can do it on their own! That leaves us to only update the blueprints if new requirements come in or new Windows Versions are published. As we have now predefined setups the testing team can rely on common ground for their product tests. Development teams can experiment with alpha versions in a secured environment (separate VLANs) without harming production machines.

The self-service for users is key to this solution because the creation is done solely on the users' terms and time. No waiting for IT or such.

Previously written scripts can be checked in a library and be reused for other blueprints.

Blueprints can be made available per project so each user sees only items tailored for their specific use case.
You can also Setup multi-machine blueprints to Support 3-tier applications with reverse proxy, Web Server and database Server, or any other concept there might be.

As always, the Nutanix support team assists with any obstacles you might come across. This led to various enhancements we and all other customers had benefits on.

There is now runbooks to use for things like automatically patch machines.

The list of blueprints and applications could be more configurable so you see all the fields you need and not just some predefined fields which are not customizable now.

There are lots of pre-defined blueprints in the online marketplace but often it is a trial and error to get the pre-defined blueprints to work due to some firewall issues. But that may because of our internal firewall being too restrictive.

More support for VMware environments would be great. Most blueprints are tailored for Nutanix AHV or the cloud providers. Hyper-V is currently not supported.

We have used Calm for over one year now.

Calm has no issues with stability. But Calm is heavily worked on by Nutanix, so any issues there might be are fast resolved and updates often help to mitigate problems. Given Nutanix unique 1-click-updates nature, updates are just as easy and reliable. It is advisable to wait for 2 - 3 weeks before upgrading to the latest and greatest so can look if any x.y.z.1 hotfix updates are published to avoid .0 glitches. But they are rare with Nutanix in general and Nutanix support is very helpful if you run into any of them. If you're in doubt simply ask support for help to see for yourself and be ready for your chin to hit the floor ;_) . Reading release notes before doing updates helps a lot to figure out what to expect. Another source for guidance is the compatibility matrix to look for any cross-requirements with Prism Central or AOS version of your target cluster (the cluster you deploy the Calm VMs on).

Scalibilty is second name to Nutanix. Scale-out of Nutanix Calm is just another node on the target cluster if things get sluggish.

Since Calm is dependent on Prism Central  you could simply scale-out that too. Nutanix has sizing recommandations for that, conveniently packed at Identify Prism Central requirements - Virtual Ramblings. Up to 25000 VMs should fulfill most requirements.

Nutanix support is outstanding. As stated above, it does not matter which continent you reside.

Nutanix NPS score is 92 -> https://customer.guru/net-promoter-score/nutanix

Our previous solution was hand-crafted VMs which cost IT a whole day or more depending on the requirements. That is why we had to find a more automatic approach. Nutanix Calm broke the duration down to 15 minutes. You even get a notification when the machine is up and running with Name, IP-Address and pre-selected password to get started.

Initial setup is simply activating it in Prism Central and configuring your target cluster which has to be connected to Prism Central as well, of course. So it is pretty straightforward. From there you can use some of the marketplace blueprints to see how it is done or just see on youtube on nutanix university calm - YouTube

We hit up our Nutanix partner for implementation to get up to speed as fast as possible. Implementation was half a day and we went on with setting some machines up. Expertise was great as we new them from the start and they just get what we want. Thanks to

ErikSterck!

This solution is greatly supporting a user-centric IT with less OPEX. Our ROI was covered within 18 month.

Setup can be done with Nutanix documentation by yourself to save up some money. Getting a consultant to support on the first steps has its perks, though. But you can always count on Nutanix Support to help out with questions or contact community. Does not matter if where your location is. We had outstanding support from europe, india and the US support offices.

Licensing should be a no-brainer but since there came up various options you should take a close look on the feature matrix to see what is in it and if you need it. Nutanix Calm has a 25-VM-license per customer for free. You only need to license Prism Central Pro node licenses for the cluster you are running Calm against. Every nutanix partner should be able to assist with this.

Other solutions are rare when considering to what extent Nutanix Calm covers the lifecycle of VMs. To answer the question: no, we did not evaluate other solutions. Calm integrates so nicely into Prism Central that any other solution appeared rather bloated in comparison. Also other solutions have problems with day-two operations (altering configuration).

Take a tour for yourself online: https://www.nutanix.dev/ad/at/

You shoud REALLY try this. It is just 5 minutes of your time!

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 wanted to optimize our process. We were going into a cloud architecture, so we wanted to see how we could leverage the existing Nutanix framework instead of manually managing the servers. 

We currently have a physical VM set up. We had slowly wanted to migrate to the cloud. Since we are already using Nutanix, my senior architect gave me some access to play around with the solution and explore how we can deploy code as a platform as a service instead of writing our own scratch code. If we want to use it as an independent platform in the future, and as a core developer, I wanted to write code to make sure it is interoperable in any of the cloud services we might use.

The scaling is good. We now have dynamic scaling and other scaling policies set up.

In a physical server, we have to define our items upfront, and then we are stuck. With this solution, we can increase it dynamically and define the threshold, and auto-enhance the features. 

We cannot say the traffic is always the same. Over the weekends, it's slow. Over the weekdays, it's higher. They gave us some configurations so that if it is idle, we run on one part, and if there is more traffic, we can run on multiple parts.

The local automation is good. We've seen a huge improvement in our code. I personally worked with the performance teams to compare the product with old physical VM architecture versus the cloud architecture, and I see the difference. I was not able to break it. It was very scalable. While my physical VM crashed at some point in time, the cloud ran fine.

It offers high availability and consistency. We have a lot of batch jobs running and handling that data, so we need a pretty good service. Instead of horizontally scaling, they are scaling vertically. 

I like Cloud Manager from AWS more based on the handling of the UI. This solution could be more user-friendly. The UI could be better. It would be nice if it offered a simple GUI where we would have one view.

We'd like the solution to be a one-stop shop. We have a requirement of having a single GUI setup. Nutanix is like an ocean. We'd like everything tied all together. 

We've used the solution for a couple of months for running some POCs.

The solution is very scalable, and we like the configuration options. You can pick and choose. You don't just have a standard way of doing things. It's pretty dynamic. 

I have not had a chance to speak with support. Our infrastructure team manages to troubleshoot items. 

Recently, we have had one physical server managed by Nutanix that had a snapshot issue (in that the server was not taking snapshots for two months). It's a production server. They sent us a proactive email. There was pretty smooth communication in that regard. They did have pretty quick support for that issue. They are rebuilding the image and archiving the data based on the fact that there are backup issues. That said, when it comes to production servers, they should have a 24-hour turnaround and not 72 hours. Support in these cases has to happen fast. 

Positive

I previously used AWS Cloud Manager in my previous organization. Currently, based on the sensitivity of the data, we are moving to a hybrid approach. Many are still using physical VMs. In my new organization, a lot of my team is already on Nutanix. We were the first team to head into the cloud, and I was handling the project. 

The setup is pretty quick, like all the clouds. The ease of use could be improved a bit more. There is pretty good documentation that helps make the learning curve smaller. My approach is to go to the documentation first before jumping in. The person I was working with provided good information, and we built our own documentation on top of that as well. 

As an application team, it was easy to implement. Maybe it was easy since we didn't get into too much complexity. The APIs are playing a good role. The configuration is pretty straightforward. 

I did not handle the pricing or licensing aspect of the project. 

I did not evaluate other options. We are only licensed for OpenShift and Nutanix at this point. 

We use OpenShift on top of Nutanix, and all the physical servers are cloud servers, and they are all managed by our team. 

As for the built-in playbooks, I haven't done much exploration. One of my team members did more work in this area. He helped me and did all the configuration. He explained what he was doing. However, I was not involved in the playbook at all. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It needs to be easier to use. However, it is improving. The market has shifted. A lot of companies are trying to get in. Yet Nutanix is doing a great job in collaborating with so many organizations. It's going to provide us with a one-stop solution that helps us avoid running around between vendors. 

I would advise people to read the documentation. That will definitely help. It's pretty sophisticated. Reading the documentation and following up with Nutanix support will keep you from stumbling into the process blindly. Get in touch with an account manager. They can help you understand the requirements first and then look into your options. If you have an expert that can guide you, you won't be wasting too much time.

We have Cloud Manager deployed across multiple departments, and each has an individual cluster. NCM manages all of those clusters from a single bandwidth source. About 60 people at our company use the solution.

Cloud Manager is a resilient solution with high availability and uptime. It also speeds up our rollout if we want to provision virtual machines or containers for development. It gives us visibility into Nutanix and VMware from a single pane of glass. This capability is crucial during the reporting phase.

It's also instrumental during capacity planning. Cloud Manager helps you take inventory of your existing resources so you can augment them before they run out. Capacity forecasting and reporting are some of the best features.

Cloud Manager decreased our continuous validation time by about 15 percent because many of these operations are prebuilt out of the box. The built-in playbooks come in handy during scheduled activities. We can write playbooks and execute them at a scheduled time. For example, if I want to perform an activity over the weekend when I'm not in the office, I can run the playbook to trigger it. The playbooks reduce the time spent on these tasks by 30 to 40 percent.

The Nutanix stack is hyper-converged. I don't need to buy expensive SAN storage because it's integrated into the hardware appliance. That's the best part. We get excellent latency by leveraging local storage.

NCM's analytics could be better because we're not getting an accurate analysis of our virtual machines, and we're over-provisioning some of them. 

I have used Cloud Manager for more than seven years.

Cloud Manager is a highly stable product, and clients can request custom enhancements based on their specific needs. You can ask Nutanix's engineering team to build a custom solution for a customer.

Cloud Manager scales linearly with the best performance. There's something called Controller Virtual machine available on every node. When you scale the solution, it never affects your performance.

I rate Nutanix's support a ten out of ten. Nutanix has the best support of any solution I've used.

Positive

We previously relied on VMware tools like vCenter and vROps for reporting. Now, we are 70 to 80 percent reliant on NCM. Nutanix is easier to manage and use. It has a short learning curve if you come from a VMware background. I was already well-versed in VMware, so the learning curve was short. 

Deploying Cloud Manager was extremely straightforward. You can typically finish the deployment and put it into production in a day and a half.

Cloud Manager is fairly priced. I like the pricing model, which includes multiple tiers. It all depends on the customers' use cases. Each customer might have a different opinion about the features NCM offers. We match our customers' expectations with what NCM offers. That might change from customer to customer. NCM is more appropriate for enterprises than small or medium-sized businesses.

I rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a nine out of ten. 

One goal was to automate things. We had a lot of tools, but we needed a centralized tool. Calm helps us to centralize the deployments of our VMs. 

We have a subsystem installed on Nutanix and we have blueprints for setting up this subsystem very easily. Also, for Kubernetes clusters, we use now CaaS from SUSE and we also create Kubernetes clusters with Calm. Our strategy is to make blueprints for all the virtual machines environments. It's an ongoing process.

Our first project was to create subsystems. This was really an accelerator because we have three environments and over 50 machines. Once we had a sub-template, it was very easy to migrate to Nutanix, to set up a system. Before Nutanix it took days and now it's maybe one or two hours. It's really fast when you use these templates. It creates all the preconditions for an installation. And with that, we were really able to move the system very quickly to this new platform.

The solution automates application management to a single platform, but we're still working on it. 

Our goal is the standardization which Calm makes possible. It's important, from a strategic point of view. We would ultimately like to achieve "infrastructure-as-code" so that we can always create an environment as it initially was. It would be like Kubernetes or container-based where you can destroy something and build it again and it's like it was before. When you have a platform where you can automatically create things, you are sure that nobody will manually change something in it. It's all managed with this framework, and you are sure that when when you need to create the same system it will work, because it is all scripted. The whole "cookbook" for making that machine is there. This is also a requirement: that nobody goes on a virtual machine and installs something manually. It must be scripted with Calm. That gives you insurance that you can build the same system again. For us, that's really the future: infrastructure-as-code. 

This is also a good way for creating the same machine on the cloud, or wherever you want, and to be assured it will run because the building of the machine is in the script.

Also, the solution’s support for scripts, API, and domain specific language has reduced the IT man-hours to deploy and support applications. It's hard to estimate how much time it has saved us, but I would say around 60 percent. We are new on the Nutanix platform and we have not created a lot of the blueprints ourselves. Another company helped us to accelerate that. We went into production with it last year and we see the capabilities that Calm gives us.

Before Calm, we didn't have a specific tool for orchestration. We had some templating things, but they were spread out over various technologies. Now, we have one, centralized solution to manage all the VMs that we have. This is the strength of Nutanix, that you have one starting point where you can do everything. You have all the tools in one platform. Before, we had one tool for this process and another tool for that process. It's helping us a lot.

Calm has also enabled us to react faster to the changing needs of our business. That brings me back to the subsystem I mentioned earlier. We were thinking we would need more time to migrate it, or that we might need to create a sandbox system for testing. But with the subsystem, it was very quick. Calm helped us a lot to make it happen. 

Also, when it comes to cluster systems, we work with the open source version of Couchbase. It's very easy to create a Couchbase cluster. Similarly with Jenkins, we have blueprints for DevOps. If they need a Jenkins environment, we can easily scale out for our Jenkins workers. It really makes life easier because we have a GUI and can scale out. We can say, "Okay, we need two more slaves," and it happens. It really accelerates things.

The scripting, where you can use libraries, is a valuable feature. We don't really make the blueprints, as we have a third-party company that makes them for us. But it enables calling APIs in the blueprints. When we create a machine, we use IPAM from Infoblox and we can get an IP address. It's one platform to script and we can then use all the APIs to complete the scripts. It gives us a central management tool from which we can do a lot of things automatically.

Also, it's easy to use, overall. I'm a Linux guy, so a lot of it is familiar to me. I feel comfortable when I use it. It's not really hard or complex.

And when you have applications that can run on more than one machine, you can easily use blueprints to scale out the infrastructure. You can start with two web front-ends, a web service and then you say, "Okay, I need a third one and a fourth one." This is very easy. It's one click and you can scale it, but you must also script it. It only gives you the framework to do that. So for performance, you can use Calm to scale out and scale in.

But the Nutanix platform also helps you find out if you have some performance problems or oversized machines. But to resize it, it's more that you would use playbooks in Nutanix for that, and not Calm.

It's also a very good tool for team collaboration, but in our use case we don't use Calm for that. We are not that big. We create the machines or the application; it's not that we deploy services so that another service can deploy their machines. We are still centralized, in that sense. With Calm, you can do this: With the templates, the services that need new VMs can make their own VMs, but we do not have this requirement for now. It's only used by the IT team here, which consists of 30 people.

As I mentioned, we use now CaaS from SUSE; it's SUSE's Kubernetes. But it's now changing. They have bought Rancher and I think that CaaS will be replaced by Rancher. So currently, to manage a Kubernetes cluster we have SUSE. But with Karbon we can manage Kubernetes with Calm. But I don't don't know how much we can do with Calm there. There could be room for improvement, although I'm not entirely sure. It's on our agenda to look into Karbon in relation to Calm and what we can do with them together. I don't know how deeply they are integrated. It's not necessarily something that is wrong.

Karbon is a new product. It's been around for about two years. The integration is growing. Last year is when it started working with Calm. It's more a concept still. My wish is that it will really be supported, but I cannot say for sure.

Again, I'm not saying something is wrong here. I think it's a very good platform, but there is always room of improvement.

I have been using Nutanix Calm since last year. We started in 2018 with a proof of concept to go to a hyper-converged platform, and then we chose Nutanix.

The stability of Calm is very good. We have not had problems. We are enhancing our clusters now a lot because we did a proof of concept for two years and last year we went into production. We are really happy with the platform and we are really accelerating and enhancing it.

We are a company with 700 employees. In Nutanix's world, we are not a big player. I don't think that we are ever going to push the boundaries.

We are also using Nutanix Files cluster. We are also planning to go with Era, which is a SQL management platform on Nutanix. It's really that Nutanix is providing a platform strategy for us. We are replacing all the other virtualization infrastructure that we have with Nutanix.

Nutanix technical support is great. It's very fast. In the beginning we had an issue and they were very quick. The support team from Nutanix, compared to others, is amazing. They provide help really quickly. Support is really one of Nutanix's strengths.

We had some templates in XenServer, but they were more a type of predefined image so that when you installed it helped start the machine. We also had Salt scripting, but we didn't have tools to manage them. We are not a big company. We had something like 500 virtual machines and we had templating tools and a lot of manual tasks. So things were semi-automated. We had images for certain applications, but when setting up the machine, we had to manually finish the setup.

One of the drivers for us to go to a hyper-converged system was that we had a 3PAR SAN which went out-of-support. So we had to make a decision about whether to buy a new SAN or to go with hyper-converged where you can grow with the need. And this became one of our preconditions. We wanted a system that does not use traditional SAN. We liked the idea of hyper-converged.

We bought a little machine and did a PoC to see how Nutanix works. We already knew it was a good platform because we had heard good things about it. When we tested it, it was very good and very fast and fulfilled all our needs. That made the decision for us, that it was the right platform. It became a part of our company strategy. 

It was a good decision for us because now we can also replicate the whole cluster to the big cloud providers. You can have a Nutanix environment on all the three of the big ones. That means that we can buy a Nutanix cluster on Azure or Amazon cloud, for example. Then we replicate our cluster to that cluster in the cloud, and then we can switch over. With Nutanix, we can easily deploy a virtual machine in the cloud, but then we are using the cloud provider's functionality. But now Amazon, Google, and Azure make it possible to rent a Nutanix cluster. So if we replicate, and an airplane crashes into our building, we can switch over to the cloud. For us, that was also a statement that we were really going with a good platform. In Switzerland, a lot of big companies are using Nutanix now, well-known companies that are going hyper-converged.

For me, the initial setup of Calm was straightforward. It comes with Prism Central and Prism Central is a one-click installation, and then you have Calm. It's really easy. The whole Nutanix platform is really easy to manage and to update. When you have Prism Central, you have Calm already. You must buy the license for the blueprints, but it comes with Prism Central.

If you need cluster management, if you have more than one Nutanix cluster, you need Nutanix Prism Central and with Prism Central you have Calm.

Our deployment strategy is "one-at-a-time." We touch one system and make blueprints and then we go on to the next system. We migrate machines to Nutanix without a blueprint, but the goal is that—even though we have a lot of virtual machines and use cases, and this is an ongoing process—all the new projects, as well as when we touch an old project, will go over to a Calm blueprint, to make life easier. You cannot make that shift in one day.

Our overall strategy is to have Calm as a central tool to deploy virtual machines, with a requirement that nobody manually create virtual machines. There should be a blueprint first. 

There are times when it might not make sense, if you need just one machine for a particular use. It could be more work to make the blueprint. But I think it's worth making even these little machines as a blueprint, so that you can always create this machine everywhere, including the cloud, without documentation. And that's another point. As you know, when you write documentation, as soon as you're finished it's already old because things are changing.

We are still building our infrastructure, so it's early for us to look at return on investment. But there will be a return on our investment because we are not buying another SAN. We have saved a lot of money, because the SAN system is very expensive and also requires very expensive switches. So we are definitely ahead there.

Also, we had a lot of XenServers on hosts, and going with Nutanix allowed us to reduce the number of hosts. The new system is very performant and we don't need as much hardware to get the same performance.

In addition, although it has nothing to do with Calm, Nutanix helps by giving us a good overview of what is oversized or undersized. We can look at it and see, "Oh, this machine may be underused or overused," and we can free up resources. This is also an ongoing process. We see that a lot of machines are oversized and we can make them smaller. We save resources for other machines that way. But that part is Nutanix itself, through Prism Central.

Calm comes with Prism Central but you enable features by buying the license for them. You buy by the blueprint, how many blueprints you need to manage.

We also looked at HPE. We compared Nutanix with that solution. We decided then to go for Nutanix and do a proof of concept. The HPE solution was more limited in the nodes it could handle.

We work really closely with HPE. All our servers are from HPE. So HPE proposed a solution to us, But when we compared it by doing a SWOT analysis, part of our consideration was that Nutanix is a newer platform. It empowers a lot of things. It's a different technology.

My advice is "use it." To use Calm, the precondition is that you have Nutanix. To me it doesn't make sense to have Nutanix on-premise and then not use Calm. Then you would have to use SaltStack or Chef or whatever other management software exists for managing virtual machines or physical machines. If you go with Nutanix, it makes really sense to use Calm.

SaltStack and Ansible are also good, but it doesn't make sense to use them when you have Calm. With Nutanix you have one platform where you can manage everything. Calm gives you a lot of possibilities because you can script and easily integrate and control the whole Nutanix cluster with APIs. And you can easily integrate other services because you have the ability to call Python scripts very easily.

For us, it was very easy because we didn't have a lot of existing scripts. Other companies that have a lot of Salt scripts or a lot of Ansible scripts have to recreate them in some way. So we were in a good situation.

We now have 14 blueprint templates, and still growing. We are coming from the Citrix XenServer platform. We are not automatically creating a blueprint. It's ongoing. We had a lot of virtual machines on the Xen platform, and we have moved them over, but we don't automatically have a blueprint when we do. You must create the blueprints. We do them one-by-one. When we touch a system again, we create the blueprint for it. That way we can scale out, scale in, and make test systems.

There is a template for creating a machine, and then you manage that machine with this template. But when you have machines from another platform, like the XenServer virtualization platform, you can move it over, because Nutanix is also a virtualization platform for running VMs. But then you don't automatically have a blueprint, so you have to start a new project to make these blueprints. The strategy is that we will have all the code for our infrastructure so that we can build all our system out of blueprints.

I cannot say Calm is providing centralized control of all our applications because we have some legacy systems. We have IBM iSeries, which is another technology. But with Calm we can centralize all our x86 machines.

It's still early time and there is room for improvement. I give Calm a nine out of 10. I cannot give it a 10 because other platforms are also really good. Ansible and SaltStack are also powerful. It's more an issue of strategy and the fact that it is very easy to use. It's not a complex tool. They make it easy to use. Other frameworks are more complex to use, but may also be more powerful. But for our purposes, it fits exactly what we need. We haven't been blocked from doing anything we need to do with Calm. We haven't had any showstoppers.

Compared with other tools, Calm is newer and the scope of what you can do with it is still growing. They improve things. They make it easier to handle.

Nutanix Cloud Manager's biggest use case is compliance management, which includes configurations and drifts.

Cost estimation is another use case, but I don't know whether Prism moved that service because I've not used this product for cost estimation for the last eight to ten months. I've used other products for cloud health and other aspects.

The biggest generic benefit is the business value. There is no direct dollar benefit. The benefit is that the clients see MTTR reduction happening. They see low P1 or P2 calls or cases, but this decline happens over time. These are the benefits, but Nutanix Cloud Manager doesn't give you the benefits upfront. It's a journey because the system matures as you resolve low alerts. The outcome of this journey is the business value. For a small customer, it can take two months. For a mid-sized customer, it can take five to eight months. For a large enterprise, it can be twelve to eighteen months. There is no straight dollar productivity or dollar value benefit they will get. They cannot quantify those benefits. They can only say that their MTTR reduction happened, their system uptime is high, or their systems are more resilient.

In terms of the speed of the outcomes received using Nutanix Cloud Manager's low-code automation, I'm a supplier, I'm a GSI, and for me, the outcome is straightforward, which is a productivity improvement. The people who are doing day-to-day services don't need an automation engineer to automate their daily mundane tasks. With Nutanix Cloud Manager's low-code automation, I can just click and automate a task if the number of times an instance is repeated is high. It's a very simple left shift of the resources. An L1 engineer can do it for me, and I don't have to deploy highly skilled engineers. I can use their time to do more projects and provide value to the customer, so the low code in Nutanix Cloud Manager is always linked to the left shift of engineers.

The way we deliver it to our clients is that we don't tell them it's Nutanix Cloud Manager. We sell the functionality. If a customer wants to have end-to-end observability and AI ops built up for it, it's irrelevant to them whether I'm deploying NCA, or I'm deploying anything else. All that matters is the service, the functionality, and the cost for that functionality.

The most valuable feature is less or no implementation time. It should be up and running at any point in time so I don't spend time in transformation. I should spend more time in the operations cycle. The time to market is something that is very important. When it comes to operations, it should bring in the highest level of automation. I don't want teams to keep on troubleshooting in terms of whether it's a false alert or not.

I've seen that Nutanix Cloud Manager has fewer false alerts as compared to other products, such as SCCM.

Nowadays, we see systems breaking a lot. I know that the current features of Nutanix Cloud Manager help to monitor the container world and modern applications, but as more microservices are getting deployed, more micro-management of those services needs to be done. If NCL needs any improvement, it's in the microservices area because, over time, you will see more microservices getting deployed. Monitoring of those is an area that needs to be looked into.

I know this product from the time when it was launched as Prism. I have been using Prism and Beam since 2015 or 2016. Being a System Integrator, I deployed it in a lot of customer environments.

It's a highly stable product, but it's yet to be proven for very big customers.

It's good for up to mid-sized enterprises. For us, a mid-segment company has ten thousand virtual machines. They are running somewhere around 400 nodes of containers for elements. One of my big customers is running 6,600 Nutanix nodes.

There were multiple solutions that were built, integrated, and deployed. All the incident correlations used to happen in BigPanda, SolarWinds, and ServiceNow, and the automation engine used to pick up those events and triggers and then automate them. They were there, but I required resources with multiple skill sets. With Nutanix Cloud Manager's low code solution, with a single click, an L1 engineer can do a task. My life is easy, and their life is easy. There is a productivity gain.

In terms of the comparison of Nutanix Cloud Manager with other solutions, as a supplier, every product is good for me. We just need to find the best and low-cost solution that delivers the functionality, even if that functionality is delivered by a small tool.

ServiceNow CMP is a comparable solution. It does the monitoring and other functionalities, but it does not look into the niche, modern technologies that are there right now, such as the containerized environment and multi-cloud container-native architecture. ServiceNow CMP needs another automation engine to deploy it because while it connects workflows to your end-to-end playbooks, it does not run them, whereas, with Nutanix Cloud Manager, I'm getting everything in a box.

I'm a Chief Architect. Based on the customer's requirement, I do the big-picture stitching for the customer. Once our solutions team picks up the products, I can influence product usage. I'm currently handling database-as-a-service in the UK and Europe. I influence the selection of the products but not deployment.

My advice would be to go for it without asking. As a mid-segment enterprise, you get everything in the box. You don't need to spend more money. You don't need to first spend money on VMware, then on SolarWinds, and then on your automation engine. 

Prism is used a lot in terms of server and service monitoring, but it's not used for observability. It feeds into observability, but I'm trying to explore if it can be used for observability in a service model.

I'd rate it a nine out of ten.

70 to 90 percent of the use that we have for the solution is to get virtual machines running. We are also starting to use different aspects of Prism. For example, we just started to deploy their file storage solution. We weren't able to so far (within the last year), because there hasn't been much time to deploy projects on new technologies.

We do use the capacity planning. If we were to speak about the algorithm side of Nutanix, we use the compression algorithm for the compression that's in the storage and the storage deduplication algorithm. We find them really powerful. The capacity planning is a good algorithm, but it's a pretty simple one. It's just a projection of the expected growth of your cluster, so you can forecast if you need to buy more storage, compute, etc. 

The true power of the Nutanix algorithm lies within the storage algorithm: the deduplication, erasure coding, and compression. They are really powerful. We were actually quite surprised, because the experience we had before was only with storage arrays. Basically, when you buy a device that is purely dedicated to storage, you expect it to really perform in that area. That is pretty normal. 

When you buy a device, like Nutanix's hyper-converged solution, and it sells you on the fact that it has a really powerful algorithm for storage, you say, "Alright, it's like when you buy something that can do everything, but it's not really doing everything well. It's doing it okay." When we actually started pushing data on the Nutanix service, we saw that the compression was very good. We didn't expect it to be that good. Therefore, the algorithm for the storage side is well-thought-out and works really well.

The most valuable feature for us is the way we can use it with virtual machine to spin them. It is lightning fast compared to what we had before. The day-to-day tasks on a virtual machine are really fast. We have the economy of not having too much complexity in the menu and design of the solution, and information is accessible pretty quick. The best feature is really how simple it is to interact with virtual machines. 

The Prism features on the backup side have made it so much easier. Now, when we want to backup our VMs and do a cross data center backup, we utilize two clusters located in two data centers in Paris. For each virtual machine that is running, we have what they call a protection domain, which takes a snapshot of the VM and sends it to the other cluster. In the event of a cluster failure on one of the data centers, we can just press one button in another data center on another cluster in Prism. This will spin the VMs that have been backed up from the primary data center to the secondary one and make them run. It is a one-button recovery plan, which is pretty amazing.

There are a lot of features that could be added or, at least, made better.

There are two kinds of Prism. 

1. Prism Element: Which is what's installed on each cluster and running each cluster individually.
2. Prism Central: Which you use to connect to all your Prism Elements, meaning all the clusters. Then, it centralizes your view of your infrastructure. We have found a lot of bugs in the interface. Sometimes, when you do an action, it says to you that it's 100% done. However, in the background, the action is still ongoing, and you have no visual update on how long will it take. 

Just this morning, we took an image from Prism Central. That image was installed on one of the clusters. In Prism Central, you have one feature that enables you to place the image on multiple clusters. You just have to select them, and say, "I want my image of my virtual machine to be on all my clusters." So, when I want to spin a VM on an individual cluster, I will find the image. What is happening is that when you use the feature of image placement on Prism Central, you select the clusters on which you want to push the image, then you validate. Once you validate, it says, "Alright, the image update has been done successfully," but in the background, it's actually placing the image. Therefore, you have absolutely nothing visually that tells you whether it will finish soon or last a lot longer. You're just there, sitting and waiting for an update that you have to visually see on the interface by refreshing the interface. 

Imagine if you were to copy a file from one directory to another directory, but you have nothing to tell you whether it's ongoing or will take five minutes, ten minutes, or an hour. You just have to wait in the other directory for the file to appear and see that it's copied. This is not down to the functionality. It's down to the design of the user interface.

If you want to convert a virtual machine to an image, you have to do it via command line. Why is there not a button on the Nutanix interface that does this? 

We have been using it for almost a year.

The stability of the Prism solution is another thing that we have found to be a bit of work. For example, the Prism Central and the appliances use 97 percent of the CPU and RAM of the virtual machine. We don't know why. There is a memory leak somewhere that makes it overuse the memory. Nutanix is aware of this. It has been ongoing for a year, and they still haven't fixed it. I just don't get it.

Scaling is easy, rapid, and pretty straightforward. Now, we have two clusters consisting of 16 nodes on each cluster. If we were to extend the cluster, we would just order a new node, rack it, and image it to have the same version of the operating system off the Nutanix cluster. Adding it to the cluster is really straightforward. Then, Nutanix takes care of everything, because it's going to use the node to deduplicate blocks of storage. It's going to use the node to store VMs on the node. The automated services on Nutanix are really good.

There are mainly 20 users utilizing it, with a maximum of 30 users. We have a SysOps team, which does like Level 1 administration, who uses Prism for their day-to-day tasks, e.g. renaming the server, creating a new server, moving a server from one node to another node, or augmenting the capacity of the server to extend the disks, CPU, or RAM. There is also the SRE team, which is the engineering team, and we do the much more complex tasks. For example, when we work on the design of a new solution, we will present storage directly on the VMs. We do tasks that are a little more complicated than the other users.

I have been in touch with Nutanix support. They have been really fantastic. The only thing that is an issue is that we are in Europe, and when we open a ticket in European time, we get a response off-hours from India. If you are in Europe and you open a ticket during European business hours, you should probably get someone from Nutanix in Amsterdam who responds. Sometimes, we open a ticket up at ten o'clock in the morning and get a response on our ticket at five o'clock in the evening from India. How come it wasn't seen by the European teams first? It's a European company with a European headquarters. You have to specifically request for your tickets to be handled in your time zone for someone from Europe to contact you. 

We are the classical customer. Before, we were using a normal three-tier hosting solution, which consisted of having a stack of storage, a stack of network, and a stack of hypervisors for the compute and memory. We thought it was a burden to maintain, because every time when we had to do updates or security patches, we had three stacks to maintain. Whereas, when we switched to Prism, we benefited from its hyper-converged solution. This meant our time maintaining and keeping the solution up-to-date was divided by a great factor. That brought us to Nutanix.

We originally came from VMware. We also had some Hyper-V also, but we were originally a pure VMware customer for our virtual machines. I have used VMware for far longer than I've been in the IT industry. Nutanix was my first experience other than VMware. It is day and night for me. I would much rather use the Nutanix product line than the VMware one.

There were two factors for moving from VMware to Nutanix. 

1. We had to renew our infrastructure. It was getting a bit old, so we needed more power in order to also forecast the growth of the company. 
2. The simplicity of hyper-converged makes it a leader. For example, it's a bit like when you cook in your kitchen and have all the ingredients, then you have to assemble them and cook them. I compare Nutanix to those new machines that came out where you put all your ingredients together and you just press a button, then it cooks it for you. It is really a little bit like that. It is like everything is hyper-converged, so in one block you have your storage, compute, memory, etc. When you want to expand your cluster, e.g., if you want to add more VMs or more storage, then you just buy one block, plug it in, and link it to your cluster. That's it. You don't have anything else to do because it's all automated, where it was a burden before when we were under VMware.

This solution seems like going from a complex, cross-embedded solution to something which is a Next Generation website. The design is very intuitive; it's easy to find information in the different menus and things like that. The user experience is much better compared to other products.

In the gambling industry, you have a lot of regulation from different countries. One of those regulations states that you have to be able to send all the logs of your Prism to a separate server, what we call the syslog server. On Prism Central, this doesn't work. We have opened a case for it, since this is a basic feature nowadays. We spoke to Nutanix, and they said that it will be in future updates. We did an update, following their support, but once we did the update, it wasn't fixed. 

Nutanix suffers tiny glitches, when you put them one behind another, make the experience just a pain. However, the main features work well. There is no doubt of that.

The initial setup was straightforward: You receive the servers, you pick up the servers, and you rank them. Once you rank them, you plug them into your network. After that, you plug in your computer, you image the cluster, and deploy the appliances. It was a two-man, two-day job to deploy 32 nodes.

We did a high-level design, a low-level design, and a network design, respectively, then we opened the deployment project. It was pretty classical straightforward. Nutanix was pretty easy. The hardest part of the work was in thinking the design of what you wanted, e.g., how many nodes and clusters. We studied the capacity used by our old VMware infrastructure and forecasted the future growth of the company to integrate in how much Nutanix we were going to buy, how many nodes, and how much compute power. Deploying the actual physical hardware and cluster mechanics was easy. It was really a piece of cake.

When you deploy the cluster, make sure you set up the networking. This is really important. If you don't do it right, you will have to come back to it later, and that could be a pain.

Do the testing extensively before you go to production. We spent two days deploying and one full day just testing that the deployment was correct.

I was involved in the deployment of the clusters. I was in the data center to deploy the servers. I was there when we deployed the Prism appliance. I was involved every step of the way (from A to Z), even in the migration from VMware to Nutanix. 

The adoption rate is 90 percent. We also have some cloud and SaaS/PaaS services. Otherwise, the whole company sits on Nutanix. Right now, we have nine million users using our application and placing bets. At the highest peak, we can have a rate of thousands of logins a minute on our infrastructure. When there is big games, e.g., Champions League Games.

Imagine that we have a lot of people placing bets or surfing the website for the offer. Our infrastructure has to respond really quickly. For example, if a customer places a bet and the game finishes, we have to pay that bet quickly so the customer is able to replace a new bet for the following game, the day after, or something else. The stability of the infrastructure, its resiliency, and capacity to take in load is really important. 

Since we switched to Nutanix, we have had fewer bottlenecks and issues during the big game nights. We are using Nutanix and our infrastructure and rely on it for our business.

We have felt the ROI. We don't spend so much time on administration as we did before Nutanix. Before, it was fastidious to update all our VMware, clusters etc. We had to do that every three months. Right now, in Nutanix, it takes us half a day. It is one person who presses a button and goes onto some other business. Nutanix takes care of the update.

We're not using the Prism Pro solution; we are using Prism Ultimate. We have the highest level of license.

Be careful when you buy Nutanix. You get to choose if you're going with Dell, HPE, or Lenovo. Make sure you choose the right one for your company. The vendor is a critical step. 

Don't unlicense your Prism licensing. Pro is the strict minimum for real infrastructure. Go with at least Pro and not with the starter. Ultimate was the best choice for me. 

We did an evaluation with HyperFlex, which is the Cisco solution. It wasn't good at all. Whereas, Nutanix is sending you a hyper-converged infrastructure, and what you see is, what you get. With HyperFlex, they're selling you the same idea, but once you get is not exactly what you expect. It's blocks that you have to assemble yourself in order to make it a hyperconverged solution, while Nutanix is truly a hyper-converged solution. Nutanix gives you the appliance and server, which you just rack and off you go. 

We tried using Nutanix Calm and Karbon for the Kubernetes cluster, but we didn't find them to be as easy to use as we expected. When we heard about Calm, we almost thought that we could do automation at a level that would be similar to Puppet, Chef, or SaltStack. When we looked at the features inside, it wasn't exactly like that. Since what we have to do is pretty complex, doing it under Puppet for the orchestration and things like that, this seemed to us much easier than doing it under Calm.

I think this was because communication was off from the Nutanix side and our understanding was off from our company side. We expected it to be a product that it was not, so we haven't been able to use it. We did try to have a look into Calm, but we haven't found a use case for the product. The use case that we have in the company requires us to direct to another product, which we decided would be Puppet.

We are heading towards a DevOps culture. What will happen is that we're going to head more and more towards hybid datacenters. We might increase our usage of Nutanix.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.