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Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs SolarWinds Virtualization Manager comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 13, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic
Sponsored
Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Cloud Management (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (5th)
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
88
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (3rd), Cloud Management (2nd), Cloud Cost Management (3rd), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (5th)
SolarWinds Virtualization M...
Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools
6th
Average Rating
7.4
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Virtualization Management Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 12.6%, down from 14.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is 10.4%, up from 7.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is 9.3%, up from 7.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Virtualization Management Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Keldric Emery - PeerSpot reviewer
Saves time and costs while reducing performance degradation
It's been a very good solution. The reporting has been very, very valuable as, with a very large environment, it's very hard to get your hands on the environment. Turbonomic does that work for you and really shows you where some of the cost savings can be done. It also helps you with the reporting side. Me being able to see that this machine hasn't been used for a very long time, or seeing that a machine is overused and that it might need more RAM or CPU, et cetera, helps me understand my infrastructure. The cost savings are drastic in the cloud feature in Azure and in AWS. In some of those other areas, I'm able to see what we're using, what we're not using, and how we can change to better fit what we have. It gives us the ability for applications and teams to see the hardware and how it's being used versus how they've been told it's being used. The reporting really helps with that. It shows which application is really using how many resources or the least amount of resources. Some of the gaps between an infrastructure person like myself and an application are filled. It allows us to come to terms by seeing the raw data. This aspect is very important. In the past, it was me saying "I don't think that this application is using that many resources" or "I think this needs more resources." I now have concrete evidence as well as reporting and some different analytics that I can show. It gives me the evidence that I would need to show my application owners proof of what I'm talking about. In terms of the downtime, meantime, and resolution that Turbonomic has been able to show in reports, it has given me an idea of things before things happen. That is important as I would really like to see a machine that needs resources, and get resources to it before we have a problem where we have contention and aspects of that nature. It's been helpful in that regard. Turbonomic has helped us understand where performance risks exist. Turbonomic looks at my environment and at the servers and even at the different hosts and how they're handling traffic and the number of machines that are on them. I can analyze it and it can show me which server or which host needs resources, CPU, or RAM. Even in Azure, in the cloud, I'm able to see which resources are not being used to full capacity and understand where I could scale down some in order to save cost. It is very, very helpful in assessing performance risk by navigating underlying causes and actions. The reason why it's helpful is because if there's a machine that's overrunning the CPU, I can run reports every week to get an idea of machines that would need CPU, RAM, or additional resources. Those resources could be added by Turbonomic - not so much by me - on a scheduled basis. I personally don't have to do it. It actually gives me a little bit of my life back. It helps me to get resources added without me physically having to touch each and every resource myself. Turbonomic has helped to reduce performance degradation in the same way as it's able to see the resources and see what it needs and add them before a problem occurs. It follows the trends. It sees the trends of what's happening and it's able to add or take away those resources. For example, we discuss when we need to do certain disaster recovery tests. Over the years, Turbo will be able to see, for example, around this time of year that certain people ramp up certain resources in an environment, and then it will add the resources as required. Another time of year, it will realize these resources are not being used as much, and it takes those resources away. In this way, it saves money and time while letting us know where we are. We've saved a great deal of time using this product when I consider how I'd have to multiply myself and people like me who would have to add resources to devices or take resources away. We've saved hundreds of hours. Most of the time those hours would have to be after hours as well, which are more valuable to me as that's my personal time. Those saved hours are across months, not years. I would consider the number of resources that Turbonomic is adding and taking away and the placement (if I had to do it all myself) would end up being hundreds of hours monthly that would be added without the help of Turbonomic. It helps us to meet SLAs mainly due to the fact that we're able to keep the servers going and to keep the servers in an environment, to keep them to where (if we need to add resources) we can add them at any given time. It will keep our SLAs where they need to be. If we were to have downtime due to the fact that we had to add resources or take resources away and it was an emergency, then that would prevent us from meeting our SLAs. We also use it to monitor Azure and to monitor our machines in terms of the resources that are out there and the cost involved. In a lot of cases, it does a better job of giving us cost information than Azure itself does. We're able to see the cost per machine. We're able to see the unattached volume and storage that we are paying for. It gives us a great level of insight. Turbonomic gives us the time to be able to focus on innovation and ongoing modernization. Some of the tasks that it does are tasks that I would not necessarily have to do. It's very helpful in that I know that the resources are there where they need to be and it gives me an idea of what changes need to be made or what suggestions it's making. Even if I don't take them, I'm able to get a good idea of some best practices through Turbonomic. One of the ways that Turbonomic does to help bring new resources to market is that we are now able to see the resources (or at least monitor the resources) before they get out to the general public within our environment. We saw immediate value from the product in the test environment. We set it up in a small test environment and we started with just placement and we could tell that the placement was being handled more efficiently than what VMware was doing. There was value for us in placement alone. Then, after we left the placement, we began to look at the resources and there were resources. We immediately began to see a change in the environment. It has made the application and performance better, mainly due to the fact that we are able to give resources and take resources away based on what the need is. Our expenses, definitely, have been in a better place based on the savings that we've been able to make in the cloud and on-prem. Turbonomic has been very helpful in that regard. We've been able to see the savings easily based on the reports in Turbonomic. That, and just seeing the machines that are not being used to capacity allows us to set everything up so it runs a bit more efficiently.
Kyle Naidoo - PeerSpot reviewer
Nutanix gave us three and a half hours back
Recently, I have had quite a few issues with Nutanix Guest Tools (NGT). When you do a full update from LCM, your NGT doesn't automatically install on your VMs. You need to go back to Prism Central and select a list of VMs, then install NGT. You need to go to each of those VMs, then restart them to get the NGT installed. Also, there are some VMs that we have on our system that we used to run on an old environment, which was Hyper-V. Previously, we had VMware, so some of our VMs are Windows 7 32-bit and Windows 7 64-bit. However, the NGT no longer allows for installations on those. We constantly get packet drops. We are actually looking at upgrading them in the future. While Windows 7 is not supported anymore from a Microsoft perspective, Nutanix could allow NGT to still be installed since people still use Windows 7. I have five VMs currently running on Windows 7. This is not a major issue. The VMs still work, but you get an alert in the mornings, saying, "Hey, NGT is not installed." When we go there, we try to install NGT, but it won't allow us since Windows 7 is not allowed anymore.
Ravi Khanchandani - PeerSpot reviewer
Optimizing virtual environments by reclaiming and allocating resources efficiently
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager optimizes VM performance and virtualization. It provides me with recommendations for resource allocation, indicating if a virtual machine is under-provisioned or over-provisioned. This allows me to reclaim resources, such as reducing the number of CPU cores or RAM, which is beneficial. Its capacity planning feature is also very useful for me. The GUI is highly simplified, cutting across various virtualization platforms, including VMware, Hyper-V, and Nutanix environments.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"With Turbonomic, we were able to reduce our ESX cluster size and save money on our maintenance and license renewals. It saved us around $75,000 per year but it's a one-time reduction in VMware licensing. We don't renew the support. The ongoing savings is probably $50,000 to $75,000 a year, but there was a one-time of $200,000 plus."
"It has automated a lot of things. We have saved 30 to 35 percent in human resource time and cost, which is pretty substantial. We don't have a big workforce here, so we have to use all the automation we can get."
"Before implementing Turbonomic, we had difficulty reaching a consensus about VM placement and sizing. Everybody's opinion was wrong, including mine. The application developers, implementers, and infrastructure team could never decide the appropriate size of a virtual machine. I always made the machines small, and they always made them too big. We were both probably wrong."
"The ability to monitor and automate both the right-sizing of VMs as well as to automate the vMotion of VMs across ESXi hosts."
"I like Turbonomic's built-in reporting. It provides a ton of information out of the box, so I don't have to build panels for the monthly summaries and other reports I need to present to management. We get better performance and bottleneck reporting from this than we do from our older EMC software."
"The biggest value I'm getting out of VMTurbo right now is the complete hands-off management of equalizing the usage in my data center."
"The automated memory balancing, where it looks at whether it's being used in the most efficient way and adds or takes away memory, is the best part. If it didn't do that, it would be something that I would have to do. We have too many machines for one person to do that. The automation helps me in that it is done in a really efficient way and a balanced way because of the policies. It really helps."
"I like the analytics that help us optimize compatibility. Whereas Azure Advisor tells us what we have to do, Turbonomic has automation which actually does those things. That means we don't have to be present to get them done and simplifies our IT engineers' jobs."
"It made it a lot easier to spin up these tenant environments with little to no administrative overhead."
"The capacity planning, forecasting, and Runways are worth their weight in gold. NCM has saved us time in IT, and that's money."
"The most valuable aspect of NCM is its ease of deployment."
"Previous inquiries took us almost a full day to prepare the VM to the liking of our users. Now the deployment time is below 15 minutes and users can do it on their own! That leaves us to only update the blueprints if new requirements come in or new Windows Versions are published. As we have now predefined setups the testing team can rely on common ground for their product tests. Development teams can experiment with alpha versions in a secured environment (separate VLANs) without harming production machines."
"The blueprints and templates are very nice and easy to use. They are very valuable because we can configure the entirety of an environment as a template and reuse it multiple times."
"The Nutanix technical support is very, very good."
"Nutanix Cloud Manager has increased our productivity higher than what it used to be. We used to spend four hours on server checking. Nutanix gave us three and a half hours back from those four hours to do normal work."
"The solution's most valuable features revolve around the single pane of glass it provides, which helps me see all my infrastructure and quickly manage VM operations without having to go to individual clusters."
"SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is a great tool that is easy to use...It is a stable solution."
"SolarWinds Virtualization Manager optimizes VM performance and virtualization."
"SolarWinds Virtualization Manager optimizes VM performance and virtualization."
"The most valuable features of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager are the non-Windows servers' monitoring and capacity planning."
 

Cons

"It would be good for Turbonomic, on their side, to integrate with other companies like AppDynamics or SolarWinds or other monitoring softwares. I feel that the actual monitoring of applications, mixed in with their abilities, would help. That would be the case wherever Turbonomic lacks the ability to monitor an application or in cases where applications are so customized that it's not going to be able to handle them. There is monitoring that you can do with scripting that you may not be able to do with Turbonomic."
"In Azure, it's not what you're using. You purchase the whole 8 TB disk and you pay for it. It doesn't matter how much you're using. So something that I've asked for from Turbonomic is recommendations based on disk utilization. In the example of the 8 TB disk where only 200 GBs are being used, based on the history, there should be a recommendation like, "You can safely use a 500 GB disk." That would create a lot of savings."
"The reporting needs to be improved. It's important for us to know and be able to look back on what happened and why certain decisions were made, and we want to use a custom report for this."
"The deployment process is a little tricky. It wasn't hard for me because I have pretty in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes, and their software runs on Kubernetes. To deploy it or upgrade it, you have to be able to follow steps and use the Kubernetes command line, or you'll need someone to come in and do it for you."
"If they would educate their customers to understand the latest updates, that would help customers... Also, there are a lot of features that are not available in Turbonomic. For example, PaaS component optimization and automation are still in the development phase."
"Remove the need for special in-house knowledge and development."
"The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."
"We don't use Turbonomic for FinOps and part of the reason is its cost reporting. The reporting could be much more robust and, if that were the case, I could pitch it for FinOps."
"It could maybe have better documentation. Nutanix does have really good documentation, but it could have more details in the future."
"LCM could be our second favorite feature right up there with One-Click Upgrades if it worked as smoothly but We have had a few issues with LCM but those appear to have been related to OEM hardware vendor not in sync with Nutanix software, not sure how this could be improved in the future."
"They should include more use cases for automation in administering the environment."
"NCM's analytics could be better because we're not getting an accurate analysis of our virtual machines, and we're over-provisioning some of them."
"I'd like them to offer a more flexible licensing model."
"Its licensing can be better."
"One thing that comes directly to mind is how they manage version control. I would love to see Calm create a built-in source control feature, one that we could tie into a repository and it would self-manage changes in versions. All the version control is built within Calm right now. I would love to see that integrated with an external repository and make it easy to tie it into GitHub or Git repositories."
"I would like to see a P2V feature like Move or Xtract. The interface for migrating from one VM infrastructure to another is one of the best but going from a physical machine to a Nutanix VM is a bit too challenging."
"The SolarWinds Virtualization Manager platform in general can have a better response time in the performance."
"The problem or issue with the product is related to its pricing."
"SolarWinds needs to support integration with other virtualization platforms like KVM or Linux-based systems."
"SolarWinds needs to support integration with other virtualization platforms like KVM or Linux-based systems."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
"We felt the pricing was very fair for the product. It is in no way prohibitive for larger deployments, unlike other similar product on the market."
"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."
"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."
"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."
"I have not seen Turbonomic's new pricing since IBM purchased it. When we were looking at it in my previous company before IBM's purchase, it was compatible with other tools."
"I know there have been some issues with the billing, when the numbers were first proposed, as to how much we would save. There was a huge miscommunication on our part. Turbonomic was led to believe that we could optimize our AWS footprint, because we didn't know we couldn't. So, we were promised savings of $750,000. Then, when we came to implement Turbonomic, the developers in AWS said, "Absolutely not. You're not putting that in our environment. We can't scale down anything because they coded it." Our AWS environment is a legacy environment. It has all these old applications, where all the developers who have made it are no longer with the company. Those applications generate a ton of money for us. So, if one breaks, we are really in trouble and they didn't want to have to deal with an environment that was changing and couldn't be supported. That number went from $750,000 to about $450,000. However, that wasn't Turbonomic's fault."
"The pricing and licensing are fair. We purchase based on benchmark pricing, which we have been able to get. There are no surprise charges nor hidden fees."
"Compared to Dell HCI, Nutanix is a lot cheaper."
"We have the ultimate license, so I don't know what it would cost individually."
"The pricing model offered by Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is better than the ones offered by the other solutions in the market."
"It is expensive when you are looking at small locations that need low-latency workloads, but for larger locations, as compared to other guys, even using VMware, it is not that expensive because if you add it all up, it is going to be pretty much the same value."
"The solution is a bit high in price for what we are receiving as features. I feel they are overcharging us at approximately 25 percent. That is something that they should change."
"It's cost-effective. It's not necessarily cheap, but it's also not inordinately expensive. It comes down to how much you use it to offset some of the costs."
"It's always difficult to discuss Nutanix pricing because the cost varies wildly depending on the customer and the region. Desktop virtualization is simpler because there is a defined scope. You can tell the Nutanix salesperson how many users you have. In a more traditional environment, it's always best to have NCM for monitoring because you'd be crazy not to."
"Compared to UCS and the NetApp storage, Nutanix is actually cheaper."
"The is an annual subscription needed to use this solution."
"The maintenance and support are a part of the package, meaning it is included in the product's price."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
7%
Computer Software Company
37%
Educational Organization
15%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
4%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
10%
Energy/Utilities Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?
It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is...
What needs improvement with Turbonomic?
The implementation could be enhanced.
What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?
We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting...
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 an...
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 produ...
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 improvemen...
What do you like most about SolarWinds Virtualization Manager?
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is a great tool that is easy to use...It is a stable solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Virtualization Manager?
This solution delivers significant cost savings, especially from a capacity perspective. Consistent monitoring is ess...
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Virtualization Manager?
SolarWinds needs to support integration with other virtualization platforms like KVM or Linux-based systems.
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
Nutanix Cloud Manager Intelligent Operations, Nutanix Cloud Manager Self-Service, Nutanix Cloud Management Cost Governance, Nutanix Cloud Manager Security Central
SolarWinds VMAN
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, Volkswagen SAIC, Brighton and Hove City Council, Foresters Financial, Janus International Group, Cloud Comrade, Serco
Elliot Health System
Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.