Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

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Our sister company currently uses an outdated database technology, Sybase, which presents challenges in migrating to a newer database.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.

The primary use case for Nutanix Cloud Manager is to distribute the workload for the infrastructure. It is used for virtualization and integrates with the front end to provide cloud features as a private cloud to the development and operations team, leading to less management overhead for the administrator team.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is a stable product compared to other vendors. It is beneficial for integrating with the front end to provide cloud features as a private cloud to development and operations teams. This reduces management overhead for the administrator team, allowing the end users to directly access features and reducing integration time.

The file server is the best feature because it supports different vendors such as Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware without locking with a specific vendor. Nutanix is a stable product with fewer limitations compared to competitors like VxRail. It is beneficial for integrating with the front end to provide cloud features as a private cloud to development and operations teams. This reduces management overhead for the administrator team.

The product could be more flexible with plugins. Quick resolution of disconnection issues and errors in plugins is crucial. Sometimes plugins are not working well, and the resolution time is too long.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager for around two years.

It is a stable product. Bugs, glitches, and downtime are minimal. I would rate the stability a nine out of ten.

Scalability is good, and I would rate it a ten.

Technical support is good. I would rate it nine out of ten.

Positive

I used VMware VCF before, but it was not as flexible compared to Nutanix.

The initial setup was moderate. It required some understanding of clustering, so while it was doable, it was not very easy for every user to undertake.

The deployment involved around ten people.

Setting up Nutanix Cloud Manager has saved a significant amount of time. Compared to VMware, the setup time was reduced by about twenty percent.

The pricing is moderate. It is not cheap or expensive.

I used VMware VCF before, but it was not as flexible as Nutanix. I also considered VxRail.

I would give Nutanix Cloud Manager a seven out of ten. The complete solution is overall good, but some improvement is required, especially with the flexibility of plugins and disconnection issues.

We use the solution to automate the business processes for our customers.

For our customers, the solution is an added value to their environment. It helps them automate critical processes instead of doing them manually.

The solution provides the best automation features.

They should include more use cases for automation in administering the environment.

We have been using the solution for two years.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

The support team’s response time is good. Although, it depends on the criticality of the issue.

Positive

We have used PowerShell and Orchestrator before. In comparison, NCM provides better integration.

The solution's initial setup is straightforward. There is a lot of documentation and webinars on Nutanix's portal to learn the implementation process.

The solution generates a return on investment. There is no need to appoint a resource as it automates the processes.

The solution is expensive.

NCM provides faster automation than manual operations. Its maintenance is less time-consuming due to the high availability of its infrastructure. In addition, it saves a lot of time as there is no need to generate reports and alerts. We can just read the insights data on the dashboard. It helps our executives to concentrate more on projects instead of operations.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

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're using Nutanix Beam and Flow. They are the cloud cost governance and cloud security governance products, but they may have different names now.

We're a large university. We have hundreds of cloud accounts in all three of the vendors: Microsoft, AWS, and Google. This product allows us to look at all of them with one dashboard and do a lot of pricing and cost work across them with one dashboard for the finance side. For the flow side also, it has a lot of good tools for AWS and GCP but not as many for Azure. As a big university, we use it to protect ourselves and keep ourselves safe while we're using the cloud.

We also have this other thing called cloudbank.org. So, we have two different licenses with Nutanix. One for CloudBank, and one for the University of California, San Diego. The CloudBank one is all about researchers from all over the country. We have about 115 different researchers there doing all kinds of things.

We saved a ton of money by having awareness of how we're spending. We can see where we were spending incorrectly.

We haven't done much automation with it. We have some automated reports on a monthly basis that are very useful for billing. There are also automated security checks and flows, which have helped us stay safe a number of times. We had one instance a couple of weeks ago where somebody opened up a public S3 Amazon storage folder to the internet. They shouldn't do that, and it told us.

The way it aggregates all the accounts and lets me do math across all the accounts, even across multiple vendors or multiple cloud providers, is valuable. The other part is Chargeback. We use that to validate our bills.

Some of the UI is a little clunky. They do listen when I tell them about this, but one thing that drives me insane is that it defaults to a cumulative view of how much you've spent, as opposed to day-to-day. Even when you've selected day-to-day, you have to turn off a cumulative switch. They've done some work on fixing that in the UI, but I don't know why they're thinking that way and why they think people would want to look at it that way.

The one thing I wish it had was that it worked more closely and more cleanly with custom data inputs, which I know is a lot to ask.

It could probably have a nice warning page for all the things. Not for me, not for the big administrator, but for all my users to whom I give accounts so that they can look at their own things. It would be helpful if they had a landing page that just said, "Hey, you're losing money here. You're possibly losing here or there." It expects you to have a certain amount of knowledge of what you're doing when you first come in. It does have a dashboard, but it's very esoteric. Something just right on top that says "You're bleeding cash right here," and a graphic would be nice.

If I want to set up a new account, there's no API. It's all done by hand. It would help us in the deployment of new users if there was a new user API that we could call with a program, as opposed to doing it by hand.

We would like to be able to report how busy our machines are so that if a machine has been sitting there idle all week, we should turn it off. Sometimes, it's not just how busy the processor was, it's also about how much RAM was being taken up when that thing was running. Often, it can run low CPU and high RAM, and we still have to keep it running because of that. There is this arcane workaround to get that to work by installing something special on the individual machines one by one. Deploying that way is very arcane. I wish there was a better way of doing that. It seems it works with CloudWatch, at least on AWS, or CloudTrail, to do it, but I don't know for sure. They probably would've done it if it was easy, but it would help a lot if, in the deployment, it also was aware of memory usage, not just CPU usage by default.

We've been using it for about three years. 

Its stability is very good. In three years, we have had one actual outage, and maybe two or three data outages from something we need to do ourselves. We haven't had many problems on that end at all. They've been doing some interesting things with the user database backend, which threw us off for a little bit one time. It was to get some features done that I wanted, so I don't care.

Its scalability is great. That was the whole reason we bought it. It was the fact that it can handle so many accounts at once, all in one dashboard to get to things. It's great.

We have 40,000 students and almost the same amount of staff. The University of California is the largest employer in the State of California. We work mostly with UC San Diego itself, but we also work with CloudBank in the National Science Foundation (NFS) to give out awards for cloud usage for researchers from all over the country. It is a big academic, an R1, with about two billion a year in research and other things. 

I would rate their support a 10 out of 10. They really care, and I appreciate it.

Positive

We had spreadsheets, Perl scripts, and things like that. 

It's a SaaS deployment. You just log in and go. It would help us in the deployment of new users if there was a new user API that we could call with a program, as opposed to doing it by hand, but everything else is just web-based. So, it's very easy to deploy.

Its initial setup is very straightforward. There are only a few bits of information you have to give the system for it to go and start looking at your stuff. You need to provide some information or some permissions, and then you can go. That's great, but one caveat, which is not Nutanix's fault but Microsoft's fault for how they license, is that it could be a little arcane, although their wizards walk you through it very well. I only had to get help once on that, and then from then on, I knew what I was doing going forward. There are about six or seven screens of details that you have to put in and pull from this place, and this place, and this key, and that key, but that's the cloud. That's not Nutanix's fault. The fact that we could get it to work is great. It's hard to say standards because nobody is setting standards here, but there are some conventions that they follow which are really nice.

It doesn't require any maintenance. They do it. They take care of all the backend.

We used a reseller for the purchase but not for the implementation. We did the implementation ourselves. Nutanix was great. The reseller was great. They're both focused on what they should be focused on. One of the great things about Nutanix is that they have Slack. We've set up a Slack channel for them there. We could talk quickly about problems that were happening. They also have their India team on Slack. I can't talk to them in real-time, but with about a 10-hour lag, by the time I get up the next morning, they've answered pretty much everything I've had a problem with. In terms of responsiveness, that has been helpful.

We have certainly seen an ROI. There have been cost savings, and when people know we're watching, that also helps keep the costs down.

We've got some very good deals on it. We have very active resellers in the middle who've done a good job of keeping us at a good price. Nutanix is treating us really well because we're academics, and they want people to use the product. I do give a lot of feedback on what they've done. Before COVID, I used to do a lot of talks for them as well.

Its acquisition and support cost isn't any harder or easier than others. We have a good sales team, and I appreciate that good resales team in the middle that takes care of us and pays attention. Its cost is reasonable. The features are very good. Once in a while, I talk to my friends who use CloudCheckr to see how we're doing in comparison. It seems Nutanix reports are a lot richer, and you can drill down more to where you want to go, but I haven't spent hours and hours in CloudCheckr.

Nutanix has been hinting at it a little bit that things are changing or changes are coming in terms of multiple tiers, but I'm not thrilled because I liked what I've had to work with so far, and I don't know where that maps into the tiers. I guess tier could work if I knew there were upper-level services I just didn't need, but if they're trying to tease more money out of us by isolating a few things in an upper tier, we won't be happy with that.

We evaluated other options. CloudCheckr was a pretty good product, but we didn't think we could work as closely with them as we have with Nutanix. They have been phenomenal to get changes made for things that we need to do. Especially because we're an academic institution, as opposed to a corporate, we flow a lot of credits and a lot of research grants. It does a lot of funky things to our financial data. They worked with us very closely on that to get it all done.

CloudCheckr is a fine product. A lot of the UCs do use CloudCheckr. We talked to them, but we weren't sure they could do the custom stuff that we wanted them to do, whereas Nutanix could do that.

We also looked at CloudHealth pretty closely, which is the VMware one. They got acquired. So, it wasn't useful to look at anymore. There was also one more that was a non-player. So, we've been keeping an eye on the space to see what's going to happen here. We thought somebody would buy Nutanix, but they're so big in some other ways that it hasn't happened yet. That was it. All these products are kind of the same, but it was also about the people we would work with. The Nutanix people we've worked with have been very helpful, and we knew that talking to them. So, we picked them.

In terms of the setup and ease of use, we did some testing on the VMware product, and it was a nightmare. The cloud setup in general, especially at an enterprise level, can be a real nightmare, but Nutanix and their engineers had a lot of experience with this. So, we were able to get through a lot of it that way. When we worked with the VMware product, it was endless meetings and back and forth. They were just not understanding where we were coming from. They also wanted to span VMware and cloud at the same time. We have very thick VMware instances here, which made it a lot more complicated than just looking at the cloud itself. For the most part, getting the VMware product set up was very difficult, whereas getting Nutanix set up was not difficult at all. It was difficult only when we started customizing it and hurting ourselves. Cloud is a mess anyway. So, I wouldn't expect anything to be easy, but once it's set up, it just works. It's not that big a deal. If it was really hard, I'd have a problem with it.

We don't use NCM to manage Nutanix and VMWare infrastructure. We only use it for vendor clouds.

We've done a little bit of work with their query language, and that's always very fast and very useful. These faster outcomes are pretty important, but I'm not expecting huge performance from a product like this. It's not like a hospital or something like that, but they are as up-to-date as the cloud providers can provide the data to them, and that's what matters to me. If the cloud providers were real-time, I would expect Nutanix Cloud Manager to be real-time as well, but it's not. So, it's perfectly fine for us.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

The main use case for Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is to create a hybrid cloud experience. It serves as a turnkey solution where we can add management features to get the same experience we have with an NCM Nutanix product on-premises, even if we run Nutanix in the public cloud.

I work for an IT distributor where we sell products for virtualization and data centers, with Nutanix being our main solution for this kind of business. We resell Nutanix for other companies from various industries or markets in Brazil.

The setup of Nutanix is very easy. The overall complexity of the solution is much less, and it's a solution that provides freedom of choice. We can run Nutanix on any cloud, on any hardware with any hypervisor. 

The cost governance features of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) are some of the most important features in this solution. We have features that help customers spend less on public cloud infrastructure. We have the observability of these costs, attribute quotas or chargeback policies, and with this kind of cost management, the expenditure of IT infrastructure in the public cloud could be significantly less so that the return on investment can be very relevant to companies that spend substantial money with the public cloud.

The console of the Nutanix solution has various reports that we can fulfill and use a SaaS-like solution for Nutanix that allows us to input our expenditure profiles of the public clouds and then compare that with the cost that we might have with the on-premise solutions. 

The main area that could be improved with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is the cost. This is a license that we can use as a complement for the NCI product, which is the main product of Nutanix. Here in Brazil, we have a total cost of ownership based on the NCI, and sometimes the NCM additions make the product a little higher when we compare it with the public clouds. We are much cheaper when we compare with the Broadcom vCloud solution, but not as competitive when we compare with AWS or Google when these kinds of solutions are built into the platform.

I have worked for about 10 years with the Nutanix portfolio: NCM, NCI, and NUS.

These solutions are already deployed in a high availability way with load balancing. Any problem with these machines does not compromise the structure of what we have built within. The solution has very high availability with no problems.

In terms of scalability, it is really high. The threshold is not about NCM; it's the size of your on-premises or cloud infrastructure. As long as your AWS or public cloud workloads can grow, the solution is already set up to manage it.

I would rate their customer service with Nutanix a nine out of ten. The support of the Nutanix team is great. The complexity of the matters might make it slightly lower, but even then, this is higher than the average of the market.

Positive

I have never used a similar solution in my company. I have only studied the solution from Broadcom.

The deployment of the Nutanix solution is instantaneous. These solutions are packaged in the Nutanix Prism Central that is a piece of software already deployed in the cluster. It requires only the setup of the policies that we want to have, the creation of the playbooks that we're interested in, and the setup of the cost profiles and the quotas or the project. The setup is already done when we deploy the Prism Central solution, which is a main managed solution for this kind of cluster.

Using NCM's built-in playbooks has freed up time for my IT team. We have saved more than 50% of the time. We can create the experience of scale-out and elasticity that we have in the public cloud, provide this to on-premises solutions, and it saves lots of time in micromanagement of the VM profiles.

Regarding the speed of outcomes from their low-code automation, some companies have longer cycles of deployment of applications of infrastructure, and time is money. Once we can deploy large solutions with CI/CD solutions and integrate a DevOps-like flow of production, we can reduce this time and accelerate the value of the solution for the infrastructure. Nutanix gives that with the turnkey solution. We do not have the complexity to assemble a CI/CD solution with open-source solutions or multiple products. This is a complete flow of work for DevOps, integrated even with the Kubernetes or containers infrastructures that can accelerate this kind of deployment significantly, varying with the profile of the company that utilizes it. My company is not a development company, so this does not have this kind of value since we do not develop, but I can see the value that this feature has for companies that build software in-house. 

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