Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

We use the solution for virtualization purposes.

The solution saves around 15% of standard time for our organization.

The solution is easy to use and has a very supportive team. It helps me with essential knowledge and planning for projects.

The solution's virtualization could be even better. They should improve the upgrade and patch engine features.

I have been using the solution for two years.

It is a stable solution. Although, one of its nodes might break if you don't follow the proper upgrading and patching steps.

It is a scalable solution. Our enterprise has three clusters dedicated to it.

The solution's technical support is good. However, it is complicated to communicate with the customer service team for the contract renewal process.

Positive

We switched to Nutanix because of its flexible pricing model compared to other vendors.

The solution generates a high return on investment.

The solution's price is reasonable.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We use Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) mainly for the centralized management of multiple clusters. We're running two clusters under the solution right now, and we'll be expanding to three probably within the next couple of months.

Using Nutanix Cloud Manager gives me another engineer on my team. The solution allows us to have constant eyes on the environment, and we're exploring some of its additional features for automation for management.

Nutanix Cloud Manager's runway features are a big help in predicting strategy for optimization. They help us so that we don't find ourselves in a patch, and we have time to budget with senior management for additional acquisition if required.

If you're still running tiered architecture for the storage, it would be good to give stats on the amount of data that is warehoused in the cold tier versus the hot tier. Additionally, it would be helpful to get some visual appreciation of the dataset and identify which VMs are harnessing the bulk of it. You could see an element of this feature in Prism Element that wasn't available in the Prism Pro or NCM.

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

Nutanix Cloud Manager is a completely stable solution, and I haven't had any issues. We always read the release notes before running upgrades.

I would expect Nutanix Cloud Manager to scale. Since our shop is pretty small, we would not plan to scale the solution, but based on what I've read, it is a scalable solution.

Nutanix Cloud Manager's customer support is fantastic. Most of the time, it's a one-call resolution. Fortunately, I don't have to call them very often. I've never had anybody that was difficult to work with, and they always seemed eager to help and follow up.

Positive

Nutanix Cloud Manager's initial setup was relatively straightforward. We worked with our SE when it was being deployed.

We have seen a return on investment with Nutanix Cloud Manager. It makes centralized management and viewing much easier without needing to bounce into different systems constantly.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is an expensive solution. However, its value is worth the cost versus trying to aggregate it across multiple other solutions.

We did evaluate other options before choosing Nutanix Cloud Manager. We looked at standard three-two-one solutions, but Nutanix Cloud Manager stood out because of its simplified management nature.

I advise users know their goals for utilizing the product ahead of time. Doing this will ensure that when they are deploying and want to create the playbooks, they will get the most value out of the implementation.

Overall, I rate Nutanix Cloud Manager an eight out of ten.

We are an education institute, and we use Nutanix Cloud Manager to manage student applications, employee applications, and for other educational purposes.

The most valuable feature of Nutanix Cloud Manager is the flexibility we're finding in expanding our technology and our support. We can't mess with the student's data, and we need to protect the data of many students within our data centers to ensure continuous business. One of the benefits of using NCM is the ecosystems we have within the organization and other organizations.

Nutanix Cloud Manager could partner with more partners to bring technologies that align with the area's policies and business needs.

We've been using Nutanix Cloud Manager for six to seven years now.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is a stable solution.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is a scalable solution. We are using six nodes and planning to add more features like the video in the future.

Nutanix Cloud Manager's technical support is reachable and solves the problem in a matter of seconds.

Positive

From the documents I'm reviewing, Nutanix Cloud Manager's initial setup was a straightforward process. There were no issues in the solution's implementation.

We're seeing a return on investment from Nutanix Cloud Manager, but since ours is an educational business, there's not much to assess.

Nutanix Cloud Manager's pricing is fair at the moment. However, its pricing should be reassessed, and different pricing categories should be set for different business needs.

When we approached Nutanix Cloud Manager, they presented the technology well. We chose Nutanix Cloud Manager because we found it could be sustainable for the future. Users should consider Nutanix Cloud Manager's use cases and opt for the solution depending on their type of business.

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

The company went with Nutanix and hyper-converged. Just the sheer number of disparate vendor products and hardware the company had to deal with was a lot. The solution was used for consolidating everything into a much more easily managed payment class. Prism brings it all under one umbrella.

Prism Ultimate is where it can't get any better. We've got all the feature sets available.

We use the runbook on occasion and we don't really use a lot of automation.

We did some site migration activities with a large number of guest systems that needed to be relocated, it was pretty convenient. I don't remember experiencing any issues. We did a pretty big data center relocation and we used Nutanix protection domains to do most of that. We ran into a couple of issues outside of any automation and those were just our own configuration issues that we quickly figured out.

The speed of the outcomes we've received using the solution's low-code automation would be as expected. We have no complaints about the processes with Nutanix.

The man-hours saved are pretty important for us. We have a pretty large environment for our team to handle and anywhere we can optimize tasks more efficiently and not have to do them in scheduled maintenance Windows after hours is a big plus.

Monthly, as far as general maintenance, the systems used to have to be babysat by somebody. We save probably twenty to twenty-four hours a month in man-hours, just on being able to schedule and automate a mundane task that used to have to be handled with kid gloves.

As far as maintainability, we do tasks more efficiently and we've saved money. The ability to even just have the built-in monitoring and alerting system that is in the product by default, just by running the infrastructure under, is great. Prism Nutanix saves us quite a bit of effort and time. I don't know if you could really put a number to that time.

We use the solution to manage both Nutanix and VMware infrastructures. We are in the process of progressing towards getting as much as possible off of VMware ESX and onto AHV. We currently have about 70% on Nutanix and the remaining on ESX.

It's great that the solution can manage both of those infrastructures. It's a lot more efficient and convenient to have all of this in one payment class rather than have to monitor two separate infrastructures.

The solution helps provide a continuous validation process and it's pretty impressive. Just what you get by bringing that infrastructure under the umbrella of Prism without having to do any monitoring setup at all, covers more than 90% of what we really need. This feature's effect on our validation time is exceptional. I would say that it probably reduced it by more than half.

The solution is better than expected in terms of helping our team address our current automation needs while planning for future expansion.

Its speed when delivering infrastructure as a service has been good. We haven't had any complaints about the performance or implementation of new systems with this product.

We haven’t really gotten into the solution's capacity planning and runway analytics to help forecast storage and compute needs. Since I came in, we have been doing a lot of forklift upgrades and data center relocations. Most of the clusters have been in so much flux that the runway and those estimations haven't been accurate enough simply due to the fact that we pull the carpet out from the data and change the environment so often. Hopefully, once we have one more major cluster to put in, we'll get most of the rest of our PSX environment over. AT that point, those forecastings will be valuable to us. However, our environment and underlying hardware have been in so much flux, that nothing could really give us real accurate forecasting.

There's a split between Prism Central and Prism Element and having to know which interface I need to get into to do certain feature sets or just having to switch between them having all the feature sets available would be my biggest ask. They've been moving towards that more and more.

I've been using Nutanix and Prism for nearly five years now. I came in about two years after the implementation started. It's the same product that we've been using for three years, just with a new name. We have been using the Nutanix Cloud Manager version for the past several months.

The stability is incredible. We are on Lenovo OEM and the only issues we've experienced since I've been on board for three years, have been related to some Lenovo firmware issues in our environment that would have caused a host outage. We've had other issues with the Nutanix solution, however, those have not impacted production or impacted the host.

The scalability is great. It's easily expandable storage-wise and compute-wise. We can do that comfortably without fear of the impact on production. We do a lot during production hours that used to have to be done outside of production hours on maintenance Windows.

In my more than twenty-five years of experience in the industry, I would say the technical support goes above and beyond any other vendor that I've ever worked with. It's probably one of their strongest points.

There have been multiple times when we've called in about some issue and the techs look into it and ensure that everything else on that cluster is copacetic as well. They won't look just at the problem. They'll say: "Hey, I noticed this, let's take care of that while we're in here." They're not trying to blow you off.

Positive

The company never used a hyper-converged solution like Nutanix previously. There was a traditional three-tier and Nutanix was brought out to consolidate.

I have not used any other solutions like this. This was my first introduction to any type of hyper-converged solution.

I wasn't a part of the initial setup. I came in two years after it was implemented.

The product requires maintenance. In this case, considering the breadth of our implementation, typically it's only one man dedicated for an hour or two a week. This is just to ensure things are kicking off as expected and things have been completed as expected.

I know the company was looking at other companies. I don't know which ones, however, as that was all pre my history with the organization. Likely, at that time, Nutanix was probably the best solution available.

I'm a customer and end-user and we're in a long-term stable release. 

There's a lot of naming in Nutanix. There's Prism Element and there's Prism Central. This depends on how wide a view you're taking. We use both here.

Prism Pro and Prism Element are different levels of feature sets in Prism. Ultimate has more features available than Pro has, however, it's the same product overall. Prism Element is tied to a cluster of Nutanix-based systems and Prism Central is a collection of those clusters. That gives a view of the entire environment. We are Prism Ultimate licensed.

We use a private cloud as our environment is all internal to our organization.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use it for our service, running everything through Nutanix.

It is easy to access. Since it is web-based, you just punch in the API and it gives you all the servers in the company. The solution has helped optimize database performances.

Nutanix helps us save on Tier 1 storage, which is very important to us. As a company, you need backup. Working with this solution is easy and fast.

As a company, backup is very important. Anything can happen to a company so you always want to have backup. The important part is that this solution is cloud-based. Therefore, if a fire happens, you still have your backup.

Since last year, we haven't really worked after hours.

Nutanix has 100% improved our team's ability to troubleshoot operational issues. This is excellent for business. It now makes things easier for us to troubleshoot, helping us know where or what the problem is. It makes things simpler.

It provides healing to the system. If there is something wrong with the system, then it gives you an alert and decides what the problem is. It tells you in detail if there is something wrong with your server.

It is not time-consuming. It makes things easier for the company, because now you know exactly what is wrong because it tells you what it is. It is easy to access.

We use it with SQL Server workloads. This solution is good and quite fast for that.

The design could be more user-friendly. There is always room for improvement when it comes to a site being more user-friendly.

My company has been using it for about six months.

I have been very impressed with the stability.

Customer service has been good. So far, I can't complain. I haven't picked up anything that I might complain about since everything is running smoothly and has been simplified. I would rate them as nine out of 10.

Positive

This has been an improvement for me because I am used to old physical servers.

I was not involved in the initial setup. Everything was already up and running when I started using it.

It has helped us cut deployment times.

Nutanix has decreased the time it takes to snapshot and clone databases. Because of this, the business is running smoothly. Everything happens quickly, so it is quick to do things on this platform, i.e., less time-consuming.

The increased backup frequency has helped to limit data loss.

When it comes to data management, the solution has reduced time spent on operational database workloads.

We use Veeam for the backup and restore of databases.

This is the way to go. Technology is growing and improving. I feel like a lot of companies in my country are still stuck in the old way of using physical servers. Whereas, we now have something like this that makes things simple with a feature that sends alerts. In a way, it is running the whole infrastructure.

There is always something out there that can improve your life, simplifying your life. There is always something out there that you can learn about.

It has improved my life and the way the company is running. We use it almost every day.

There are about 10 of us using it, including support, system engineers, my assistant management, and management.

I would rate this solution as nine out of 10.

I use the VM efficiency to figure out what services are over-provisioned. I've also been experimenting with the reports. In addition, I've been using it as a way of collecting all the data from all the different clusters into one portal.

One of the most valuable features is the hardware and how they have set it up to be pretty redundant. If something goes down, you can just swap it out and you're back online. If a drive or even a whole node goes down, it's pretty easy to get it back up and running.

Also, you don't have to actually mess around with external storage. Everything is in one complete package. The fact that the solution is sold as one product with multiple tiers is a seven out of 10 to me, on the important scale. If you get everything from one vendor, you have one place to turn if you have problems or if you need replacement parts. The whole "one-vendor" thing is pretty neat. Regarding the hardware, when you have everything in one package, everything is good to go. We haven't needed to purchase any other solutions for the type of automation this solution is intended for.

I've used the capacity planning and Runway analytics to help forecast storage and compute needs a few times, but just to check that we are a couple of years away from even having to think about it. It has been pretty good for helping our team address current needs while planning for future expansion.

I would like to see a desktop application for administration of the solution. That's the thing I missed the most. Other solutions have a client that you can install on your computer. You can actually connect to and do the administration from an application instead of using a web portal, which is what Nutanix provides.

We have been using Nutanix Prism Pro for a year and continued using it as Nutanix Cloud Manager Starter for the past several months.

I would rate NCM's stability at five out of 10. We started having problems with our nodes about two or three months after we started using Nutanix. We were getting errors. The IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) stopped functioning. After a long period of troubleshooting, we ended up having to send one of the nodes back for a deep root analysis. They had to send a replacement and try to figure out what the problem was.

I'm sure that kind of scenario isn't very prevalent among their other customers, but that has been our experience with it. We manage 10 nodes with the solution, and something like seven of them have had this problem.

The scalability of the solution is way better than anything else. Everything is plug-and-play. That part is pretty awesome.

Their tech support is pretty good overall. It depends on who you end up with. In about 30 percent of my cases, I've been lucky to get a person who speaks English very well and is awesome in every way, knowing absolutely everything. Every time that I get one of those guys, I instantly go into the survey they send, when they close the case, and praise them in the highest way.

If the English of the support person is worse than mine, or their vocabulary, pronunciation, or even the quality of audio is worse than what I have, it's pretty hard to get my meaning across. That has happened in about 20 percent of my cases. The person doesn't understand what I'm saying and I've been forced to escalate the case to get someone who has more knowledge and better English.

And in 50 percent of my cases, they have been totally fine.

Positive

We swapped out Hyper-V with products from Nutanix to try something else. It was time to upgrade and then Nutanix seemed like a good alternative.

When we ordered the solution, we had a pretty good understanding that we would get something where we could just plug in the network and power cables, turn it on, and it would be already set up in almost every way. We thought we were only going to need to do a bit of tweaking, providing IP addresses and the like. But what we got was pretty bare. There was nothing on them. We had to go through the whole setup with Phoenix.

We had to do it twice. The first time, one of our guys did everything and it seemed to be okay. But then the guys from Nutanix called and said, "No, we have to do this together because we want it to be set up the way it's intended to be." That's pretty fair. But the guys from Nutanix actually managed to mess things up in a huge way. So we had to set it up again. And that speaks to how complicated the setup is when you compare it to the other solutions.

I set up fully-functioning VMware and Hyper-V solutions a good number of years ago when I was young and didn't have as much experience, and both were no problem. But Nutanix is a step up regarding how complex it is.

You should get a hold of someone who is crazy good and then never ever lose their contact info. I have one guy now that I email every time there is something complex that needs to be done. If we are digging into config files that are deep within the OS, I always contact him because I know that he knows everything.

I have used Hyper-V with SCVMM. Part of that has some features that are similar to NCM, but they are different products with different features. I've also used vSphere from VMware, which has some of the same features, like the overall control over your VMs, data collection, and reporting.

Nutanix is pretty different from the others because it collects everything and displays it in a very nice way. To summarize the difference, you get the feeling that Prism Pro is new and more modern. The user experience and the user interface are more modern, and it's certainly easier to use.

The other side of that coin is that sometimes it fails. It's something like Mac and PC: If something fails on Mac, which doesn't happen very much, it's harder to figure out why. You might have to contact support and get them to fix it. A PC is harder to use, but if it crashes, it's easier to find out why. Prism Pro would be "Mac" and the others would be "PC."

Nutanix isn't as easy if you want to try to troubleshoot, at least not for me, because it's all based on CentOS. It's Linux-based. With Linux, it's easier to do things, but it's way easier to royally mess everything up if you make mistakes. You have to be pretty sure of your skills with Linux-based systems to try to troubleshoot things yourself. I've been using Nutanix a lot for a year now, and I'm just barely starting to get the hang of it.

The setup of Nutanix is harder than both VMware and Hyper-V, but Nutanix is the easiest to use among the three. However, the learning curve for Nutanix is pretty steep. The interface itself is pretty good and easy to use, but if you start working with the CLI, which you have to do somewhat frequently, it suddenly becomes way harder to figure things out.

Have we experienced increased uptime since we went to Nutanix? No, we haven't. It's pretty much the same with Nutanix as it was with Hyper-V regarding uptime. What has improved is the ease of use. And there is less cabling and fewer points of weakness.

We went big on the specs for the servers so when you have what feels like unlimited resources, you don't need to set up the whole automation part of it.

Cost Governance is a SaaS solution that helps customers optimize public cloud services. Most customers don't have a clear idea about workload sizing. We measure the usage compared to what has been defined and recommend ways to optimize.

You can use Cost Governance to perform cost governance in multi-cloud environments. It supports the three big public cloud providers — Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform — and private clouds for Nutanix environments. 

Cost Governance helps customers improve cloud performance and save money. Many customers have idle public cloud resources. Maybe someone creates an object and forgets to delete it when they are no longer using it.

The solution detects all the unused resources and recommends removal. It can even remove objects automatically, which translates to huge savings. It can also save you lots of money by suggesting that you use a pre-paid reserved instance instead of buying on-demand cloud resources. 

The solution has automated reports and workflows. You can configure it to automatically send out reports to the business units responsible for managing cloud costs, so you don't need to log into the tool to get information. Cost Governance's user interface and dashboards are beautiful. The customers love it because it's easy to use. They can run it and get a report an hour later to immediately see the savings.

Azure has a public cloud offering, and it also has a CSP model that allows Microsoft partners to provide Azure as a service to their customers. Cost Governance only works on the standard public cloud, not the CSP model. When I was at my previous company, we frequently got requests for Azure CSP support. We also got some requests for Alibaba Cloud and Oracle Cloud, but Azure CSP was the biggest one.

I start working with Cost Governance (formerly Beam) a little more than a year ago. They don't have that many products because Nutanix is about a decade old. They've only begun to increase the portfolio in recent years. I was a portfolio specialist for a year, so I know most of the core solutions well.

It is Software as a Service, so there is nothing to scale. We can target customers with a small cloud footprint or customers that are huge. There is no need to scale anything because it's SaaS.

Of course, Cost governance is my first choice because I was selling it. However, I was competing with solutions from VMware and other vendors. At that time, we believed our product was much better, and our customers gave us feedback that this was the best solution.

I rate this solution a 10 out of 10 for ease of deployment. Setting up the solution is straightforward because it's SaaS. You can sign up for a 14-day free trial by going to the website and registering your public account. It takes a couple of hours for Cost Governance to gather information and perform the computations. You don't need a dedicated person to deploy, manage or maintain it. Typically, each organization has someone who oversees public clouds and cost management. 

Customers need to consider the total cost of ownership and how much they'll save using this solution. It has some advanced cost comparison features that aren't being utilized by many customers at the moment. You provide a specific workload, and the solution tells you where the workload will be the cheapest in your multi-cloud environment, including the private cloud.

For example, if you want to build an ACM, Cost Governance can say that will be cheaper if you deploy on-prem or in Azure. Most customers are not there yet, but if a customer is in that process, the value for the money will be a perfect 10.

I rate Cost Governance an eight out of 10 for pricing. There are different plans, so you can pay monthly or yearly. You can also sign a three-year contract. It's quite flexible.  I can't give it a perfect 10, because customers always want a cheaper solution.  

I rate Nutanix Cost Governance a nine out of 10. I stopped short of rating it 10 because the lack of support for CSP was costing us some sales to big companies that had those types of contacts with Microsoft partners. Cost Governance's one shortcoming is a lack of support for specific environments. When I left the company, they planned to add support for those cloud environments, but I'm not sure if they've been publicly released yet. 

We use Calm as an automation engine for deployment of the cluster software over our network. We are also using it to deploy standardized workloads on the Nutanix clusters.

We also use it to create a "self-service shop," where we can select to deploy standardized workloads and choose a certain profile for a particular server, and the Calm engine will integrate with other solutions like our IP database and CDB. Everything is fully automated.

In addition to standardized workloads, we also can say, "Give us a generic virtual machine."

It really drives up our speed tremendously for getting workloads to the customer as soon as possible. Previously, it took a few weeks to get a virtual machine in place, including deploying the virtual machine and getting the administrative parts in order for it. That process takes a matter of minutes now, if the prerequisites are in place on the networking layer. Our delivery time is incomparably faster than what it was. We're mainly providing platforms to other application teams, and it greatly helps those teams to have a virtual machine in place. Indirectly, it will ultimately help us develop and deploy applications faster.

Calm has also enabled us to react faster to the changing needs of our business, with the significant decrease in the delivery time of certain machines.

I really like the Nutanix Marketplace a lot. We publish standard workloads there and that, in combination with the Projects, allows for self-service, which is the most powerful feature of Calm.

Also, the ease of use when building new applications and offering them in the marketplace is the most elegant feature of Calm.

It also works very well when it comes to optimizing capacity and performance. It allows you to have a framework where it is very easy to automate in a standardized way and provides you the boundaries for standardizing automation. It really helps to unify the way a team works. Calm's abilities when it comes to team collaboration are great. All the workloads are deployed in a standardized manner, and administered that way as well. This is the first time we have been able to do workloads for the machines in a standardized manner. Currently, we are expanding a lot, with a lot of new virtual machines. So if we don't focus on standardization, it will become really hard to manage with a small team. Standardization and automation are very important for enabling us to keep up with the growing infrastructure.

We also use Nutanix Prism Pro and it provides us with insights into application-related infrastructure to a certain extent. But in reality, we haven't done a lot with it yet. The dashboarding is certainly elegant, but we're not utilizing the clusters a lot yet, so it hasn't been very necessary to work with it. Second-day operations are something that we're working on. The deployment is not done and transitioning to operations is in progress.

There is room for improvement in the remote script execution. The way logs are shown in Calm, it's not always keeping up properly. It's really the interface that needs attention there. I believe it is something being worked on at the moment by Nutanix.

Also, the integrated scripting language, which is a very limited form of Python, should be improved. It should be made into a more modern version of Python, and maybe other languages as well. 

I would also like to see an improved ability to integrate with APIs.

I have been using Nutanix Calm for about a year.

It has great stability. We haven't experienced issues with stability with the product.

In terms of scalability, it just works. It has high availability, and we haven't run into any issues where we have needed to scale up.

We have Nutanix clusters located in at least half of our Vopak locations. This year we rolled out the Nutanix platform to 30 locations and, in the next year, 30 additional locations will follow. Currently, the six users of the solution are involved in infrastructure development on the DevOps team. Those are the people who are building on top of Calm.

In general, Nutanix support is great. They're responsive and skillful. We're really pleased with them.

Positive

We did not have a previous solution. Calm was a brand-new implementation for us.

The initial setup of Calm was straightforward. It was just a matter of enabling the product, and that process is very well worked out by Nutanix. Our deployment was done within an hour. It was very fast.

You will see great value from it if you utilize the self-service part of Calm. The price you pay for it will only give you equal value if you use the self-service part to enable other teams. If you only use it as a deployment mechanism, I think it's rather expensive.

We did not really look at other solutions. We chose the hypervisor platform, and Calm came with it. We also looked at VMware as a hypervisor platform, but we chose Nutanix and therefore we went for Calm as well.

Nutanix excels in making something that is very complex into something that is very simple. It's really easy to work with, and the time it takes to get familiar with the product, for an engineer, is way less than with the competitor's platform.

It's very important to think ahead about what your automation strategy will look like. You should really think about creating reusable components and also have good source control and a CI/CD strategy. If you start building without thinking about these things, you will have to do a lot of rework and re-engineering to be able to scale up.

In terms of Calm unifying container and virtual machine automation and orchestration in a single orchestration platform, we're not doing containers yet, only tenants. But in the future, I expect it will do so because our next step we'll be looking into container workloads. But that's not where we are for now at Vopak. Similarly, we haven't used Calm’s AIOps and automation capabilities.