Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

Our organization is utilizing Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure for the majority of our infrastructure applications software, systems software, print processing software, and web application software as well as all of our core it infrastructure applicaitons and processes including alerting, monitoring, logging. Our only exceptions are currently our large data base implementations and our accounting edi batch processing solutions which are said to require ultra low latency and high performance network and storage.

Nutanix Prism Pro has improved the quality and efficiency of our organization's infrastructure team operations throughout our entire datacenter. Nutanix Prism Pro is powered by machine learning and task automation and it intelligently optimizes capacity, proactively detects performance anomalies, and enables our infrastructure team to automate operations tasks with ease and confidence, recapturing valuable time we can utilize elsewhere within our organization. Traditional Infrastructure Team Operations Management tools were built for traditional static infrastructure. These tools often overwhelm infrastructure teams with overly obnoxious alerts. In dynamic and scalable modern data centers with high performance and diverse workloads, infrastructure teams need simplicity and accuracy to achieve high productivity. Prism Pro automagically mines large volumes of system data to generate actionable insights and enables our infrastructure team to automate remediation of everyday tasks for performance management and capacity optimization.

ONE-CLICK UPGRADES! - Nutanix Prism Pro provides robust upgrading Nutanix clusters mechanism that has long been a delightful experience delivered via one-click upgrades. The one-click process hides a lot of complexity by using advanced automation and consumer-grade design experience. Historically, each cluster had to be upgraded one at a time. While the process itself was simple, this constraint still extended the length of time required to complete upgrades for multi-cluster environments.

Advance Search- Nutanix prism Pro offers to search Nutanix infra related entities as a content format. For example, it shows for VMs who is using memory equal to or greater than 10GB,VM memory =< 10GB. This is a very advanced feature that helps to get deeper details of Nutanix cluster entities.

The Life Cycle Manager tracks software and firmware versions of all entities in the cluster, integrated both on Prism Element and Prism Central.
LCM consists of a framework and a set of modules for inventory and update.
LCM supports software updates for all platforms that use Nutanix software.
LCM supports firmware updates for specific platforms.
From Prism Element, you can use LCM to update AHV, NCC, Foundation, BIOS, BMC, DATA Drives, HBA Controllers, SATADOMs, and M.2 Drives (G6 and later). From Prism Central, you can update Calm, Epsilon, Karbon, and Objects. When you run a firmware upgrade on multiple nodes, the LCM updates one node at a time to prevent any downtime in your cluster. Before the upgrade starts, all the VMs on that node are migrated to another host and the node enters maintenance mode. Always make sure that your cluster can tolerate a node failure by having the data resiliency status as “OK” in Prism Element.

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.

We have been utilizing Nutanix for fifteen months.

We have found Nutanix solution to be very stable; we have never experienced any downtime with these solutions and aside from a few LCM hiccoughs we have never had any performance impacts utilizing this solution.

We have found Nutanix solution to be highly scalable; the Shared Nothing Distributed Architecture works well for our implementation.

Nutanix support has definitely been best in class there has been more than one occasion where we have contacted for support with an issue and tech/engineer has noted unrelated issues and insisted on resolving either during the session or at our earliest convenience.

Previously we utilized traditional hardware-software infrastructure solutions Nutanix is our first hyperconverged infrastructure solution.

I was not involved in the initial rollout of our first cluster sets but continued rollouts of new clusters has been straightforward.

Our implementation efforts have generally been a joint effort between vendor team and our in-house IT personnel the level of expertise has been quite good although there have been some communication breakdowns along the way.

Unfortunately I can not provide exact ROI calculations but we continue to invest in converting our traditional infrastructure to Nutanix HCI.

Unless your organizaiton is in a very limited niche don't pay the hypervisor tax it just isn't worth it.

I was not involved in the initial shortlisting of HCI vendor solutions.

Our organization has been pleased with the Nutanix HCI solution overall. The majority of our issues have been related to non-Nutanix hardware underlying the entire solutions so if We had it to do over again We would probably choose to go with Nutanix hardware.

We wanted to find a way to start getting our academics used to paying for compute without having to actually pay, but still to do it for real in the cloud. We use the self-service portal within Nutanix for them to deposit some funds, which is a cost charge, not a credit card, and then we say, "Okay, based on that, you have bought X amount of CPUs, Y amount of memory, and Z amount of storage." They can then go in and say, "Okay, well, I know I've got a pool of 10 BCPs for a month. I want to spin up three of them to process this data, which I'll then tear down afterwards."

We use it for our neurological psychology department where they do a lot of brain scans. They want to upload them to a place where they can compute the output of those scans and then they want to tear down their compute afterwards, because they don't need to be running all the time. 

Another area uses it for looking at weather data, which is typically quite a large amount of data. They only need to process once and then they can destroy it because they don't need to look at it again, once they've done analytics on it. 

Those are our typical use cases: to allow our research areas to spin up their resources against a pricing model that they've secured funding for, and not have to engage the IT teams to provide the resources for them. It also allows them not to go beyond their budgets and stay within predefined lanes.

We have it on-premise. We built our own private cloud and we host it on there for our academics to consume and spin up their own resources. We know that we could burst up to Azure, AWS, and GCP, but we don't. We keep it all within our private cloud at the moment.

It gives the end-users control of what they need. If they have requested a VM with two VCPUs but they actually need four, they have the ability to go in and do that themselves, from the same pool of resources that they've been allocated. It gives them the complete flexibility to do it themselves. If they're working remotely and they access the cluster from, say, Australia on the opposite side of the world from us, to use an extreme example, and they want to do stuff overnight, they don't have to wait for IT to wake up eight o'clock in the morning, or even later. They can do it at whatever time is relevant to them locally.

It's helped us in terms of ease of compliance and simplicity for the researchers in governing their research grants. The grants are usually very strict regarding how money can be spent, to make sure there's no waste allowed and to get the best value out of the grants. Rather than having to spend thousands on something they may only need for very small periods in a month or a year, it allows them to do more research than they could necessarily afford to do if they had to buy the hardware. It really gives them that agility. The capital that the researchers would have had to spend on hardware, to achieve this, is now all part of a central service using hardware that we've already procured.

In addition, because it does allow the end-users to look after their compute themselves, it means that they can work on things together. They don't have to put a request into IT for them to spin up the resource for them. They can dip in, spin it up, and use it straight away, so if they're actually working very closely with somebody, they don't have to wait for IT. That means the collaboration window is going to be a lot slicker. The actual activity can be done at the time it's needed, rather than having to plan way in advance or slow it down because they need some resource and they haven't got the ability to use it. The ultimate message is that they have the power in their hands, which means the collaboration becomes more fluid because they don't need to wait on IT to give them services.

Nutanix Calm's one-click self-service feature means that we don't have to look after it. The end-users can, as I said, serve themselves so they can set the blueprint and spin up some resources. They don't need to wait for IT, which means that we, in IT, can actually focus on adding value by making sure that the clusters are healthy and by looking to help them with some of their requirements. IT doesn't have to be the "organ grinder" and turn that key to keep giving them resources that they need. Because they have that basic control, we can provide them more value.

It allows the research to happen a lot faster, for the researchers to do the work that they need to do and then tear it down. It certainly does support a much faster turnaround time. Typically, in the past, we would allocate up to a week to provide them with a complete resource, depending on what the requirements were and if we had them available or not. With this, it allows them to do it themselves within a matter of minutes. The speed at which they can do research is now a lot greater.

The solution has enabled us to react faster to the changing needs of the organization, absolutely. That's the main incentive.

One of the valuable features for us is the ability for people to reserve some resources and then use them as and when they need them, rather than us having to give them those resources as they request them. It's very much aligned things to a cloud mindset before letting them loose with an actual credit card.

The fact that these are non-technical people — they're experts in their fields but they're definitely not technical — and they can just log in to the portal and select the resource that they believe they need, and manage it themselves, speaks to the ease of use. It shows them their live costs, etc., as they're spending. The fact that they can do that without any problems, or having to engage the IT teams, is a true testament to it. There's no need for any user training at all. It wasn't overly easy back in the early days of Calm to use it. It was a bit "hacky" in terms of the way you had to build the blueprints, but now it's a lot easier to use. It's a very "light touch" IT solution for an IT service that we provide.

Even though it's a lot easier, it could be a bit slicker for the end-users. The ability to create their own blueprints could be without their having to understand the details of what they're trying to do. If they could just tick this, this, this, and this — whatever they need — and it would go spinning those up, that would be better. Now, we still guide them quite a bit.

I've been using Nutanix Calm for about two years now.

We haven't had any problems. In two years it's never gone down. Every time we patch it, it patches seamlessly. We've never had any problems with it and we've never had to do anything to try to resolve any problems.

Because it's all based at Nutanix, it's really easy to scale it out. We have increased our capacity on our platform a number of times, and it seamlessly rebalances the clusters as it needs to.

It's purely our researchers who are using it. We don't use it ourselves, as an IT department. We have capacity for 100 active VMs at any time and there are about 300 academics in the department who have access to use it.

We haven't used Nutanix technical support for this solution. We have used it for other products, but Calm looks after itself. We have not had any problems with it at all.

We didn't have a previous product. We would do it ourselves, which was part of the challenge for us because we couldn't deliver at the speed at which they wanted us to deliver. The researchers were going off and trying to do it themselves within public cloud, and therefore spending and wasting a lot of money which they could have spent in better ways.

We moved to Calm to make it more efficient for the academics. It would give them a bit more power and control, and ultimately we want to be a lot more cloud-orientated. To achieve that, there needs to be a degree of governance. If they are used to that governance in how they operate, then migrating them to a public cloud piece should be easier. They will  be used to being sensible with when their resources are turned on or not.

Everything is very straightforward to set up. It's as few clicks as possible, which works very nicely.

Our deployment was done within about a day. That was two years so it would be hard to put a more specific time on it. It was also a very different product then, as compared to now.

In terms of an implementation strategy, we essentially got the solution because we wanted to help some of the areas that were complaining about our speed of delivery. We only really offered it to those areas. But we've now gone full circle and just committed to some more Calm licenses to grow our capability because of the speed of delivery it gives to our researchers. That's especially true with their being remote. They can then do it all themselves and don't have to engage with IT to help them spin things up. In the past, they just knocked on the door and got some support from the computing team. With people working remotely now, that's obviously a lot harder. It allows us to achieve remote work.

As for maintenance, It's part of the wider stack. When there's an update, we will roll that out. But it's all pretty much one click and away you go. You come back a little bit later and it's done.

We did it ourselves, based on the guidance that they provided to us.

We have absolutely seen ROI. It doesn't cost us very much and it makes our academic flows a lot easier and we don't get complaints anymore about not being responsive to their needs.

I can't really comment on pricing because, being in the public sector, we get different pricing to what is out there in the world.

But in terms of approach, size it on what your minimum would need to be and then add additional licensing as you need it, rather than trying to go too big, too quickly. The whole point of Nutanix software is that you can grow and size the estate, rather than going instantly to a monolithic solution from day one.

We didn't look at other solutions. We already had Nutanix to provide some research compute for other things, so we went with Calm in addition to the suite that we had at the time.

The biggest lesson I've learned using this solution is how easy it is to empower users to achieve what they need to achieve. Without this, it would be very hard to build the trust up and allow our academics to do what they need to do.

In our case, Calm doesn't help us to implement standardization across our organization because the research is usually quite specific. The types of VMs that they would spin up would all be slightly different. Some might have much bigger storage requirements, some might have higher RAM requirements, and some might need to be quite low compute but for longer periods. It does tend to vary quite a lot. But on the flip side, it allows them to all work the same way so they're not going off and burning money in public cloud environments.

When we first got it, it probably would have been a five out of 10 because it wasn't the easiest to build the initial blueprints. Now, we're certainly up to an eight. There's always room for improvement with something like this.

Prism Pro lets us manage multiple Nutanix Clusters through a single interface. I can view all the alerts or health of each Cluster from one website instead of going to each one individually. 

When I started with the company, we did not have Nutanix. Within the first six months, we installed Nutanix software and Prism Pro. In the very beginning of the first six months, I was working a lot of overtime, having to fix a lot of things. I don't have a lot of overtime anymore. I don't have the nights and weekends that I used to because of all the time savings the solution has given me.

We use the solution’s machine learning algorithms for things like predictive capacity planning or other functions. This shows us what our capacity is, where it's going, and what trend it has been on. Thus, we can decide whether we need to purchase it next year.

The Pro license gives us Capacity Behavior Analytics. This feature lets you see what your capacity is and what you're using in your Cluster. It predicts what it's going to look like in a few months. You can forecast if you need more infrastructure. It sees how much your environment's growing and helps with the sizing of VMs to meet your workload growth.

The 1-Click Centralized Upgrades are really nice. When you go in and want to upgrade your Cluster, you just click a button and everything will upgrade. You don't have to go to each individual server to do the upgrades.

These features save time. They give us insight into what our data is doing and what we need to do to ensure it's running properly.

It is very intuitive and easy to use. It just makes sense. You don't have to look around for a lot of things. The things that you will be using are just there. Everything is on one screen. You can click through to go where you want to go, but there are not a million buttons that you have to figure out (where to go for what).

We use the solution’s X-Play automation feature. The anomaly detection is nice, as it give us insight into things that are anomalies. We can then take corrective actions on them. Its codeless approach to automation is good because I don't like to code. It's point and click, which is nice. It sets up your automation without having to do any coding. 

X-Play has a page that provide us with a single tool for monitoring automation. This page is where I go if I need to set up automation or check if something needs to be done.

Pricing could be worked on a bit. I feel that when I talk to people about it who have looked into Nutanix, they say, "Well, it's pretty expensive compared to the other thing I was looking at." I tell them it's worth it. 

I would also recommend getting the word out. I still talk to a lot of people about the solution in the industry. They are not aware of it, and say, "What is that?"

About five years.

The stability is great. I haven't had it go down on me, so I haven't really had any issues with Prism Pro. We've had some hardware issues, but the way that Nutanix has their software setup, it doesn't have downtime to the end user and the VMs don't go down. Everything just keeps working.

I do the deployment and maintenance for this solution.

We have been adding a server per year. We have gotten to the point where we will be taking out a server and adding a server, so we're in the sweet spot right now. It's been great. It's not like other solutions where you buy it all upfront, then by the time you need more, you have to replace the whole thing. With this solution, I can easily just add some capacity or CPU by adding another node.

We have 150 VMs across four Clusters with 18 nodes. We are utilizing the solution at 100 percent. 

We are not a huge company so we probably have two users: a system administrator (me) and my networking guy. The help desk doesn't even need to get in it, so they don't use it.

It is the best support that I have ever dealt with. They're knowledgeable and have always been great, easy, and accommodating to work with, e.g., in the first couple of months of deploying Nutanix, we had an issue with certain nodes that were rebooting automatically. Nothing went down, but it was concerning. Within a week of having the problem, we had a dedicated support person who worked with us for about a month and a half while they found the bug and developed a new patch for it. We tested it for them, then once it was working, everything was good. About a month later, the head of the support team down in North Carolina came out to visit us just to make sure everything was okay. 

We had IBM and Dell EMC storage before, but both of them have their own interfaces, so there were two or three things that I had to look at. With this solution, since we have Nutanix, it's just one. That makes it a lot easier.

At my previous job, I used Cisco UCS and NetApp storage.

The initial setup was very easy. You just click a button, and it will set up your Prism Pro VM that runs. Installing the Nutanix platform from the beginning was amazingly easy. At my old job, we just installed new hardware, and that took about a month. Nutanix took four hours, so it was a huge difference.

We talked the implementation over with the vendor when we were ordering. A couple guys came onsite to help us. It was very simple. The Nutanix guys were great. Any little problem that we would run into was fixed in a minute, then we just rolled through it. That's why the implementation was so quick. 

We have seen ROI with Nutanix. We have more reliability than what we had before. We used to have outages all the time where I would be working overtime, and that costs money.

Some people say that Nutanix is a bit more expensive. However, when we were looking at Nutanix versus Cisco and NetApp before deploying this solution, the prices were very similar. Being a government entity, we got a bit more of a discount on Nutanix so it was a bit cheaper. The time savings after the fact has been really worth it.

Prism Pro is a license that we have on all of our products for Nutanix. It gives us a bunch of different new features.

Prism Pro is a bit more upfront. It costs a bit more for some of the features that you get. We have four Clusters, and two of them don't have Prism Pro because they weren't even available with what we bought. Those two Clusters also run well, but they don't have all the features.

When I started, we were looking at Nutanix, but also at NetApp and Cisco, which is what I had just come from and done a new installation. I was pushing for that. However, when I saw the presentation from Nutanix, I was like, "Well, this is how it just should work. Let's give it a try." It's not easy running the whole thing by myself in a normal situation, but with Nutanix, it lets me do that because I don't have to worry about all the little bits and pieces. It's just one interface which is easy to manage.

From my previous experience, I worked with Cisco and NetApp, where Cisco was the servers and NetApp was the storage. I transitioned into just doing storage and did storage all day, every day at my old job. I moved things around trying to make space for this, that, or someone wanting to put something where we didn't have space. I would have to move all types of stuff. It was a big pain. When I came to my new job, and we started Nutanix, you don't have to do any of that. There isn't anything I almost ever do with storage unless I'm adding a new node. It's all shared in one giant pool of storage. This saves so much time. It's like, "Why was the other company doing it that way?" It doesn't make any sense and was a pain.

You have to at least look at this solution. Once you do, you will buy it. All my old colleagues that have moved onto different jobs too, and I always tell them about it.

They are always expanding what they have and what they are offering.

It can do a bunch of other things that we don't use yet, but are thinking about.

Biggest lesson learnt: IT doesn't have to be super complicated.

I would rate Prism Pro as a 10 (out of 10).

We consider it our "private cloud," and all of our workloads are deployed on it. Through our application, we offer secure cloud storage. Most of our customers are law firms or financial institutions and they really care about the security of their documents and they really care about document workflow. Because of that, we have to abide by government rules and regulations. For example, if you're a German law firm, you don't want to store your documents in Australia, you want to keep them in the European Union. 

Our product is set up in multiple regions, so we've deployed the solution, on-premises, in each region. We have an instance in the U.S. to service U.S. customers. We have an instance in the United Kingdom to service customers there, and We have one in Germany to take care of the European Union. We also have one in Australia, where we take care of Australia and the Asia Pacific region. In each of those regions, we have data centers that we lease space from. In each region, it's a centralized solution. Our entire application that the end-user interfaces with runs on top of Nutanix.

Nutanix Cloud Manager has allowed us to scale really quickly. For example, during the COVID pandemic, everyone was working from home and a lot of people started buying our product because it allows them to work from home. We grew really quickly and we were able to scale our infrastructure really quickly because Nutanix has invested a lot of time into that.

The most valuable feature is the ability to automate. Nutanix has made it really easy to automate everything that we do. That's important to me and our organization. We can get more done every day by automating tasks.

It's hard to think of anything that needs to be improved. One issue, though, is that you can set up DHCP but it's a little bit clunky. I wish they would streamline and centralize the management of DHCP.

I have been using this Nutanix solution for about nine years. We have been using the Nutanix Cloud Manager version for the past several months. 

NCM is super stable. We're very happy because that translates into our uptime which is pretty great. Our customers are happy with how available our application is.

It's very scalable and we're very happy with how we've seen it scale. We don't have any concerns about that.

The technical support is amazing. Nutanix invests a lot of time and money into making sure that their technical support is top-notch.

Recently they have implemented a series of solutions that make it very proactive. They analyze our environment, including the version of their software that we're running and the hardware. They analyze every little detail. If they detect an issue, they let you know. They're using artificial intelligence to aggregate all the data and to parse through it. As a result they say, "Hey, you have an issue in your environment," and then they tell you how to explain it. 

The second way that they're very proactive is, under certain circumstances, they'll automatically open a support case and automatically collect the logs from your environment. So if something happens in the middle of the night, before it becomes a problem, they'll open a case with support and collect the logs. When I wake up, someone from Nutanix has already been assigned to the case and they've already reviewed the logs, and they'll generally have a good solution.

And one of my favorite things about Nutanix support is that they're very willing to teach you. When I'm working with them I'll ask them a lot of questions about what they're doing or about the situation. They're more than happy to explain it all and to teach me so I can understand the situation better and become better at my job.

Positive

We used to use Microsoft Hyper-V, which is good, but it's difficult to manage and it's difficult to scale.

The solution was purchased before I came to the company, but when I arrived I realized that it hadn't been implemented in the best way. I spent a couple of years fixing the architecture so that it would follow best practices. They had inadvertently painted themselves into a corner and I took away the paintbrush and the paint and fixed things so that it would work and scale better, going forward.

The initial deployment was pretty straightforward, but the people involved just didn't have experience with Nutanix at scale. They didn't necessarily do it wrong, they just didn't do it with the end goal in mind. They had tunnel vision in which they said, "We have a task that needs to be performed and we have to get it done as quickly as possible." It was a very task-oriented implementation. What I was able to do, with my experience, was take a step back and say, "Let's look at the big picture. Where are we going to be in five years?" I was able to architect a solution that would make sure that we could get where we needed to be in five years and in 10 years.

We make sure that we follow best practices from Nutanix. When deploying the product, we make sure that our cluster size—how many physical Nutanix servers we purchase and group together—follows best practices. We make sure that we plan for the ability to perform an upgrade in the environment and we plan for potential hardware failures. We've also started purchasing specialized configurations to match our workload. All of these things are a part of how we architect and deploy the environment.

We have about 250 Nutanix servers around the world. Our application consists of four or five independent offerings and those 250 nodes are spread across those four or five offerings. There are three of us who manage the environment. I'm the architect who created and implemented the solution. I also ensure that we have enough capacity to continue to grow and to take on new projects. Another member of our team does a lot of the project work: Here are the tasks that we've been assigned. How do we get from point A to point B? And the third member of our team focuses on upgrades and hardware break-fix.

We've absolutely seen a return on our investment. One way is through our uptime—how much of the day, week, month, and year our application is running. Because Nutanix is scalable and it's distributed, we're able to easily perform upgrades and keep our application running. Because of the design and implementation, we've been able to make sure that we're always running the latest version of the software, which means that we have all the latest bug fixes and security fixes. In uptime, upgrades, and security fixes, we've seen a huge return on investment. 

I've worked at my current company for four years and our business has just exploded. A lot of that increased business is due to the fact that our Nutanix environment is so stable. It's very reliable and predictable for our customers, and that translates into a better user experience. As a result, another way that we've seen a return on investment is in increased sales.

We use so much of Nutanix that we decided to do a long-term licensing agreement with them. That saved us a lot of money, but it was a difficult journey to understand what we were purchasing and to convince finance and upper management that it was something we should do. Nutanix has taken our feedback and they've worked on streamlining it and making it easier to understand and communicate to non-technical people.

We looked at all the players in the market. We interviewed them and looked at their features and we felt that Nutanix had the best offering.

Nutanix's main competitor is VMware vSAN. Nutanix built their product from the ground up, and because of that, they were able to do some really innovative things to make sure that scaling and automation are taken care of. VMware wedged vSAN into its existing offerings and, because of that, it's really clunky, difficult to set up, and it doesn't perform as well.

When we first started evaluating Nutanix, our upper management had a hard time understanding what it was and what it would do for us. It's different from a lot of traditional solutions and you have to approach it differently.

As you understand that this is the next generation of infrastructure—that it's the next generation of virtualization, the next generation of private cloud—it's a little bit easier to say, "This is going to be different. This is going to be challenging in some ways, but as far as security and compliance go, and as far as performing upgrades goes, nothing could be easier. And when it comes to getting support, they have your back. Nutanix is a company that cares about your experience and your thoughts and improving things. I've never met a company that does a better job. It is different, but it's way better than what I've used in the past.

Nutanix has invested a lot of time and money to make it a really good and solid application, but there's always a little bit of room for improvement.

The solution is a management portal for the entire solution. You can have a look at your configuration and do different kinds of configuration monitoring management. You have the infrastructure implementation workflows on top of it, so that's the portal that will manage these underlining nodes.

It's a stable solution.

The solution scales well.

Technical support is helpful.

It's easy to set up.

Licensing could be more flexible in future releases.

We've used the solution for two years. 

It's a stable solution. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution can scale as needed.

I can't speak to how many people are using the product right now.

Technical support is great. They helped during the setup and were excellent. 

The solution is very straightforward. The deployment took about five to six days. It took about a week's time.

Anyone who is comfortable with any virtual edition of a solution with five to six years of experience will be able to manage it. I can manage the entire solution myself.

The solution is easy to self-deploy. During the initial setup, we worked directly with technical support, and they were quite helpful.

I'd like them to offer a more flexible licensing model.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using.

I would recommend the solution to others. Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten. We've been very happy with it. I'd advise potential users should first run a POC and then go for it.

We have been using this solution mainly for our high-performance computing use cases. We had a requirement of creating multiple VMs and keeping the file server in the same nearby location. The VMs will turn all the data and their inputs and outputs will happen through the file server. We wanted something that supports virtual machine files, blocks, from a storage point of view.

The most valuable features of Nutanix Prism Pro are the user interface is quite easy to understand and it provides easy management for administrators. It is reassuring that the data is secure, even if something was to happen to it, the data can be recovered with the built-in option in the tool.

Nutanix, as of today, they do not have many of the features that VMware hypervisor provides, such as the memory layer. Nutanix is not known in the virtualization world, it is known only in the file server world. Due to this, many of the software vendors who provide their virtual appliances, do not support Nutanix as a platform. Their partnering has to improve, when the software vendor does not support Nutanix, we have to deploy Windows into the projects.

The solution could improve by reducing the alarm sensitivity and have categories that show only the critical elements on the console. Not everything that triggers the alarm. I understand these alerts but if my manager was to look at them he would be concerned not understanding they are minor alerts.

Additionally, if they could make templates to allow the provision of the images from the dashboards, instead of doing multiple steps would be a good benefit.

I have been using this solution for approximately two years.

The solution has high file and server availability, it is very stable. We had an incident with our data, due to the data getting corrupted from an endpoint issue, not from an infrastructure problem. However, through a server snapshot file, we were able to recover more than 20 terabytes of data in this solutions' native features. We did not need to obtain any other recent configuration transform data, the feature was already provided. This was really helpful.

We have scaled Nutanix Prism Pro at least 300 percent after deploying it and we are still not at the bottleneck point. Our current footprint is quite large, we are not seeing any challenges. However, each cluster will have to be kept at a finite number. If the cluster size should is too big, your maintenance window will increase for a very long time. If you can keep cluster size to a minimum, then it will be easy for you. For example, if you have a hundred node cluster and have to do maintenance, then the patching will be happening on a single node layer. Patching all the servers one by one will take too much time for us. It makes sense, in the design phase, to keep those clusters to a smaller figure, approximately 20 nodes.

We have purchased Lenovo appliances. Due to this, our primary call for support has to go to Lenovo, and then they will pass us off to Nutanix. We cannot raise a call directly with Nutanix for assistance.

The initial installation was straightforward. We brought up the whole cluster in approximately two days.

We had peer support from the OEM vendors for the deployment. 

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.

We explored Horizon, Cisco, HP, and many others. However, Nutanix won because the file server layer of Nutanix is more mature compared to the other competitors.

Nutanix Prism Pro is a good tool but is not for every use case, there will be a few constraints that might not make it become a single layer but it can be one of your hypervisor layers in your infrastructure.

I rate Nutanix Prism Pro an eight out of ten.

In our organization since we implemented Nutanix, we have focused on migrating critical business production applications and services to Nutanix due to its high performance, high availability, reliability, and 99% confidence that all applications and databases do not They will have problems. In addition to the performance that we can have with Nutanix, we have platform management tools that show us everything that happens in the environment of virtual machines with Prism that allows us to quickly and graphically monitor our environment.

We have a platform where most of the servers are physical and with a good time of use, since we acquired a Nutanix block with 4 nodes we have migrated physical to virtual servers in the same way we have consolidated database servers in a virtual server, like application servers, that is, since we implemented this solution, we have reduced the physical servers in our data center, we have reduced electricity consumption, it has made the use of air conditioning in the data center more efficient, in short, it has been a relationship win-win.

It is interesting to me how Nutanix manages hyperconvergence, the possible failures that can occur in the platform migrating machine machines to nodes without problems while solving the failed node, but without a doubt Prism is the feature that I value the most since I can manage and monitor everything in a single tool, giving me simplicity, statistics, states of equipment resources, alerts, updates in a single click, migrate equipment nodes manually or automatically. In short, Prism is my favorite among many that Nutanix has.

I think one of the points to improve is having the platform with multiple languages, for example, Spanish, seriously, one point to consider is a valid point for me, my native language is Spanish, being in Venezuela. The documentation would also be good to have in Spanish, the use of Nutanix in English is very intuitive and easy to understand, when one enters the prism the board is easy to understand but if it were in Spanish, it would help to better understand it for those who handle the English very simply.

I have been using Nutanix Prism Pro for two years and seven months.

For the organization, it has been a great leap in quality, since apart from having a large number of physical equipment, the closest thing to nutanix was an IBM BLADE WITH 5 blades sharing an IBM 3520 storage, and the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system. , with Hyper-v as hypervisor. The handling of the equipment in this infrastructure was too slow at the time of writing data to the different machines that belonged to the cluster since the disks are rotating and hardware, we can say that it already had a fairly long period of use.
The arrival of Nutanix to the organization was a quality leap from the sky to the moon, we migrated the critical production services such as databases, applications and other servers that should have better performance, and more advanced management from a prism apart it gives us a way to monitor everything that happens in the cluster.
For me it has been very beneficial, since in addition to the advantages it has given my organization, it has also allowed me to get to know a new infrastructure, which has a learning platform, the Nutanix University, where you can learn and get certified. something beyond a tool is a way of looking at technology.

It really great lets you grow and manage everything from one point Prism.

The support level is very high, and committed pure gold.

We hadn't actually worked with a hyperconvergence tool..

The biggest difficulty was due to the language since we speak Spanish, but we had someone who spoke it well and we were able to carry out the installation without a hitch.

We did the implementation with the support of the provider and Nutanix support, its level was excellent

We realized ROI in six months.

Many times when we are evaluating solutions, Nutanix is a little expensive, but when they get the cost-benefit ratio it is definitely one of the best on the market since it allows you to manage several blocks as one.

We evaluate the use of Cisco UCS

For me it has been very beneficial, since apart from the advantages it has given my organization, it has also allowed me to get to know a new infrastructure, which has a learning platform, Nutanix university where you can learn and become certified, it is something beyond a tool is a way of seeing technology

Our primary use case to date has been hosting virtual machines of public branch exchanges (PBX) and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) for our customers' Voice Over IP (VoIP) cloud-based telephone systems.

We currently focus on two PBXs that have performed quite well on Nutanix Prism Pro: Asterisk/FreePBX and 3CX. We are also in the process of implementing cloud-based security systems for our clients and expanding to also offer desktop as a service so that our clients can fully implement a bring-your-own-device policy for their offices.

Nutanix Prism Pro has improved the way that we manage our systems due to the way that the solution is built. Hyper-converged Infrastructure offers us the speed and reliability that is very much needed in our type of environment.

It has cut down our maintenance time significantly and simplified our processes for backups. 

We have had situations before where we have to restore a customers VM on the fly due to bad management of the client, where they would actually break the system and with our old solution, restoring could take upwards of two hours, whereas now, it takes a maximum of 10 seconds.

There are two specific things that stand out to me in terms of what I find most valuable in this product. Number one, how simple and effective the dashboard is at laying out everything that is needed at a glance. Whether it be checking the health of your clusters and nodes or seeing the state of all of your VMs, the information is right in front of you when logging in.

Second, the support for the product is absolutely amazing. Of all of the times that we required assistance for our Nutanix cluster, Nutanix support has been there no matter the time. So far, every support engineer has been a pleasure to work with.

I would appreciate more advanced networking features in the dashboard. There seems to be a lack of GUI functionality for creating/modifying features such as LACP and VXLAN. While these features can be configured, it can only be done via the CLI of your CVM/Cluster and it can be quite a hassle. GUI implementation for these features would really strengthen the product immensely.

I would also appreciate a dashboard that allows for more customization. I would love to be able to eliminate information that I don't consider crucial from the dashboard and/or have the ability to focus on more essential things (such as network utilization) for our use.

We have been using Nutanix Prism Pro for almost three years.

We previously used ESXi. We switched because we found that there was constant maintenance needed for our VSANs and it was quite cumbersome.

While the product may seem to be more expensive at first, it ultimately pays for itself within a short time frame due to the hours saved on maintenance.

We evaluated multiple options before choosing Nutanix. These included Citrix, Hyper-V, and Zen.