Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

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.

I work at a distributor. We use it for partner-facing demos, and it has been really great. My mission is to help partners see the light with Nutanix, and that's where I use Nutanix Cloud Manager the most.

It's highly capable. In an organization, you can make it easy to use, but you still have advanced features. You're not simplifying or dumbing it down. You're still enabling an advanced user to design solutions and leverage the full product suite. It's highly capable, so you have that great ability to be successful for a lot of different users. You can have a very low-level, simplified user experience and you can also go advanced. In terms of organization, that's really key. As you get into hybrid cloud IT environments where there's a lot going on, Nutanix storage is very powerful.

The speed of the outcomes received using Nutanix Cloud Manager's low-code automation is very fast. The beauty of it is that because it's low code and no code, even as a beginner, I was able to go in and walk myself through it. I didn't need a lot of coaching or instruction to get there. It was fantastic.

In terms of the importance of these outcomes, it's not just about delivering an outcome. Anybody can deliver an outcome if you offer enough time, but delivering that outcome more reliably and faster enables that business to benefit a lot sooner. They then see the cost get lower. They see efficiency go up, and they start to really benefit from technology as opposed to seeing technology and IT in general as a cost center and as a liability.

It's awesome for helping teams address their current automation needs while planning for future expansion. That's because of the way that it enables a broad variety of users to accomplish what they want in a very efficient and simple way. It brings an iPhone user experience to IT, and that's a really powerful story right now.

The best part of it is that when you use the product, there's no secret proprietary magic that you experience as a user. The real genius is under the covers, so it makes the user experience very straightforward and easy. It's a wonderful solution to teach partners about. The ease of use is something a lot of suppliers talk about, but Nutanix does it better than anyone else.

Nutanix has room for improvement around the partner tools and making them approachable and easier to learn.

I've been using this solution for about one year.

It's highly stable. I haven't had any issues. It's very easy to run, and it keeps running. I don't have to do much with it. That's the beauty of it.

The details around scaling, like Prism Central and scaling the resources, are highly technical and get highly specific per use case, but it's always scalable. You can always find the documentation very easily, and it's very straightforward to do so.

Their support is terrific and world-class. Nutanix always talks about their NPS scores, their success, and their commitment to customer service, but I've seen its boots on the ground level. People try to help me even if it's outside of their role. Ever since I stepped into this role, it's been a really wonderful surprise to see Nutanix try so hard to help us. I'd rate their support a ten out of ten.

Positive

I supported other suppliers in different roles. In my IT career, I worked with a number of different suppliers, typically more on legacy three-tier work, such as fiber channel attachment and the like. All those suppliers struggled to evolve to support modern workloads, and that's where I feel that Nutanix has always been ahead of the game. I chose this role to support Nutanix on purpose. It wasn't by accident that I ended up here.

I can't say that I had this same level of experience with the competitors. We are an HPE shop. We have a huge HPE presence, which is great, and I have experienced a few other hyper-converged providers. I've done some VMware training over the years, but I haven't really gotten my hands on them in the administrative sense. It's not as deep as with Nutanix.

Simplicity is a key function for helping a customer really benefit from technology. You can have technology for technology's sake, but suppliers are really stuck in a world that's proprietary. Even to navigate an administrative tool, you see a lot of proprietary terms, whereas a generalist can sit down and run Nutanix very quickly.

In my role, I didn't really decide on Cloud Manager myself, but in talking to partners and end users, it's a very strong consideration. There are a lot of competitors in the space that Nutanix plays in, so the value that Nutanix brings has to be superior in order for them to be effective, and, of course, they are. That goes back to simplicity and the efficiency that comes with it.

I was involved in its setup for our lab. It was very straightforward. We had some help from Nutanix. Nutanix is always falling all over themselves to help us, which is wonderful. It only took a little while. We just did it via a remote session, and it worked out great. I'm located in Minnesota. My lab is in Georgia. The help from Nutanix was in another place, and we had no issues at all. It was very smooth.

It's not necessarily from leveraging NCM or NCI itself just because of the way that it works for us, but our ROI is tied to our partners and to customers in a way. Their success is our success, and that's why we're gaining a lot of momentum with new partners. We're reactivating dormant partners and trying to broaden the Nutanix message. There are a few core partners that do it really well, and that's great, but we try to broaden things, and we have success with it.

For customers, the ROI is primarily around efficiency and simplicity. So as an example, Life Cycle Manager isn't just a great tool for updates and upgrades, it's a way to have happier staff. It's a way to give your staff weekends back, which is great for the staff. They're happy, but it also means you don't pay overtime. There's a win-win there. There's a great symbiosis if that happens when people adopt the technology.

I've never heard a customer ask for a higher price. Everyone says everything is expensive, and that's true. Nutanix is really smart to understand that the most important fact is the value to the customer, not the price tag. 

While you do get some sticker shock sometimes, as soon as you show this and you prove the value, all of a sudden, it looks exceptionally affordable. We've had wonderful success when we get a buying decision in front of an economic buyer, like a financial leader. They start to see the TCO benefits of Nutanix very, very quickly.

Sometimes it's about the little things. It's about what your experience is like and how much time you spend trying to learn how to use the product. It's about how much time and money is it going to cost you to understand their proprietary terms for things as opposed to having a generalist sit down and be off to the races. That can save a lot of hassle and frustration but also time and money. With these projects, it is important to get outcomes, get that workload deployed, and enable a business or a customer to focus on what keeps their lights on, which is probably not managing infrastructure. That's how I see it. 

I'd rate it a nine out of ten. There's always room to improve, but as far as what's on the market today, it's a unique value add.

Our first use case is for ransomware. We have two more use cases that we identified. The second one is going to be for DR, and the third one is going to be for capacity.

Currently, we do ransomware on-prem. We use a shared cluster in our disaster recovery site. With Nutanix Cloud Manager, we hope to use the NC2 clusters in Azure and move all the ransomware activities from on-prem to the cloud.

We are an insurance company. Data security is our top priority. We take ransomware very seriously. We always want to be careful and make sure that our data is secure, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. We go through ransom activities at least once a month on-prem, and that's what we hope to do with Nutanix Cloud Manager as well. We hope to continue to provide data security to our business and to our customers.

We use Nutanix Cloud Manager's built-in playbooks. They absolutely freed up our team's time to focus on other tasks or projects. We were looking to use these playbooks for a while. From an automation perspective and from a day-to-day management perspective, creating these playbooks definitely freed up our engineers to focus on more strategic tasks and more solutions than day-to-day activities. They saved about 40% of their time. As we move forward and use more playbooks, we see more and more time freed up. It freed up at least six to seven percent of our engineers' time.

The ability to do Layer 2 stretching across data centers is valuable. The migration of VMs from one location to the other is also valuable.

There should be more APIs to integrate with different vendors and to integrate with the existing solutions that we use on-prem.

I've been using this solution for about a year.

We had some hiccups with Nutanix Cloud Manager, our on-prem networking solutions, and all that, but as we went on, we overcame all those issues. There has been no showstopper whatsoever. All the issues that we came across were just small things that we had to work through. Nutanix's support has been very helpful. They worked with us all the way to help us overcome all these issues, and so far, it has been great.

We are looking forward to it. We only have a small NCM platform built, but as we move forward, we look forward to using it for other use cases. We definitely want to explore expanding our NCM presence in Azure or in AWS.

Their support was excellent. I'd rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We used Azure's cloud-native management. We still use it to some point to manage our Azure entities in the public cloud. Other than that, we haven't used any solution.

The setup was easy. We had help from Nutanix support, which was excellent. We got wonderful support from people who gave us a hand along the way. It wasn't very difficult, and within two or three days, we were fully functional to some extent. As far as the ease of use goes, our engineers love it. They use it every single day. I've not heard any complaints from our users. The user experience that we always look for has been great so far.

Learning is wonderful. There's so much available on Nutanix's portal in terms of the KB articles, knowledge base, user guides, and admin guides for Nutanix Cloud Manager. To have all that available to our engineers online is a great help.

I'm sure we will see an ROI. We've only been doing it for a year. It takes time, but I'm very confident that as we grow and mature, we will definitely see some positive returns.

https://www.peerspot.com/produ...When we started to look at Nutanix Cloud Manager, the cost was a major factor. Management comes into play. Hosting on-prem is getting expensive. We did find a lot of cost benefits to using the NCM and NC2 clusters in Azure. Being a Microsoft partner, we always get a big discount. When we use Nutanix Cloud Manager in Azure or AWS, there is an ease of management. We have a single pane of glass to look through and manage our on-prem entities and Nutanix Cloud Manager. It becomes very easy.

The pricing was very good. We were very pleased with what we were offered by our account manager. Because of that, we expanded Nutanix Cloud Manager, and we hope to expand even more. Right now, we are in Azure, and as we build up more and more within the NCM platform, we hope to expand into AWS as well.

We chose Nutanix Cloud Manager because of the pricing. Also, the features and the capabilities that it offers within the Nutanix ecosystem were very attractive. We've been using Nutanix on-prem for almost six years, and to be able to extend them on the cloud was a no-brainer.

We use Calm for on-prem automation, and we are looking to use Calm for our cloud automation as well. We have PoC flow for Microsec on-prem, and we hope to extend that out to the cloud as well as we segregate the traffic between on-prem and cloud entities.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is very easy to use. Our users and engineers have become very knowledgeable in a very short time, and as far as the cost goes, it has been very effective.

We only started using it about a year ago, and there's a lot more we need to use Nutanix Cloud Manager for. We haven't fully explored all its capabilities from an automation, AI, or machine learning perspective. We hope to use all the built-in features within Nutanix Cloud Manager.

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

We have a group of sister companies with different types of applications, from web-based to server-installed. 

We segment our clusters into different areas for each company to use, from development to staging to production. 

Currently, we mainly use the production area, and our staging is off. With the new NCM, we may use a different hardware or environment. 

Since moving to Nutanix, the development and support teams prefer it more.Due to differences in hardware and workload deployments.

One of the solution's greatest strengths is its "Single pane of glass" feature, which allows users to access all pertinent data in one location immediately upon logging in. Additionally, the solution's ease of deployment and mobility are notable aspects that I personally find appealing.

During my attendance at Nutanix, I personally discovered a significant benefit. Although we currently operate a separate division for our public cloud infrastructure, we have yet to leverage the potential of integrating it with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) or Nutanix Clusters (NC). 

What I've learned is that we can seamlessly migrate and manage the details displayed on NCM's dashboards, consolidating everything into a unified environment. 

While we haven't taken advantage of this opportunity yet, I am eager to take full advantage of it in the future.

Our sister company currently uses an outdated database technology, Sybase, which presents challenges in migrating to a newer database. Despite our efforts to encourage them to move to a different database, the company's 25 years of code and data basic make it difficult to do so. 

We are open to any level of support or guidance that can help us manage the Sybase database, even if it's not a fully managed solution. 

Direction on how to scale, improve, and optimize tables and queries within Sybase would be greatly appreciated.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for less than a year.

The company has been using Nutanix for the past four or five years and has gone through different versions. However, we have been using NCM for about a year to a year and a half.

I am satisfied with the stability of the system. Our engineers have had no issues accessing it and I have not received any reports of bugs or accessibility problems.

This solution effectively addresses our current automation requirements, especially with regard to repetitive tasks that the team needs to learn how to automate. 

As our company expands, we are interested in shifting the bulk of our workloads away from the public cloud and into our private cloud clusters.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) offers a lot of automation capabilities that we can take advantage of in the future. While there are already some basic automation features like Nutanix Move, there is significant potential for additional automation within NCM. 

This automation will greatly assist us in scaling our operations without the need for manual repetition. As we continue to explore NCM and prepare for transitioning away from the public cloud, we can leverage a substantial amount of automation to streamline our processes.

The scalability of the system is straightforward, even from a hardware standpoint. 

Simply adding servers to the data center and integrating them into the cluster is a remarkably effortless process. 

I have not come across a solution that offers such ease of scalability.

I have had the opportunity to engage with Nutanix support through various channels, including email, meetings, and post-installation calls. Even when we added two nodes to our infrastructure last year, Nutanix engineers were on-site to install the cluster, and I must say, they provided excellent service.

The support we received from Nutanix through emails has been excellent, with detailed and concise information provided.

Our experiences with Nutanix's account management and technical account management calls in early 2019 were extremely productive. They were highly focused, aiming to gather detailed information about our environment and workloads. This allowed them to effectively assist with scaling out, gaining a thorough understanding of our environment, and troubleshooting as needed. The level of support provided by Nutanix has been consistently outstanding.

Although I am not directly involved, from my observations, everything has been great, including the engineers who assisted us in adding nodes to our cluster. They were very helpful and knowledgeable.

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

On a personal level, I would rate Nutanix at a nine and a half. However, this rating is based on my limited direct involvement and is not a comprehensive assessment from a Nutanix perspective. Taking into account the algorithm used to evaluate performance, my interactions with Nutanix have been highly positive.

I did not participate in the initial setup process.

We have experienced a significant return on investment (ROI) through our implementation of Nutanix. Initially, we started with two Nutanix systems, using them in our staging environment. However, as COVID-19 emerged in 2019, we acquired six additional nodes and deployed them in our production environment. Almost immediately after putting them into operation, we witnessed the tangible value they brought. The returns generated from this implementation have been substantial.

We initiated a gradual migration process, gradually transferring workloads into the Nutanix environment. As our workload demands grew, we reached capacity in the system by the end of last year. To accommodate this expansion, we have already acquired and installed a new cluster. Additionally, we have a dedicated disaster recovery (DR) site, and our objective is to transform this DR site into a fully operational production site by deploying another new cluster there.

On one side, we have our production environment, while on the other side, we have our disaster recovery (DR) setup. As we continue to witness the positive impact and returns on investment (ROI), we anticipate further growth in our Nutanix infrastructure. Initially, there was some hesitation and uncertainty, but once we experienced the immediate benefits and ROI, we realized the immense value Nutanix brings to our operations.

Implementing Nutanix brings both cost and time benefits. With an initial investment, the focus shifts toward recovering and maximizing the value of that investment. In contrast, when relying solely on the public cloud, there is a constant ongoing investment and potential challenges in controlling costs. While efforts are made to maintain control, it can still be a never-ending endeavor. However, by adopting Nutanix, engineers can quickly grasp and adapt to the system, making informed decisions and judgment calls more efficiently. This ease of learning and system familiarity empowers them to navigate and optimize the infrastructure with confidence.

With the ease of use and automation provided by Nutanix, our engineers can make informed decisions on workload management such as migration, reduction, or scaling up. This saves them time and provides opportunities for personal and professional development.

We evaluated AWS as a file management system, and it appears to be a possible solution.

When it comes to setup, both AWS and Nutanix offer attractive features from a management perspective. However, AWS can sometimes be a bit confusing, requiring repetitive actions and causing potential challenges. 

On the other hand, Nutanix, particularly with the support of NCM and its accompanying university resources, simplifies the transition from learning to live environments. 

The comprehensive coverage in the university program facilitates easier implementation in the actual environment, further aided by features like the test drive, which allows for experimentation without concerns about breaking anything. This emphasis on ease of use was the primary topic of discussion.

From my personal preference, having everything consolidated in a single pane of glass is important, and Nutanix excels in this aspect. 

While AWS has recently introduced cost statistics upon login, Nutanix had already implemented this feature earlier. 

Not only does Nutanix provide a comprehensive overview, but it also allows for effortless navigation into deeper insights with just a click. In contrast, AWS requires more extensive digging or clicking to access detailed information, making the process less user-friendly compared to Nutanix.

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

I have about 85 virtual machines that rotate between cloud and on-premises. I use the tool for databases, applications, and service communications. I use the solution for my complete infrastructure. Since I work in a Casino, we have a lot of work on the databases with respect to our gaming applications and their servers. Our applications also run on workstations. Therefore, I use the Nutanix platform to store all our applications. I use it for file servers, email servers, DHCP, DNS servers, and domain controllers.

I like the solution's duplication feature. For example, there is a file created by an employee from the finance department. However, there are other employees working on that file, say from the surveillance department and gaming department. It’s about five people who work on that same file. So, Nutanix cross-checks all five versions and saves them as a single file. It saves document space by consolidating all five documents into one.

I also like the fact that the solution manages itself. It has one interface where you can basically see all your servers. So, you can manage your servers and see whether you are falling short on space or disc usage. Also, in case your RAM only uses four Gigabytes of memory instead of eight, you can extend out the over-provisioned mail and save your cluster for four Gigs of RAM.

The solution also helps you save costs. In case your servers use less space, you can cut down your hard drive by 100 Gigabytes which you can provision for another server or create another server on the cloud.

While using Nutanix, we need to switch off the VM in case we are doing an update. We have to turn off the VM if we are updating the memory or hard disk space. In a normal scenario, we switch off the VM, update it and then update the RAM. Once updated, we need to switch on the machine and wait for the RAM to initialize. The same goes for hard drives as well.

I would like them to improve the solution so that we can operate it live without switching off the VM. Switching off the VM causes downtime. It would be great to log back without switching off the VM and affecting the services.

I have been using this solution for four years.

The solution is stable.

Nutanix is a scalable solution.

I contact customer service and support at least two times a month. Their services are quite excellent since their response time is exactly the same as the SLA provider.

I have used Hyper-V before Nutanix. 

The solution was very easy to install. We had only three nodes to install since we moved from Hyper-V. The deployment process took us around four days to complete since we had to recreate the VMs on the Nutanix platform and move them over from Hyper-V. We created a VM called Nutanix Move on our Nutanix environment. Nutanix Move enables you to take a machine from the Hyper-V environment and convert it to the OS used in the Nutanix platform. I had 85 machines and downtime was an issue while deploying the solution. I had to do the switching over mostly during the night or early hours of the morning.

However, the process was quick. We recreated about 20 VMs a day which is quite impressive.

The pricing is lower compared to Hyper-V.

I would give a ten out of ten for the solution. Nutanix has saved our company from doing multiple general server checks which used to take around three to four hours in our old environment. Nutanix gets the checks done within 20 mins at the most. The solution's capabilities are endless. It is a stable product that will sustain your environment. It is really good and works like magic. Apart from Nutanix's pricing aspect, our company decided to use the solution because of technological advancement.

We use Nutanix Cloud Manager to manage all of our Nutanix infrastructure. We have six data centers throughout the world, and we use it to manage all that infrastructure for VMware. We're currently moving to AHV and are managing those as well.

From a resiliency of the infrastructure standpoint, we don't chase outages and major problems like we used to on other arrays such as CMC storage or Dell storage. Our folks have a lot more free time handle to the normal workload instead of troubleshooting.

The ease of use is a valuable feature. For us, it's a consistent interface. It's very easy to train our employees on it, and it's a newer generation interface. It's homogeneous, and every product and subset tie together, giving a very similar look to everything.

We do implement Nutanix Cloud Manager's built-in playbooks. Currently, the biggest one we use that's been very helpful is cleaning up snapshots. As users do snapshots of their virtual machines, it then goes back and cleans those out. We don't have a mess lingering out there.

Because Nutanix Cloud Manager's eScripts are based on Python, it allows me to bring developers in who are Python-centric. They are able to get up to speed quickly and develop the automation pieces we need for our own private cloud and build servers and applications on-premises.

In some ways, Nutanix Cloud Manager abstracts out certain items in a simplified manner, which makes it good for training. At other times, to get to the next technical level, we want to actually dive in, and Nutanix Cloud Manager sometimes restricts us from actually diving into the deeper technical pieces. There's no advance button that lets us do more advanced things without having to drop out to the CLI to do the command line piece.

I've worked with Nutanix Cloud Manager for more than five years.

So far, we've been very impressed with the stability. In the Nutanix ecosystem, everything is clustered, highly available, and fails over. It takes care of itself.

We have very few users who are using Nutanix Cloud Manager at present, but we do have all of our infrastructure running Nutanix on the storage side. From that scale, we're handling thousands of servers with no issues there. In about three months, we will be switching over all of our VMware folks to Nutanix Cloud Manager via ServiceNow. Then, we'll be able to see the full impact of our users using Nutanix Cloud Manager.

I would give a ten out of ten to Nutanix's technical support. We've had excellent support. They always know two or three other people they can call on to help with certain portions of an issue. There's very good networking within the company.

Positive

We're a VMware shop and have vRA, which we used for all the automation on the VMware side. We also used vRealize Orchestrator. Initially, we chose Nutanix over standard disc arrays because we came out of the storage market. As Nutanix has added products, we've seen value in them and went in that direction.

When we bought the storage system and disc encryption, they came with other licenses. Nutanix Cloud Manager was an add-on. When we looked at the cost of other solutions and the opportunities that Nutanix Cloud Manager gives us to tie directly into Nutanix, it just seemed to be the right fit.

It might be too early to tell as we just started using Nutanix Cloud Manager for our private cloud about four months ago. Once we get fully off of VMware, we should definitely see an ROI.

The price is probably right where it should be. It's not vastly expensive, and it's not too cheap. We get very good value for the price with what we're being offered with it.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is a walled garden, and you have to do all of your editing within the interface. Our developers become frustrated with not being able to use other tools such as Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and CSE pipelines. These are outside of the Nutanix Cloud Manager interface, and the developers would prefer to use them instead of using the NCM interface. In this sense, Nutanix Cloud Manager has been a struggle to use. The NCM interface could be improved.

The setup is fantastic because you can click a button and deploy it. It's already part of the existing piece, and it's like adding a module. Compared to the setup of other cloud management solutions, Nutanix Cloud Manager's setup is much easier. We just spent about four months upgrading a VMware product, and there were bugs. It was a nightmare. With Nutanix Cloud Manager, it's click-and-play, and we haven't had any issues at all.

The learning curve is a lot easier because it is based on Python, and we have developers who already know it. We don't have to retool. Many of my developers have been up to speed in under a week.

If you're considering Nutanix Cloud Manager, my advice would be to go through the entire POC in-depth to see the value in it. Initially, it may look very simplistic, but when you dive into the code, you will see the depth of the product.

Overall, I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a six because the automation tools are still in the early stages. There are things that need to be fleshed out in the private cloud as well as the public cloud. I don't see anything badly wrong with it, but I think there's a lot of room for improvement as an industry in general.

I am not using the cloud manager myself. Instead, I am responsible for deploying and implementing it on behalf of my clients. My role solely involves deploying the manager.

From my company's perspective, our main use case for Nutanix revolves around Citrix. We use it for Citrix Cloud, Citrix on-premises, and sometimes for data center modernization. However, the main reason our customers continue to use Nutanix is its multi-cloud visibility and its ease of VM management.

One or two of our customers utilize the built-in playbooks depending on their level of maturity and available resources. The automation goals of these playbooks are important, but the extent to which they are adopted depends on the customer's IT team and their level of readiness.

We have just begun implementing this, so we don't have any feedback yet on how much time it will save on their projects using playbooks.

We only sell and deployed Nutanix. We don't sell anything else. Because we trust the value of the product and we don't have to manage other products and Nutanix is the best way to satisfy the customers.

Because of its easy deployment, sellability, and fast implementation, Nutanix is a preferred choice. It has excellent performance for workloads and is easy to migrate and move workloads. Additionally, it's simple to convert existing VMware Nutanix clusters to a Nutanix infrastructure, making DR and security easier. Overall, it provides a well-organized and seamless experience.

The most valuable features of this solution are visibility, the single console, capacity planning, the VM efficiencies. We have a recovery plan, security, policies policy security. That's why we implement it with your customers.

I believe that Nutanix Central has the potential to enhance the features and management capabilities of the platform. In my opinion, Nutanix Central will be instrumental in further improving this aspect.

I don't anticipate needing any additional features in this area. While I may require new features such as load balancing with Nutanix Flow networking, I don't believe I'll need them from NCM.

Over the past year, we have seen several improvements in Nutanix Cloud Manager, including new dashboards for security and disaster recovery. Additionally, a new dashboard has been introduced.

There are some load-balancing features that are currently missing in the flow network security and could potentially be added in the future.

I have been working with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for nine years.

The stability is good.

We have not had any problems with NCM.

The goal is to optimize what they currently have and detect any anomalies, particularly in terms of security, for future expansion. This is why they are using it.

Perhaps it would be better if NCM could be optimized to consume fewer resources.

The support team for Nutanix is exceptional. 

The support provided by Nutanix is the best I have ever experienced. 

Whenever we open a case, the solution is provided quickly with excellent quality. The support team is composed of knowledgeable individuals who can address issues effectively.

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

Previously, I worked with vRealize Operation Automation.

In my opinion, VMware is not as user-friendly as NCM, which is why I did not choose it for our project.

I think NCM is a valuable tool and can provide evidence of its usefulness, but sometimes the decision not to use it comes down to budget constraints.

We don't handle the deployment process ourselves, but it really depends on the specific use case. For many of our customers, their use case revolves around Citrix. As a result, some customers don't require Nutanix Central, since they only run Virtual Delivery Agents (VDA) on the cluster. Therefore, the decision to use Nutanix Central or other tools really depends on the specific requirements of the customer's use case.

The default deployment is okay.

We have experienced a positive return on investment due to the VM efficiency that Nutanix provides. It has allowed us to optimize our infrastructure and reduce the number of on-desk nodes. This has enabled us to redirect the budget towards other solutions or add more nodes and features.

In my opinion, the pricing is reasonable.

The pricing for NCM is appealing when selling to cloud vendors. I believe that the starter level should be included by default in the package. 

This would enable us to offer more features to customers who may not have the budget to purchase NCM separately. By having basic features included in the package, it would be easier to sell additional features and the full stack to customers.

When we discovered Nutanix and NCM, we were amazed by the simplicity and user-friendliness, and it felt like a revelation. The WOW effect was so strong that we didn't even consider looking for another product.

My main advice to future customers is to be cautious about the resource consumption of NCM and carefully consider where to host the NCM installations.

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

We use it for capacity planning and we forecast with it. We use the workload reporting, which includes VM efficiencies, and we're able to provide reports that way on capacity, storage, and Runways.

One of the big benefits is that it helps us explain why we are scaling and why we need to do certain things. We can scale out or up and show them why. There's proof before any money is spent. It's had a positive impact.

I can go to management and say, "We need this many sort-only nodes before the end of the year to give you the capacity for what you need to have done. And I can say, "This is where we're going to use up what we have." Sometimes they'll say, "Oh, we won't need it," and we can come back and say, "It's been showing us this the entire time."

We're big on the capacity planning. We're fortunate that we're not restricted by a budget, but we do need to have things budgeted for planning purposes. We need to be able to say, "We're going to need 500 terabytes," or "We're going to need X amount of storage in the coming year." The capacity planning helps us really stay ahead of the curve.

There have been bugs. We've seen what looked like some storage inefficiencies in reports and, when we went in to look, we found they were false alarms. That was something they corrected on the fly.

Overall, it works.

We're using Ultimate within Nutanix Cloud Manager and we've been using the solution since 2017.

It's very stable.

It's also scalable. We use it across multiple locations and multiple teams. 

Unfortunately, we don't have any plans to increase our usage of it. I have voiced some frustrations, internally, over the years, that I have not gotten to expand and use the product the way it should be used. I wish we could have really given it a lot more play in our shop.

Nutanix Calm, is another portion piece I wanted to look at.

I would rate Nutanix in my top two or three in terms of support. I've worked with some vendors that are lacking but Nutanix is not one of them. I've opened a lot of tickets with Nutanix over the years, but I've rated every one of them when I have closed them, and every one has been a 10 out of 10.

When we had the bug with the storage, they approached it as "high severity."

Their support is on par with VMware; they're good. And with Nutanix, it doesn't take as long to get into the upper-tier support. When you get someone on the line at Nutanix, you get someone who can help you with any range of issues and, if not, they Slack somebody immediately.

Positive

We didn't really have a previous solution. Infrastructure-wise, we were three-tier, with storage, switching, and all that is in between those segments. For capacity planning we used SolarWinds, but we never did anything such as scaling out with SolarWinds.

We use Ansible and then we're looking at possibly moving towards VMware Tanzu. We're doing a PoC on it.

The initial deployment can be a little complex. You better bring your "A-game." For me, VMware is simple, the way I break it down and the way we work on it. At the infrastructure level, you can rebuild things easily, but in Nutanix, even when it comes to deploying nodes, or the storage-only nodes, it's a little more complex.

Overall, for the way we use it, it takes a day or two to deploy Nutanix Cloud Manager. There are two of us managing it, but I'm usually the person from our organization involved in deploying it.

We started seeing the benefits as soon as we got it. We started using the forecasting and their sales engineers, who were good, worked with us. They showed us the power in it.

Upgrades happen through Prism Central. Other than the updates, we haven't had to do much in terms of maintenance. It's pretty much hands-free.

Every shop needs more staff and, with our staffing numbers, we have usually had to employ a services reseller or we have worked with the Nutanix team.

Those services came in and set us up, all the way from physical, in the rack, to the NCM portions and bringing it online. They built the management pieces and appliances inside of Nutanix. OSI-wise, we started at Layer 1 and went up from there.

It has helped us forecast and do capacity planning. We haven't been caught in a spot where we needed storage and had to move systems around and make quick changes to get by until we could cut a check to get more storage. It has helped us in the long run. The capacity planning, forecasting, and Runways are worth their weight in gold. NCM has saved us time in IT, and that's money.

It's worth every dime.

The pricing has been reasonable.

Do a PoC, but be mindful that it's not going to cover everything.

Nutanix has always been good. We don't use it to the extent that we probably should, but the GUI is friendly and I can't list anything that needs to be changed. Overall, it has worked for what we need.