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Nutanix Central vs Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on May 8, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.2
Nutanix Central boosts efficiency by 70%, simplifying IT management and reducing training needs with centralized access and improved functionality.
Sentiment score
7.2
Nutanix Cloud Manager boosts ROI with enhanced efficiency, cost savings, and streamlined IT management, driving rapid financial returns.
I have seen measurable outcomes from using Nutanix Central, such as more efficient IT management.
When an alert appears, Nutanix provides detailed information and resolution steps, making our job easier.
Managing without Nutanix Central would require significantly more man-hours.
Anything that reduces bandwidth and reduces the brain work that our teams have to do to maintain systems across all environments is time-saving and cost-saving.
The biggest return on investment for me when using this product is the fast deployment and the rapid integration and migration without impacting our operations during the migration.
Playbooks and automation definitely freed up engineer time. This allows us to focus on other projects and not have to get hands-on, reducing operational costs.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.5
Nutanix Central support is praised for responsiveness, effective communication, and high user satisfaction despite occasional rushed initial resolutions.
Sentiment score
8.2
Nutanix Cloud Manager's support is praised for responsiveness, expertise, quick resolutions, personalized assistance, and seamless communication exceeding expectations.
When an issue is reported and reviewed, they provide next steps and work to resolve the issue long term.
Nutanix support is one of the top ones I have dealt with.
They've always resolved issues in a timely manner.
There is a feature that allows you to escalate the call.
The handoff with support and the knowledge of the support engineer is significantly better than experience with other vendors.
We have easier access to high-level engineers compared to VMware, where you have to navigate multiple channels for support.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
9.2
Nutanix Central scales efficiently, enabling seamless integration during expansions and reflecting its capability to adapt to growing demands.
Sentiment score
7.6
Nutanix Cloud Manager offers scalable, efficient management with seamless expansion, praised for automation and integration despite some large cluster challenges.
It scales efficiently with the growing needs of our company.
Nutanix Central scales with the growing needs of my company, and we have expanded usage.
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) scales well.
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) has not had any issues scaling with the growing needs of my company.
Scaling with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is not as straightforward as they claim, largely due to the assumption that you have IPv6 enabled on your switches.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.2
Nutanix Central is a stable, reliable platform with excellent performance, offering consistent operation and effective node failure alerts.
Sentiment score
7.8
Nutanix Cloud Manager is highly stable and reliable, praised for seamless patching, strong support, and robust disaster recovery features.
If one node goes down, it automatically alerts us, but we can always count on the other builds running.
Nutanix Central is always available, so it's quite stable and reliable.
Nutanix Central is available 90% of the time with the ability to log in and manage all resources.
We've never had any downtime related to the Nutanix product itself.
I would rate the stability a nine out of ten.
The stability and reliability of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) have been excellent.
 

Room For Improvement

Users recommend improving Nutanix Central by enhancing VM migration, IAM documentation, API compatibility, and simplifying update processes.
Users seek improvements in integration, VM organization, documentation, pricing, flexibility, networking, interface customization, analytics, and support response.
One of the biggest challenges we have with Nutanix currently is that our Rubrik backups do not work with the Nutanix API.
It would be nice to go in and say, 'This VM doesn't need to be in this data center, and we'd prefer to put it in this one,' and have the ability to initiate the migration.
Once it is set up, everything works smoothly, but the initial setup was difficult.
Our primary reason for choosing Nutanix was for mission-critical applications and Kubernetes.
Quick resolution of disconnection issues and errors in plugins is crucial.
If there are licensing errors, for example, being told I have 96 cores licensed but Nutanix Flow not licensed despite having assigned units, it complicates things unnecessarily.
 

Setup Cost

Nutanix Central aids enterprise users in cost governance, resource planning, and aligns with budget constraints without extra fees.
Nutanix Cloud Manager provides competitive value with pricing flexibility, though licensing complexity and setup costs can be challenging.
We do not incur additional costs for using Nutanix Central.
Nutanix Central's cost visibility feature helps with resource planning and budget preparation.
We tie in with cost governance in Nutanix Central, which helps us identify other products and determine whether we need to increase our licensing or reduce it.
It's not cheap, but there are savings and return on investment when coming from a non-Nutanix shop.
In comparison, Nutanix's pricing is significantly higher than that of other setups.
It is not cheap or expensive.
 

Valuable Features

Nutanix Central streamlines resource management, offering centralized visibility, effective cluster control, and proactive hardware insights and alerts.
Nutanix Cloud Manager offers hyperconvergence, self-service, automation, centralized management, improving efficiency, deployment, and time savings for IT teams.
The visibility we get from Nutanix Central—seeing it all in one spot—primarily gives us significant time savings.
It allows us to know what groups, such as application groups, servers belong to, so we can group them appropriately in consistency groups for DR purposes.
Before an issue becomes critical, it sends us an email notification with warning status information.
It's easy to control resources and govern the resources, and it frees up support to focus on other things without having to help developers.
I would approximate the cost savings to be in the 20% to 25% range since we can optimize our resources and avoid the need to purchase more hardware or reuse resources in the infrastructure from one implementation.
The importance of faster outcomes for their environment is significant; for example, when I delivered the Disaster Recovery solution, we included automation for auto-configuration of VMs and resizing of VMs, which replaced many tasks that were previously done manually.
 

Categories and Ranking

Nutanix Central
Ranking in Cloud Management
18th
Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools
6th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
8.0
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Data Center Infrastructure Management (7th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (8th)
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
Ranking in Cloud Management
1st
Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
104
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (3rd), Cloud Cost Management (2nd), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (7th)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2703777 - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps us get ahead of potential problems, and their support has been phenomenal
I don't think there's much improvement needed in Nutanix Central. Maybe there are different tools I haven't discovered yet that may bring everyone on the same page. I am still in the process of researching them and providing feedback to Nutanix. For what we use it for, it runs efficiently. What I think is missing in Nutanix Central to make it the best product ever is compatibility with our backups. One of the biggest challenges we have with Nutanix currently is that our Rubrik backups do not work with the Nutanix API. That would be great to resolve, as it would reduce the time spent resolving the issue.
Vipin Kumar Sha - PeerSpot reviewer
Stands out with auto-scaling, auto-scheduled snapshots, and single-vendor support
The areas that could be improved include the Nutanix Move tool, which is presently used for migrating VMs from one setup to a private cloud. It can be improved by adding some other setups, such as Citrix Xen, Red Hat Virtualization, and Red Hat OpenShift. There are many other cloud products that need to be added to the Nutanix Move tool, which would be really helpful for us in India, where we use different setups such as Red Hat Virtualization, OpenShift, Citrix XenCenter, Hyper-V, and VMware. The second suggestion is regarding the different clusters in Nutanix. Although Nutanix is very user-friendly and codeless, the individual clusters cannot be logged in at the same time via Prism, which takes time and can be wasteful. We have multiple clusters within Nutanix. Prism serves as the central management interface, allowing us to access these different clusters. When we log in through Prism, it takes a certain amount of time—sometimes several minutes—to log into each individual cluster. This can be quite time-consuming. Another important issue, especially for our customers in India and other data centers, is the need for proper VM tool reports. We require detailed information such as VM names, IP addresses, CPU assignments, and CPU utilization. This data should be exported in an Excel format. For example, if a virtual machine has four CPUs, the Excel report should include entries like: VM name, IP address, 4 CPUs, and current utilization (e.g., if 2 out of 4 CPUs are being used). We also need to capture other parameters, such as memory and disk configurations (e.g., hard disk 1 and hard disk 2), whether any ISOs are mounted (like CD/DVDs), USB drives attached to the VM, storage types (like NVM), and any RDMs associated with the VM. By extracting all this information into an Excel file, we would create a handy inventory for all the engineers. This detailed VM list would be extremely beneficial for cloud engineers and managers working with Nutanix.
report
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
34%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Government
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nutanix Central?
My experience with the pricing, setup costs, and licensing is limited as I don't manage that part. However, I know it has been within budget and hasn't impacted our financial planning.
What needs improvement with Nutanix Central?
I don't think there's much improvement needed in Nutanix Central. Maybe there are different tools I haven't discovered yet that may bring everyone on the same page. I am still in the process of res...
What is your primary use case for Nutanix Central?
My main use cases with Nutanix Central are managing updates, including LCM updates. We also manage all of our clusters and servers with it. It tells us the hardware health, VM health, disk issues, ...
Which set of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) features do you find to be the most useful?
For me, the features related to cost savings are the best part of NCM. Of course, the whole product is worth using and when it comes to cloud management, there is a reason why it is favored by so m...
Are the setup process and further maintenance of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) difficult?
When I came into my current organization, NCM was already set up. According to the team that dealt with it, the product was fairly easy to set up. Compared to other products, our IT rates are set u...
Is Nutanix Cloud Manager’s Intelligent Operations feature effective?
Yes, this is a highly effective feature and the rebranding only made things better as they introduced more improvements. You can benefit from Zero coding task automation Automated optimization Tic...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Nutanix Cloud Manager Intelligent Operations, Nutanix Cloud Manager Self-Service, Nutanix Cloud Management Cost Governance, Nutanix Cloud Manager Security Central
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, Volkswagen SAIC, Brighton and Hove City Council, Foresters Financial, Janus International Group, Cloud Comrade, Serco
Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix Central vs. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
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