Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

We have installed a physical Nutanix box and we have created the server on it. Our infra is running on that server. We have Citrix infra, so we configured our Citrix in Nutanix only.

We were facing some issues with a vendor accessing our VDI, but after we installed Nutanix, that issue was resolved.

Among the most valuable features are 

• the one-click upgrade
• that Nutanix is very easy to understand
• that it's very user-friendly.

We have been using Nutanix Prism Pro since 2018.

In terms of its stability, it is a good solution.

The scalability is also good. We have around 4,000 users across India and we are planning to increase our node in six or seven months.

Currently, we need no more than four or five staff to operate the Nutanix infra.

We have faced some issues during operations, but when we log a case with Nutanix support, they help us to resolve them. Their technical support is very good. The support they provide is extraordinary. If we raise a P1 ticket, they will respond within 20 to 30 minutes.

Positive

We used VMware but we migrated to Nutanix.

We are not facing any problems with the solution. Nutanix is good when compared to its competitors. My advice is to go for it. We have another office in India, where they have a VMware setup, and we are going to migrate them to Nutanix there as well.

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

We provide Test-VMs to users. Currently, we deploy only Windows-VMs from Windows 10 1803 up to 20H2 and Server 2012 R2 to Server 2019. The blueprints consist of a base Windows Image (which is used as a template for the VM to be) and several tasks you can define and use remote PowerShell to get whatever you need to get done, like install additional software, set registry keys - you name it. Each task is then executed in the defined order and results can be reviewed even during execution time. Hardware specs can be made configurable, so users can adjust the amount of RAM or CPU core count but can also be set to static.
We recently set the machines up to configure customary passwords and give users an email notification when the machine is ready to use. Also we differentiate machine networks based on the users department to separate machines.

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 self-service for users is key to this solution because the creation is done solely on the users' terms and time. No waiting for IT or such.

Previously written scripts can be checked in a library and be reused for other blueprints.

Blueprints can be made available per project so each user sees only items tailored for their specific use case.
You can also Setup multi-machine blueprints to Support 3-tier applications with reverse proxy, Web Server and database Server, or any other concept there might be.

As always, the Nutanix support team assists with any obstacles you might come across. This led to various enhancements we and all other customers had benefits on.

There is now runbooks to use for things like automatically patch machines.

The list of blueprints and applications could be more configurable so you see all the fields you need and not just some predefined fields which are not customizable now.

There are lots of pre-defined blueprints in the online marketplace but often it is a trial and error to get the pre-defined blueprints to work due to some firewall issues. But that may because of our internal firewall being too restrictive.

More support for VMware environments would be great. Most blueprints are tailored for Nutanix AHV or the cloud providers. Hyper-V is currently not supported.

We have used Calm for over one year now.

Calm has no issues with stability. But Calm is heavily worked on by Nutanix, so any issues there might be are fast resolved and updates often help to mitigate problems. Given Nutanix unique 1-click-updates nature, updates are just as easy and reliable. It is advisable to wait for 2 - 3 weeks before upgrading to the latest and greatest so can look if any x.y.z.1 hotfix updates are published to avoid .0 glitches. But they are rare with Nutanix in general and Nutanix support is very helpful if you run into any of them. If you're in doubt simply ask support for help to see for yourself and be ready for your chin to hit the floor ;_) . Reading release notes before doing updates helps a lot to figure out what to expect. Another source for guidance is the compatibility matrix to look for any cross-requirements with Prism Central or AOS version of your target cluster (the cluster you deploy the Calm VMs on).

Scalibilty is second name to Nutanix. Scale-out of Nutanix Calm is just another node on the target cluster if things get sluggish.

Since Calm is dependent on Prism Central  you could simply scale-out that too. Nutanix has sizing recommandations for that, conveniently packed at Identify Prism Central requirements - Virtual Ramblings. Up to 25000 VMs should fulfill most requirements.

Nutanix support is outstanding. As stated above, it does not matter which continent you reside.

Nutanix NPS score is 92 -> https://customer.guru/net-promoter-score/nutanix

Our previous solution was hand-crafted VMs which cost IT a whole day or more depending on the requirements. That is why we had to find a more automatic approach. Nutanix Calm broke the duration down to 15 minutes. You even get a notification when the machine is up and running with Name, IP-Address and pre-selected password to get started.

Initial setup is simply activating it in Prism Central and configuring your target cluster which has to be connected to Prism Central as well, of course. So it is pretty straightforward. From there you can use some of the marketplace blueprints to see how it is done or just see on youtube on nutanix university calm - YouTube

We hit up our Nutanix partner for implementation to get up to speed as fast as possible. Implementation was half a day and we went on with setting some machines up. Expertise was great as we new them from the start and they just get what we want. Thanks to

ErikSterck!

This solution is greatly supporting a user-centric IT with less OPEX. Our ROI was covered within 18 month.

Setup can be done with Nutanix documentation by yourself to save up some money. Getting a consultant to support on the first steps has its perks, though. But you can always count on Nutanix Support to help out with questions or contact community. Does not matter if where your location is. We had outstanding support from europe, india and the US support offices.

Licensing should be a no-brainer but since there came up various options you should take a close look on the feature matrix to see what is in it and if you need it. Nutanix Calm has a 25-VM-license per customer for free. You only need to license Prism Central Pro node licenses for the cluster you are running Calm against. Every nutanix partner should be able to assist with this.

Other solutions are rare when considering to what extent Nutanix Calm covers the lifecycle of VMs. To answer the question: no, we did not evaluate other solutions. Calm integrates so nicely into Prism Central that any other solution appeared rather bloated in comparison. Also other solutions have problems with day-two operations (altering configuration).

Take a tour for yourself online: https://www.nutanix.dev/ad/at/

You shoud REALLY try this. It is just 5 minutes of your time!

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.

One goal was to automate things. We had a lot of tools, but we needed a centralized tool. Calm helps us to centralize the deployments of our VMs. 

We have a subsystem installed on Nutanix and we have blueprints for setting up this subsystem very easily. Also, for Kubernetes clusters, we use now CaaS from SUSE and we also create Kubernetes clusters with Calm. Our strategy is to make blueprints for all the virtual machines environments. It's an ongoing process.

Our first project was to create subsystems. This was really an accelerator because we have three environments and over 50 machines. Once we had a sub-template, it was very easy to migrate to Nutanix, to set up a system. Before Nutanix it took days and now it's maybe one or two hours. It's really fast when you use these templates. It creates all the preconditions for an installation. And with that, we were really able to move the system very quickly to this new platform.

The solution automates application management to a single platform, but we're still working on it. 

Our goal is the standardization which Calm makes possible. It's important, from a strategic point of view. We would ultimately like to achieve "infrastructure-as-code" so that we can always create an environment as it initially was. It would be like Kubernetes or container-based where you can destroy something and build it again and it's like it was before. When you have a platform where you can automatically create things, you are sure that nobody will manually change something in it. It's all managed with this framework, and you are sure that when when you need to create the same system it will work, because it is all scripted. The whole "cookbook" for making that machine is there. This is also a requirement: that nobody goes on a virtual machine and installs something manually. It must be scripted with Calm. That gives you insurance that you can build the same system again. For us, that's really the future: infrastructure-as-code. 

This is also a good way for creating the same machine on the cloud, or wherever you want, and to be assured it will run because the building of the machine is in the script.

Also, the solution’s support for scripts, API, and domain specific language has reduced the IT man-hours to deploy and support applications. It's hard to estimate how much time it has saved us, but I would say around 60 percent. We are new on the Nutanix platform and we have not created a lot of the blueprints ourselves. Another company helped us to accelerate that. We went into production with it last year and we see the capabilities that Calm gives us.

Before Calm, we didn't have a specific tool for orchestration. We had some templating things, but they were spread out over various technologies. Now, we have one, centralized solution to manage all the VMs that we have. This is the strength of Nutanix, that you have one starting point where you can do everything. You have all the tools in one platform. Before, we had one tool for this process and another tool for that process. It's helping us a lot.

Calm has also enabled us to react faster to the changing needs of our business. That brings me back to the subsystem I mentioned earlier. We were thinking we would need more time to migrate it, or that we might need to create a sandbox system for testing. But with the subsystem, it was very quick. Calm helped us a lot to make it happen. 

Also, when it comes to cluster systems, we work with the open source version of Couchbase. It's very easy to create a Couchbase cluster. Similarly with Jenkins, we have blueprints for DevOps. If they need a Jenkins environment, we can easily scale out for our Jenkins workers. It really makes life easier because we have a GUI and can scale out. We can say, "Okay, we need two more slaves," and it happens. It really accelerates things.

The scripting, where you can use libraries, is a valuable feature. We don't really make the blueprints, as we have a third-party company that makes them for us. But it enables calling APIs in the blueprints. When we create a machine, we use IPAM from Infoblox and we can get an IP address. It's one platform to script and we can then use all the APIs to complete the scripts. It gives us a central management tool from which we can do a lot of things automatically.

Also, it's easy to use, overall. I'm a Linux guy, so a lot of it is familiar to me. I feel comfortable when I use it. It's not really hard or complex.

And when you have applications that can run on more than one machine, you can easily use blueprints to scale out the infrastructure. You can start with two web front-ends, a web service and then you say, "Okay, I need a third one and a fourth one." This is very easy. It's one click and you can scale it, but you must also script it. It only gives you the framework to do that. So for performance, you can use Calm to scale out and scale in.

But the Nutanix platform also helps you find out if you have some performance problems or oversized machines. But to resize it, it's more that you would use playbooks in Nutanix for that, and not Calm.

It's also a very good tool for team collaboration, but in our use case we don't use Calm for that. We are not that big. We create the machines or the application; it's not that we deploy services so that another service can deploy their machines. We are still centralized, in that sense. With Calm, you can do this: With the templates, the services that need new VMs can make their own VMs, but we do not have this requirement for now. It's only used by the IT team here, which consists of 30 people.

As I mentioned, we use now CaaS from SUSE; it's SUSE's Kubernetes. But it's now changing. They have bought Rancher and I think that CaaS will be replaced by Rancher. So currently, to manage a Kubernetes cluster we have SUSE. But with Karbon we can manage Kubernetes with Calm. But I don't don't know how much we can do with Calm there. There could be room for improvement, although I'm not entirely sure. It's on our agenda to look into Karbon in relation to Calm and what we can do with them together. I don't know how deeply they are integrated. It's not necessarily something that is wrong.

Karbon is a new product. It's been around for about two years. The integration is growing. Last year is when it started working with Calm. It's more a concept still. My wish is that it will really be supported, but I cannot say for sure.

Again, I'm not saying something is wrong here. I think it's a very good platform, but there is always room of improvement.

I have been using Nutanix Calm since last year. We started in 2018 with a proof of concept to go to a hyper-converged platform, and then we chose Nutanix.

The stability of Calm is very good. We have not had problems. We are enhancing our clusters now a lot because we did a proof of concept for two years and last year we went into production. We are really happy with the platform and we are really accelerating and enhancing it.

We are a company with 700 employees. In Nutanix's world, we are not a big player. I don't think that we are ever going to push the boundaries.

We are also using Nutanix Files cluster. We are also planning to go with Era, which is a SQL management platform on Nutanix. It's really that Nutanix is providing a platform strategy for us. We are replacing all the other virtualization infrastructure that we have with Nutanix.

Nutanix technical support is great. It's very fast. In the beginning we had an issue and they were very quick. The support team from Nutanix, compared to others, is amazing. They provide help really quickly. Support is really one of Nutanix's strengths.

We had some templates in XenServer, but they were more a type of predefined image so that when you installed it helped start the machine. We also had Salt scripting, but we didn't have tools to manage them. We are not a big company. We had something like 500 virtual machines and we had templating tools and a lot of manual tasks. So things were semi-automated. We had images for certain applications, but when setting up the machine, we had to manually finish the setup.

One of the drivers for us to go to a hyper-converged system was that we had a 3PAR SAN which went out-of-support. So we had to make a decision about whether to buy a new SAN or to go with hyper-converged where you can grow with the need. And this became one of our preconditions. We wanted a system that does not use traditional SAN. We liked the idea of hyper-converged.

We bought a little machine and did a PoC to see how Nutanix works. We already knew it was a good platform because we had heard good things about it. When we tested it, it was very good and very fast and fulfilled all our needs. That made the decision for us, that it was the right platform. It became a part of our company strategy. 

It was a good decision for us because now we can also replicate the whole cluster to the big cloud providers. You can have a Nutanix environment on all the three of the big ones. That means that we can buy a Nutanix cluster on Azure or Amazon cloud, for example. Then we replicate our cluster to that cluster in the cloud, and then we can switch over. With Nutanix, we can easily deploy a virtual machine in the cloud, but then we are using the cloud provider's functionality. But now Amazon, Google, and Azure make it possible to rent a Nutanix cluster. So if we replicate, and an airplane crashes into our building, we can switch over to the cloud. For us, that was also a statement that we were really going with a good platform. In Switzerland, a lot of big companies are using Nutanix now, well-known companies that are going hyper-converged.

For me, the initial setup of Calm was straightforward. It comes with Prism Central and Prism Central is a one-click installation, and then you have Calm. It's really easy. The whole Nutanix platform is really easy to manage and to update. When you have Prism Central, you have Calm already. You must buy the license for the blueprints, but it comes with Prism Central.

If you need cluster management, if you have more than one Nutanix cluster, you need Nutanix Prism Central and with Prism Central you have Calm.

Our deployment strategy is "one-at-a-time." We touch one system and make blueprints and then we go on to the next system. We migrate machines to Nutanix without a blueprint, but the goal is that—even though we have a lot of virtual machines and use cases, and this is an ongoing process—all the new projects, as well as when we touch an old project, will go over to a Calm blueprint, to make life easier. You cannot make that shift in one day.

Our overall strategy is to have Calm as a central tool to deploy virtual machines, with a requirement that nobody manually create virtual machines. There should be a blueprint first. 

There are times when it might not make sense, if you need just one machine for a particular use. It could be more work to make the blueprint. But I think it's worth making even these little machines as a blueprint, so that you can always create this machine everywhere, including the cloud, without documentation. And that's another point. As you know, when you write documentation, as soon as you're finished it's already old because things are changing.

We are still building our infrastructure, so it's early for us to look at return on investment. But there will be a return on our investment because we are not buying another SAN. We have saved a lot of money, because the SAN system is very expensive and also requires very expensive switches. So we are definitely ahead there.

Also, we had a lot of XenServers on hosts, and going with Nutanix allowed us to reduce the number of hosts. The new system is very performant and we don't need as much hardware to get the same performance.

In addition, although it has nothing to do with Calm, Nutanix helps by giving us a good overview of what is oversized or undersized. We can look at it and see, "Oh, this machine may be underused or overused," and we can free up resources. This is also an ongoing process. We see that a lot of machines are oversized and we can make them smaller. We save resources for other machines that way. But that part is Nutanix itself, through Prism Central.

Calm comes with Prism Central but you enable features by buying the license for them. You buy by the blueprint, how many blueprints you need to manage.

We also looked at HPE. We compared Nutanix with that solution. We decided then to go for Nutanix and do a proof of concept. The HPE solution was more limited in the nodes it could handle.

We work really closely with HPE. All our servers are from HPE. So HPE proposed a solution to us, But when we compared it by doing a SWOT analysis, part of our consideration was that Nutanix is a newer platform. It empowers a lot of things. It's a different technology.

My advice is "use it." To use Calm, the precondition is that you have Nutanix. To me it doesn't make sense to have Nutanix on-premise and then not use Calm. Then you would have to use SaltStack or Chef or whatever other management software exists for managing virtual machines or physical machines. If you go with Nutanix, it makes really sense to use Calm.

SaltStack and Ansible are also good, but it doesn't make sense to use them when you have Calm. With Nutanix you have one platform where you can manage everything. Calm gives you a lot of possibilities because you can script and easily integrate and control the whole Nutanix cluster with APIs. And you can easily integrate other services because you have the ability to call Python scripts very easily.

For us, it was very easy because we didn't have a lot of existing scripts. Other companies that have a lot of Salt scripts or a lot of Ansible scripts have to recreate them in some way. So we were in a good situation.

We now have 14 blueprint templates, and still growing. We are coming from the Citrix XenServer platform. We are not automatically creating a blueprint. It's ongoing. We had a lot of virtual machines on the Xen platform, and we have moved them over, but we don't automatically have a blueprint when we do. You must create the blueprints. We do them one-by-one. When we touch a system again, we create the blueprint for it. That way we can scale out, scale in, and make test systems.

There is a template for creating a machine, and then you manage that machine with this template. But when you have machines from another platform, like the XenServer virtualization platform, you can move it over, because Nutanix is also a virtualization platform for running VMs. But then you don't automatically have a blueprint, so you have to start a new project to make these blueprints. The strategy is that we will have all the code for our infrastructure so that we can build all our system out of blueprints.

I cannot say Calm is providing centralized control of all our applications because we have some legacy systems. We have IBM iSeries, which is another technology. But with Calm we can centralize all our x86 machines.

It's still early time and there is room for improvement. I give Calm a nine out of 10. I cannot give it a 10 because other platforms are also really good. Ansible and SaltStack are also powerful. It's more an issue of strategy and the fact that it is very easy to use. It's not a complex tool. They make it easy to use. Other frameworks are more complex to use, but may also be more powerful. But for our purposes, it fits exactly what we need. We haven't been blocked from doing anything we need to do with Calm. We haven't had any showstoppers.

Compared with other tools, Calm is newer and the scope of what you can do with it is still growing. They improve things. They make it easier to handle.

One of the use cases is that we do site-to-site replication, DR. Everything is controlled through Prism Pro: DR replication, runbooks, retention policies. We also use some of the playbooks for automated actions.

Administration of our virtual environment has been streamlined. We can go to Prism Pro and look at anything from VM performance down to our DR. We can customize dashboards to get what we want to look at on a daily basis, all in one place. We've put some of the critical things on the custom dashboard like disk latency performance. It's like a one-stop shop to manage our entire infrastructure. It has cut down on management efforts significantly. It has saved us about eight hours per week.

The most valuable feature is definitely the disaster recovery portion, which they call Xi Leap. It's included in the licensing. Before, we were on a solution that charged extra for DR software. And with Prism Pro, not only can we manage all of our other infrastructure in addition to our DR, in the same console, but we can set up recovery points. We can also set up scripts to run, so it gives us everything we need to have a solid DR plan in place.

It's very similar to Prism Element. It's very easy to use. The navigation is all on the left side and it's broken down into categories. It has a fast HTML5 interface, so you don't rely on any Java. Nutanix stays with its one-click mindset on this as well. There are very few clicks to get where you need to go. Overall, it's very easy to use and administer.

Prism Pro comes with capacity planning and runway analytics. We use those features, as well as provisioning and VM analytics that will tell us which virtual machines are using too many resources, or not enough resources, so we can right-size them appropriately. They're definitely very useful. By right-sizing the VMs we're not wasting CPU or RAM. The runway gives us an idea, for our budget year, about whether we might need to add another node to support our capacity. That is all very helpful.

The machine learning can be improved. There are a lot of false positives at times. For example, I'm actually looking at some alerts right now, that some service was restarted multiple times. It is like the same alert, spammed over and over again. But really, it turns out that that event didn't happen.

We purchased it back in 2015.

The stability has been very good. We haven't had any outages or downtime with it. Even after upgrades, it comes right back up. We haven't experienced any issues with reliability or uptime.

It's very scalable. We just have one Prism Pro VM. I know you can scale out the setup where you have multiple Prism Pro instances if you have a bigger environment. Our environment is small so we only needed one Prism Pro instance. That made it simple for us to get it up and going. If you do have multiple instances, they act like a cluster to balance out resources and manage different clusters. You can definitely scale out.

Nutanix's support is well-known and they are really good. We haven't had an issue where they haven't worked with us. We call into an entry-level support and they're very knowledgeable, unlike some other companies you run into where tier-one support can be hit or miss. We've had good luck with them. We've opened over a dozen cases too.

Back in the day, we had VMware and they had a similar Java-based interface, but that was five years ago. Our VMware licenses were coming up for renewal and we felt that VMware was too segregated. They were more of a traditional infrastructure where they separate the storage, separate the networks, and separate the hypervisors to manage. Nutanix, being hyper-converged, has everything in one portal.

The initial setup of Prism Pro was straightforward. All you do is click a button in Prism Element and go through a wizard. Give it an IP, it downloads the binaries, and deploys it for you. It's very simple. You just put in the network information for Prism Pro and, within a few clicks, it's done.

It only took about 30 minutes to deploy.

We didn't use a third-party. In our company, in addition to me there are four others who work in Prism Pro. The others include an infrastructure manager and three system administrators.

We have seen return on our investment with Prism Pro in terms of man-hours and ease of use. We've drastically reduced the time it takes to perform various functions and to handle management, especially when it comes to DRs. Our savings have mostly been in employee time.

They can be very flexible. Pricing is always negotiable. You really need to analyze if you need the features or not. Do you need Prism Pro or can you get away with the basic Prism? You can also do a test drive of the features through a Nutanix-hosted cluster. So you can try before you buy. Work with your VAR on pricing because they'll be flexible.

We looked at SimpliVity. They're now part of HPE, but they were on their own company back then. SimpliVity requires you to have VMware licensing, so you also had to buy VMware. Nutanix has its own built-in hypervisor included. SimpliVity also had a hardware card in their server that could be a single point of failure. Nutanix is mostly software, which pretty much eliminates that failure domain.

Try it for yourself. You can have a PoC where you can have a cluster on your site. There are different avenues to test it out before you move forward.

I think a lot of people get stuck in their ways with VMware or a traditional method. Don't be afraid to try something new. IT is always changing. Technology is getting better.

We're using it very extensively. We deal with all of our management from it. We check on our VM, deploy new VMs, manage reports, manage DR, manage playbooks, and we do our IT as well, for capacity planning and future runway support. We're 100 percent on it. We're completely off VMware, so everything is on Nutanix.