Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) Reviews

Our business needed a disaster recovery solution. We wanted something that could failover into Azure if our on-prem data center crashed or we lost power. We used to have bad power issues and needed a solution to failover into another data center to get everything running in under an hour. 

We need to figure out which VMs and applications to stand up first in Azure to get our business operational the fastest. That's what we hope to achieve with Nutanix Cloud Clusters. We need to have our failover scenario prepared with our existing infrastructure and Azure. 

Our existing infrastructure is a hybrid setup. We use private direct peering from our data center in Providence, Rhode Island, and we have a 12-gig express route with hub-and-spoke technology. We deployed NC2 on a spoke, and our hub is set up as a peer to that spoke. 

We have been looking for a good DR solution for about two years, and Nutanix Cloud Clusters has been awesome so far. We wanted a reliable platform that could shift our workload. We have a very low-latency connection. NC2 is excellent for disaster recovery versus Azure Site Recovery, Microsoft's DR solution. 

We spent a year on this ASR project and had so many issues when we attempted to do a failover. It took four to 24 hours to failover a couple of SQL VMs. During our first test deployment of NC2, it only took three or four minutes to failover and recover our VMs. This blew the Microsoft platform out of the water.   

One of the biggest reasons we switched to Nutanix Cloud Clusters was the VMware acquisition. A lot of customers are in the same boat. When the time came to renew our license, it was almost $2 million extra for the licensing alone without the additional hardware. We would spend $2 million for the licenses and not get anything else. We would also need to maintain the data center, rack space, switches, SAN, etc.

By moving to NC2, we could consolidate a ton of rack space and hardware and go hyper-converged everywhere. There is still maintenance that requires work, but it allows us to reduce the footprint inside our data center, making portability and manageability much easier.

I like the fact that it gives you a single pane of glass where you can set up your protection policies and categories and failover into the other side pretty easily. You don't need to go into all of these different GUIs and panes of glass to commit a failover. I can easily train some of my technicians who are less skilled or do not fully understand the architecture and teach them to be admins for this platform. I appreciate the usability.

We have used NC2 to migrate applications. The discussion about refactoring an application can take months. We need to consider whether we want to refactor an application to make it cloud-native or lift and shift. We thought it was impossible to make some of our legacy applications failover into Azure, but we demonstrated that it was possible with NC2. Some of our bigger applications work in the Azure cloud almost like they're deployed at the on-prem data center. The failover has been great, and the VMs have been set up with no OS problems.  Nothing is fundamentally wrong with the applications. 

Our biggest complaint is that we constantly need to open support tickets about bugs when we upgrade to the latest version. For example, our static IPs failover into Azure but switch to DHCP. It only occurs about one out of every 50 times, but it's a huge issue. We need to find a workaround where we disable DHCP. NC2 is currently immature, and they're still trying to make the platform more stable, but I see the vision. 

We started our POC for Nutanix Cloud Clusters about three months ago. 

I would give NC2 an eight out of 10 for stability. I'm unsure if it's a problem with the NC2 or if we are neglecting maintenance on our side. The version that we are using isn't doing well, but we're primarily seeing issues on-prem. The software itself seems more stable. 

NC2's scalability is great. 

We work with the Nutanix enterprise global team. It's excellent compared to Microsoft support. Microsoft requires you to open a support ticket for every issue, and they will not look into something unless you open a ticket. By contrast, Nutanix support will take the initiative and be proactive. They come to you with suggestions about what you should do. I've had to open up a lot of tickets about bugs on the NC2 platform, but they're working to make it more stable. 

Nutanix is quick to act, whereas Microsoft put it on us to prove it was their issue. We found a fundamental flaw in their software, but we had to spend months probing it. While we had a horrible relationship with Microsoft, our interactions with Nutanix have been great. 

We spent a year working with Azure Site Recovery. It was a horrible experience, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Our choices were ASR and NC2. Two years ago, our executive went to the table with Nutanix and Microsoft. I don't know what happened, but it seems like Nutanix dropped the ball. We did a proof of concept with ASR, which failed, so now we're scrambling to get NC2 deployed before our VMware contract expires. 

Overall, the deployment was smooth. There were a few road bumps and hurdles, but I think those helped me to understand the platform better and understand the fundamentals of the solution. 

I believe NC2 will reduce our total cost of ownership. We're still in our POC phase, but I'm confident we'll reduce our overhead once it goes into production. The initial effort required to implement the policies and set up the architecture will be significant, but we'll cut the overhead significantly after all of that is in place. It will be much easier to maintain. 

I expect Nutanix to be a more reliable solution that I don't need to babysit and maintain. I told the Nutanix team that I wouldn't open a support ticket for every error I saw. I've been seeing alerts that are just bugs. I just want a solution that I can stand up that's easy to learn. 

I rate Nutanix Cloud Clusters nine out of 10. I like NC2. It's a great platform to leverage. I recommend doing a proof of concept because it takes a POC to understand the product's full scope. I've read the documentation many times, and it's difficult to understand. There are all these deployment scenarios based on your existing architecture. 

Overall, it's an amazing product. However, there are still a few bugs because the developers keep making significant architectural changes in each version. The last version had several features we were anticipating, but then we had to go through the upgrade process again. Still, if I need to wait a few months to get better features and more stability, I can live with that. 

We purchased Nutanix as a replacement for our previous disaster recovery solution. We originally used Microsoft Azure Site Recovery, but we had many problems. One of our partners who helps us with our major solutions suggested we check out NC2.

We are leveraging NC2 for our products to ensure they work how we want them to. In the event of a true disaster, we can failover into any cloud solution or back down to on-prem. Some of our applications run better on-prem, and some aspects of our operation must be on-prem. 

Our previous solution was inconsistent and took a long time to recover. NC2 consistently delivers full disaster recovery in a few hours. That was a huge selling point. We need to know that our business can be up and running in hours, not days. We didn't have a real disaster recovery plan before NC2. That's a goal we've been trying to achieve, and Nutanix gives us what we need to make that a reality

Hopefully, we never need to use it, but it's good to know we have it. It's like an insurance policy. We've never used it in a real DR situation, but based on test cases, I estimate that we've saved around a week's worth of time compared to ASR. NC2 has the potential to replace some of the other solutions that we use today, but we don't know yet.

NC2's biggest advantages over Azure Site Recovery are its performance and ease of use. You quickly know if everything is working. We have used NC2 to migrate some enterprise applications, but nothing too big. 

We have used it for a few low-level apps. It's potentially a massive timesaver because we don't need to rebuild those applications. I couldn't say the exact amount of time saved but it's possibly 25 to 50 percent, depending on the scenario. In some cases, it might be up to 80 percent. It varies based on the infrastructure.

In the current version, we've noticed many false positives when we check the alerts in the morning. For example, it told us that services stopped working, but there was nothing wrong when we checked it out. We've already raised the issue with support. They told us it's a bug in the version we use. We're about to upgrade to the recommended version, so it should be fine. 

I started using Nutanix Cloud Clusters about five months ago.

NC2's stability could be better because we've faced a few bugs in the current version. It isn't the worst, but it could get better when we upgrade. It's not like we're seeing daily outages. The one outage we had wasn't NC2's fault. It was a problem with our Microsoft tenant

I rate Nutanix support eight out of 10. Their support team has been extremely responsive and helpful when we've had issues. In addition to their support, we've also worked closely with their support team on a project we're doing. They've been phenomenal in helping us get through it.

Positive

We previously used Azure Site Recovery. We could always get our data into Azure, but it didn't work as expected when we tried to replicate it back down during disaster recovery. 

ASR didn't work properly. It would replicate, but we couldn't use anything because all our disks would come back out of order. That was especially a problem with our Windows VMs. With Nutanix, that process has always been smooth. Recovery could take one or two days with ASR, but it can be completed in a few hours with NC2.

We believe we can save money in the long run. We're also saving time on the management aspect.

I wasn't involved in purchasing Nutanix, so I don't know the exact price. I've heard it's reasonable and comparable to our VMware licensing. It might be more expensive, but we get more bang for our buck. 

We considered a few others, but it made sense to use NC2 because we already leverage Nutanix products for other aspects of our business.

I rate Nutanix Cloud Clusters seven out of 10.

We use Nutanix Cloud Clusters to deploy the organization's VMs and clusters. We are running those VMs now on OpenShift. Our current deployment is on-prem, but once we finish our Kubernetes deployment, we'll take the next step toward an AWS hybrid cloud. 

We can do anything throughout the infrastructure from one console. This is the best for us. NC2 has reduced our TCO in the private sector but not the public sector. In the public sector, state money is simply paid, no matter how much it costs. There is no need for efficiency. In the bank, there is a higher need for efficiency, so we are constantly looking for ways to reduce the TCO with NC2.

Nutanix Cloud Clusters simplifies our IT operations. What happened is that when we migrated from KVM to Nutanix, we had different clusters, and everything was mostly manual, including scripting, shells, and managing different blades. Switching to this graphical tool was something special. 

NC2 has increased our speed and given us the power to plot things faster than before. Before the deployment, everything was more complicated, and now managing the infrastructure is more seamless.

We started using the CICD theme a year ago, improving the infrastructure relationship even more. Now, it helps us be more productive and move faster.  Problem detection is much more accurate for us. Previously, we had specific clusters and had to look for where the most complicated problem was.

We found Nutanix's replication features to be the most valuable because we have so many solutions for disaster recovery. We're heading towards managing our organization's applications and data across on-premise and public clouds. It is a project that will begin toward the end of the year.

I don't have the expertise to build a hybrid cloud. We are starting to build one and haven't tried that part yet. I want to try because that is the most critical part for us. I want to see what, if anything, could be improved. The product is fantastic locally. Now, I want to try it in the cloud. My problem is not in the infrastructure; it is in the application, a different thing.

We have used NC2 for at least four years.

We have had no problems with NC2, aside from some of the typical problems that might occur during the deployment. The cluster has never failed us. If we have any issues, it's because of the application, not the infrastructure.

NC2's scalability is excellent. The only limit is cost, as you normally have to buy additional nodes. Investment is important in our country. Paraguay does not have a lot of application traffic, so having one to four boxes is more than enough. 

In Paraguay, all development is in-house. It is normally local development with tools like legacy JavaScript and similar tools. Technologically, it's difficult to update in terms of architecture. Now, the evolution that takes place in that system is containerized.

We are containerizing the different solutions that the IRS of Paraguay began two years ago. The application is relatively old, but it continues to withstand technological update attacks without major problems.

I rate Nutanix support 10 out of 10. We used Nutanix technical support during one of our deployments. I think they were from Chile. They clearly understood Nutanix products and were very experienced. Their expertise was obvious in their responses when problems arose in the architecture before implementation.

Positive

KVM and vanilla CentOS are the two solutions we have used.

We deployed NC2 with support in both cases — Nutanix support in one case and local support from another company in the other. There wasn't any strategy. We just directly followed the supplier's recommendations. There were no major surprises or problems in any of the deployments.

The licensing of Nutanix Cloud Clusters is good for now, but I want to see the shift when we migrate to a hybrid cloud. I still don't know. Due to the price issues with AWS, I hope it is not expensive. The Nutanix license is expensive for our country, so I want to see if I can lower costs by having a multi-hybrid cloud. This could be a place for improvement. In my case, having a license with an on-premise cost in the cloud without the cost skyrocketing so much. The AWS public cloud has a lot of hidden costs, and that's the part that worries me.

I rate Nutanix Cloud Clusters 10 out of 10.

We used to have one data center with the Nutanix infrastructure cluster for disaster recovery purposes. The main data center is replicating the DR business continuity data center. Last year, we analyzed whether we could replace this data center with another cluster in the public cloud. That's what we did.

We installed Nutanix Cloud Clusters in Amazon AWS and replicated the VMs and the data from the main center to the data cluster in the cloud. The next step was to release this data center because we didn't need a physical data center with the infrastructure anymore, and the data would be replicated into the cloud and Nutanix Cloud Clusters.

We did this because of the cost, management, and administration. We don't need to lease the data center for DR anymore. We have physical equipment to manage over there because it's a data center that we are leasing. The second aspect is the flexibility for restoration or recovery.

Before this DR data center, we were in a fix if there was a problem with fire. We need to fix it first, and then we need to see if the equipment is not available anymore. With Nutanix Cloud Clusters, we can do a very quick recovery to the main data center or any other data center we choose.

If the main data center is not available anymore, we can restore it to any other data center. We have many data centers worldwide, so it adds more flexibility to us.

The solution's most valuable feature is its quick configuration and installation. They are really quick compared to any other configuration clusters I've seen before. Nutanix Cloud Clusters can be configured and installed in a couple of hours.

Nutanix Cloud Clusters has helped us reduce our total cost of ownership by 50 to 70k because we used it to replace a physical data center.

The license portability is excellent. We already had the Nutanix clusters and license at our DRP data center. We didn't need to buy more licenses when we moved to Nutanix Cloud Clusters because we migrated and used the licenses that were already available.

Nutanix Cloud Clusters has simplified our IT operations. It has saved us efforts in administering the entire data center.

When you go to the configuration part on the Nutanix site, the information is a bit high-level. What you have is the type of material you can choose from, along with the cost per year, and that's it. It doesn't have information about what material can be adapted for database purposes, application purposes, and profiles.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Clusters for one year.

The solution's technical support is excellent. Today, we have around 100 clusters of Nutanix and other virtualization environments. Once I create the case, I get feedback a couple of hours later. The only issue I have with the support is when it comes to engineering. In engineering, they need to analyze and come up with a solution, but regular support is really good.

Positive

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

One use case is for virtual machines or virtual servers.

NC2 improves team performance and productivity. It is very efficient for managing our organization’s applications and data. It is easy to use and very user-friendly.

There is also license portability. It is very good that it no longer depends on a physical team, and it can be contributed to different teams. It is very useful.

NC2 has helped us reduce our total cost of ownership by 15% to 20%. Because everything is integrated, in general, it helps to reduce all costs.

I believe without any doubt that Nutanix is ​​one of the few companies that focuses on making the lives of systems engineers easier. All their applications are very easy to use. The philosophy of doing everything with one click is applied in Nutanix technology.

We use it for disaster recovery protection for our enterprise applications in AWS S3. It allows us to have high availability and safeguard the information very easily without having additional expenses.

I have used NC2 to migrate enterprise applications. NC2 is very fast and efficient. It synchronizes, and it compresses. I have done many activities of this type, and it works very well.

Its performance and speed are valuable. Its performance has helped me reduce costs.

It should not be so expensive. Its price is high, but at the same time, it does give the results it offers.

I have been using this solution for six years.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable. Scalability is one of its best features. 

I have plans to increase its usage in the future.

They are very good. One of the best things that Nutanix has is customer service. All technologies fail. There is no perfect technology. The difference is the service they give you.

Positive

We were using VMware. We switched because of the price.

Its initial deployment is very good. The first time I used it was through a demo, and I was very happy. 

The deployment was very easy. There was not much of a strategy. We just had to follow the described procedure.

We used an integrator from Mexico. The name of the company is GQC. They are a service provider. My experience with them was very good, and I would highly recommend them.

The ROI is in terms of reliability.

I feel that the prices could be improved, but the truth is that I am very happy. The license price keeps increasing, but I am confident that it is much more reasonable than other brands.

I did not evaluate other solutions.

I would rate NC2 a nine out of ten because there is no perfect technology. There are always things that can be improved, but the truth is that it is doing very well.

We use it for server virtualization and migration from two-tier legacy architecture to hyperconverged architecture.

We are using it in our company and for our customers.

About 70% of our yearly benefits are from Nutanix. The benefits are in terms of time, money, and resources. For example, for a VMware project, if I have to put three engineers, then for a Nutanix project, I can put one engineer, and it is done very quickly.

Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) simplify our IT operations.

We use it for disaster recovery protection for our enterprise applications in AWS S3. For example, for the production-size customers, we have clusters with four or five nodes, and we can make enough architecture for the disaster recovery side with two nodes. It is only for critical virtual machines between the two sides, so we can make cost optimization by using fewer nodes in the disaster recovery and less usage of resources.

Distributed storage and software-defined storage are valuable. There is ease of use. It is very important for our customers to have one centralized management console. Scalability is also very important for our customers.

The interface organization can be better. If we can, for example, organize virtual machines by groups, folders, and sub-folders, it will be easier to administer and monitor. Their support is excellent, and it is easy to use, but it can be easier.

We have been using Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) since 2018. It has been seven years. 

Its stability is very good. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.

It is very easy to scale. We can scale out and scale up. We prefer to scale up.

Their technical support is very good. The time to respond is very good. In 99% of cases, they are able to solve the problem within one hour of raising the incident.

Positive

I have some customers who prefer the legacy architecture. For those customers, we propose VMware, but by default, my advice for my customers is to go with hyperconverged. Hyperconverged for me is Nutanix along with AHV.

I prefer Nutanix over others because of its ease of use and because it is the future. The solution is very stable, and the support quality is very good. That is why I prefer to advise hyperconverged with Nutanix.

NC2 has helped to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) for me and my customers. If we do a calculation for two to five years, it can optimize the cost by 20% to 30% including hardware, software, and services.

The licensing portability can be very interesting. At the moment, I am working with Nutanix Appliances with the AHV as a hypervisor. I did not have a chance to ask for portability between platforms, but it will be good if you can have portability between multiple types of platforms.

At the moment, all of my customers have NC2 on-prem. I do not have customers who are using multi-cloud and public cloud. I just had a discussion with one of my customers who is interested in multi-cloud. That will be our first experience with Nutanix for a multi-cloud deployment.

I would rate Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) a nine out of ten.

We are a cloud service provider, so we offer the product as a service for our customers. We use it in-house as well. 

We offer various services like containers as a service, storage as a service, and so on.

In most cases, we used to manage our organization's applications and data manually. We are in the process of automating it and moving towards the cloud and self-service.

The license portability is good enough. The flexibility is a key feature. That's why we value it the most.

The most valuable feature of NC2 is scalability.

The most significant reason my customers like it is that they know what they will pay for the service. It's a regular payment instead of per consumption.

We are one of the most important partners for Nutanix in Spain. So we have a lot of benefits coming from this.

It simplifies our IT operations. Scalability and flexibility are very important features for us. They make our lives easier, but we are working to make them even better.

What we need now is multi-tenant features to make the clusters self-deploy and self-use on the platform instead of us having to do it manually.

I have been using it for around five to six quarters.

The customer service and support are fine. The speed of the answers could be improved, but from a technical perspective, it is good enough. 

Positive

We used VMware. In terms of cost, Nutanix is a better solution because of the platform. Our agreements with Nutanix are better than VMware, even with the Broadcom acquisition.

I would rate my experience with the deployment a seven out of ten, with ten being easy. It could be easier. 

It has helped reduce the total cost of ownership by more or less 20% or 25%.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

We need to exit our private data center and migrate to the public cloud. Transforming all our systems and the native cloud is very challenging. NC2 gives us the ability to migrate to the public cloud while giving us more time to transform all these applications that we have into modern apps.

The product gives us the ability to migrate to the public cloud without external resource recruitment. 

We did not need to spend a lot of money transforming our apps. That allows the technologists and IT to focus on other areas of the business, including AI and automation, and improve these instead of worrying about migration to the public cloud. 

The ability to manage our costs when we migrate to the public cloud is great. Costs can get out of control, so the fact that we can manage our costs is one of the best features. The other big value we get out of Nutanix is sustainability. In terms of lowering our carbon footprint or moving to NetZero, we can achieve a lot of targets by using NC2, and that's great.

In terms of dealing with our business-critical workloads, Nutanix is a highly scalable, highly resilient, and very high-performing solution. To have that capability in the cloud, just like having it within a private data center, means that our workloads run at an optimum level.

Nutanix Cloud helped to eliminate cloud waste in our organization. As we looked at the native cloud, we saw the wastage. We saw the costs and decided that a cost optimization strategy was very much needed. Having NC2 minimizes waste and maximizes what we're using in the cloud. We have a report coming soon about how much waste we've managed to reduce.

NC2 is great for managing our organization's application and data across on-premises and public clouds. That's a unique feature, and we really enjoy it. That unified management plane of managing both public and private Nutanix clusters means it's a seamless experience no matter what cluster we manage, which is great for the digital team that we have.

Not much can be improved at the moment, given that we're quite an early adopter and we're not quite live yet. The experience of deployment was very slick. The support from Microsoft and Nutanix was very good. 

Perhaps the one thing that could be improved is the features of Prism Central versus the local Prism Elements UI but I understand that is being reviewed.

We were early adopters of NC2. We've had it for about six months, and we're aiming to go live with it this year in August 2023.

We've been running the product for six months as an early adopter, and we have not had any challenges. There have not been any problems in terms of reliability given it is the same software as Nutanix onprem.

Scalability is one of the features of the public cloud. Since we've deployed NC2 in a public cloud, we can easily weigh more capacity if we need that, and that's a very simple process.

I'm in the early adoption program, which makes it very easy. Over many years, I've used Nutanix, and support is one of their finest features. 

For example, once, I had a very complex issue on our cluster in our data center. In the end, there were eight senior engineers right across Nutanix who were getting called into our original call. That lasted a couple of hours. It got to the point where they fixed this very complex issue. I've never seen support like that before - where multiple senior engineers were called in and were willing to help. It got to the point where someone that practically wrote the piece of the software in question ended up talking with us and helped to sort it out. 

Support remains one of Nutanix's best features.

Positive

This is a brand-new project for us. 

Nutanix and Microsoft gave us excellent guidance and gave us very minimal assistance, even though they were there to support us. 

We deployed in-house.

We are still in the early adoption stage and doing POCs. Once we go live, we'll be able to measure ROI more clearly.

The license portability is good. We migrated our hardware-tied licenses to their capacity-based model. Once we migrated those licenses we then linked to NC2. That was a great advantage that we could do that.

We did a lot of cost analysis and looked at some cloud-native options. 

However, the reality is that a lot of the benefits, including having that unified management plane, meant that we could use Nutanix in the best possible way once we realized the cost optimizations behind it.

For someone who wants to migrate workloads directly to the cloud and run them natively, you want to look at what these niche markets, third parties, and vendors like Nutanix have. They're filling a niche market inside the cloud where you can get better value for your money by utilizing the best of what's in the cloud. You've got the other benefits of sustainability and management,  lowered costs in terms of upskilling, and more.

I'd rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

I'd advise others to speak to Nutanix. They were very good at giving us consultancy to help us realize all the benefits of NC2. Of course, at first, we didn't realize all the benefits. However, once we were willing to take a look and get all of the documentation in front of us that showcases all the benefits of NC2, we wanted to try it. A trial is where, at least in my case, it shows how it can outshine the full native cloud.