Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

We use Nutanix for management and capacity planning.

I like the analytics and the interface. Nutanix is easy to deploy and manage. 

Nutanix is one of two stacks where you can run everything you like. It would be nice if you could run it without the Nutanix appliance. Some clients don't use Nutanix engineering server hardware, so it would be helpful to run the Nutanix software for demos and tests. 

I have been using Nutanix for about three years. My boss started looking into Nutanix in 2013 or 2014. We were one of the first Nutanix partners in the area.

Nutanix is highly stable.

I rate Nutanix 10 out of 10 for scalability. Nutanix is highly scalable on the right version with the right hardware. 

I rate Nutanix support nine out of 10. They have specialized engineers for various clients, so when you open a ticket, only one technician will be working to resolve it. 

I rate Nutanix eight out of 10 for ease of setup. Setting up Nutanix is relatively easy if you know about networking.  It's not rocket science. You need to know the type of licenses you'd like to use and what the company shares. Before the initial implementation, you need to take time to plan. After that, the implementation could take a couple of hours or up to three days. 

I rate Nutanix 10 Cloud Manager Intelligent Operations 10 out of 10. You can operate Nutanix blindfolded. It's easy. 

We have some critical and not-so-critical applications. That's how we classify them broadly. The critical applications remain on-premise for us, while we're pushing the remaining ancillary applications to the cloud. That's how we use Nutanix Cloud Management.

We don't use it to manage cloud costs per se. We already have an enterprise agreement with Azure and AWS for cloud consumption. It's primarily to drive efficiency and migrate more applications to the cloud. Within the cloud division, we have around 52 engineers, and they all use it.

Compatibility with multiple clouds and a single control would help us. We are also getting onto GCP, and there is limited compatibility with GCP in the areas we need. We are using GCP primarily for data analytics.

We started using Nutanix six months ago.

Nutanix is relatively stable.

Nutanix is scalable. 

We haven't faced any problems because Nutanix provides an outside team. We haven't had any issues requiring L3 support, and the L1 and L2 engineers are on-site.

It was pretty easy to set up Nutanix Cloud Management because we had help from a Nutanix partner and a technician from the vendor. We had no problems getting up to speed on the solution. We were up and running in about 45 days.

We paid about 140 million Indian Rupees for a three-year cost. The price is reasonable and less expensive than managing the operations yourself.

I rate Nutanix Cloud Management seven out of 10. Before implementing, I would suggest looking at the workloads you plan to use with Nutanix Cloud Management. Depending on the workload and the criticality or regulatory importance, you should decide whether to deploy.

We use Prism Pro and Prism Central to centrally manage everything. It comes with a playbook and we use that to alter some procedures.

Nutanix has integrated storage which gives us a separate storage unit. That has dramatically decreased our rack space. We used to have a twofold rack on this solution.

It is an integrated solution with virtualization, storage, and network all together. We used to have each of those components from different vendors and we had to manage them separately. Now, we can centrally manage all of them. We can configure most things from a central location, and the automation enables us to accomplish a lot of things. We save a lot of time as a result.

Overall, the solution has dramatically improved the way our organization functions. We used to have IBM servers and Nimble Storage but there was no central management so we had to manage each host individually. We also had to manage the storage separately. With Nutanix, everything is built-in, the storage and the host together. We can do everything from one central location. That makes things very simple. 

The TCO is really good and the administration is very simple.

The central management aspect of Prism, as well as its playbook functionality, called X-Play, are very helpful for us.

We can use the event trigger in the playbook and then specific procedures are run automatically for us. That saves us admin time. Using X-Play is simple. In three steps you can define things and there is also a wizard to guide you. There's a lot of automation you can potentially do, but if you try to do something several times you might create some problems with your automation. The wizard is the simplest way to automate and the resulting automation saves us time.

We are quite a small environment. We only have two chassis and eight hosts, four hosts in each chassis, and we centrally manage them. The performance is quite good and responsive.

Overall, everything is simple, including the upgrade feature. Everything is built in one place with a single pane of glass for management.

We use Nutanix only for our dev and test environments. Our production environment is VMware, and that is totally separate. But we do transfer data between them. That's a challenge because we need to frequently bring the production data into our test environment and that's a big transfer. If we could do a cross-storage transfer, like a transfer from NetApp or Nimble Storage into Nutanix with automation, that would greatly help us.

I've been using the solution for a little over four years. I'm the infrastructure architect and I design the solution.

The stability of the solution really surprised me when I first started using it. It exceeded my expectations. I have been impressed.

Just think about the fact that we managed 15 hosts individually before, and we had to manage the storage separately. The maintenance of it was really difficult for us. We had two dedicated environment admins, and now we are down to one, a dedicated Nutanix admin. He is fully in charge of the solution and its maintenance. He also supports users and does troubleshooting for them. It has saved us lots of time that we can put into user support.

From my understanding, the solution can very easily be scaled up. The scalability should be really good.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is the next version of Prism Pro. If we renew Nutanix next year, we will use NCM. It is a better version of Prism Pro and I'm looking forward to that.

Technical support is quite good. We have a heartbeat sent to Nutanix, so when we open a support case, they normally respond really quickly and provide good suggestions as well.

Positive

We used IBM with Nimble. We also used Cisco UCS with NetApp. UCS provides central management for their platform, but we had to manage storage separately. We had to manage each host individually. That was a lot of duplicated work because we had more than 15 hosts.

At first, we moved our environment to Azure, but we found that it was too costly. That's the reason we ended up with the Nutanix solution, and we moved everything back in-house again. Azure is a totally different environment. It's a cloud solution, but we have really lengthy applications and Azure didn't really meet our requirements. We ended up with way more VMs than we required, and that really brought the cost up.

After a year and a half on Azure, we explored the Nutanix solution. We decided to use it and moved some 200 VMs back.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The only thing that was confusing  was configuring the IP address for the management part. After that, everything was fine and really simple. I'm still confused about the IP address part. I don't think that's related to Prism or NCM. It's just the Nutanix solution.

Maintenance is required because from time to time they release new firmware that may contain new features and bug-fixes. Prism has built-in upgrade features that make upgrades pretty simple too. It's really simple compared to UCS.

We brought in a Nutanix technician from Toronto, the first time. The second time, we hired a third-party consultant to come in. They were both okay. Their knowledge of it was really good. Both of them were still confused about the IP config. The initial problem was that we have a lot of events. Our internal network is quite complicated. That might have confused them.

On our side, there were three of us involved. I'm mainly on the infrastructure side and take care of the platform storage network. We also have a dedicated Nutanix admin, and one other. We spent almost a day with the consultant.

Compared to UCS and the NetApp storage, Nutanix is actually cheaper. It also has a lot of built-in features, most of which we are using, and we added a few extras.

We reevaluated UCS, but UCS still didn't come with storage. We thought that the built-in storage of the Nutanix solution, and the single pane glass management, would greatly help us. It would reduce our administration time a lot and allow the programmers themselves to provision VMs. That would also help us.

Be sure you collect your requirements accurately and be sure to consider growth. We didn't do that at all and, about eight months after we bought the first one, we ran out of resources and had to add a second one. So carefully estimate your growth and give yourself a lot of room to grow, including space and CPU capabilities.

The company went with Nutanix and hyper-converged. Just the sheer number of disparate vendor products and hardware the company had to deal with was a lot. The solution was used for consolidating everything into a much more easily managed payment class. Prism brings it all under one umbrella.

Prism Ultimate is where it can't get any better. We've got all the feature sets available.

We use the runbook on occasion and we don't really use a lot of automation.

We did some site migration activities with a large number of guest systems that needed to be relocated, it was pretty convenient. I don't remember experiencing any issues. We did a pretty big data center relocation and we used Nutanix protection domains to do most of that. We ran into a couple of issues outside of any automation and those were just our own configuration issues that we quickly figured out.

The speed of the outcomes we've received using the solution's low-code automation would be as expected. We have no complaints about the processes with Nutanix.

The man-hours saved are pretty important for us. We have a pretty large environment for our team to handle and anywhere we can optimize tasks more efficiently and not have to do them in scheduled maintenance Windows after hours is a big plus.

Monthly, as far as general maintenance, the systems used to have to be babysat by somebody. We save probably twenty to twenty-four hours a month in man-hours, just on being able to schedule and automate a mundane task that used to have to be handled with kid gloves.

As far as maintainability, we do tasks more efficiently and we've saved money. The ability to even just have the built-in monitoring and alerting system that is in the product by default, just by running the infrastructure under, is great. Prism Nutanix saves us quite a bit of effort and time. I don't know if you could really put a number to that time.

We use the solution to manage both Nutanix and VMware infrastructures. We are in the process of progressing towards getting as much as possible off of VMware ESX and onto AHV. We currently have about 70% on Nutanix and the remaining on ESX.

It's great that the solution can manage both of those infrastructures. It's a lot more efficient and convenient to have all of this in one payment class rather than have to monitor two separate infrastructures.

The solution helps provide a continuous validation process and it's pretty impressive. Just what you get by bringing that infrastructure under the umbrella of Prism without having to do any monitoring setup at all, covers more than 90% of what we really need. This feature's effect on our validation time is exceptional. I would say that it probably reduced it by more than half.

The solution is better than expected in terms of helping our team address our current automation needs while planning for future expansion.

Its speed when delivering infrastructure as a service has been good. We haven't had any complaints about the performance or implementation of new systems with this product.

We haven’t really gotten into the solution's capacity planning and runway analytics to help forecast storage and compute needs. Since I came in, we have been doing a lot of forklift upgrades and data center relocations. Most of the clusters have been in so much flux that the runway and those estimations haven't been accurate enough simply due to the fact that we pull the carpet out from the data and change the environment so often. Hopefully, once we have one more major cluster to put in, we'll get most of the rest of our PSX environment over. AT that point, those forecastings will be valuable to us. However, our environment and underlying hardware have been in so much flux, that nothing could really give us real accurate forecasting.

There's a split between Prism Central and Prism Element and having to know which interface I need to get into to do certain feature sets or just having to switch between them having all the feature sets available would be my biggest ask. They've been moving towards that more and more.

I've been using Nutanix and Prism for nearly five years now. I came in about two years after the implementation started. It's the same product that we've been using for three years, just with a new name. We have been using the Nutanix Cloud Manager version for the past several months.

The stability is incredible. We are on Lenovo OEM and the only issues we've experienced since I've been on board for three years, have been related to some Lenovo firmware issues in our environment that would have caused a host outage. We've had other issues with the Nutanix solution, however, those have not impacted production or impacted the host.

The scalability is great. It's easily expandable storage-wise and compute-wise. We can do that comfortably without fear of the impact on production. We do a lot during production hours that used to have to be done outside of production hours on maintenance Windows.

In my more than twenty-five years of experience in the industry, I would say the technical support goes above and beyond any other vendor that I've ever worked with. It's probably one of their strongest points.

There have been multiple times when we've called in about some issue and the techs look into it and ensure that everything else on that cluster is copacetic as well. They won't look just at the problem. They'll say: "Hey, I noticed this, let's take care of that while we're in here." They're not trying to blow you off.

Positive

The company never used a hyper-converged solution like Nutanix previously. There was a traditional three-tier and Nutanix was brought out to consolidate.

I have not used any other solutions like this. This was my first introduction to any type of hyper-converged solution.

I wasn't a part of the initial setup. I came in two years after it was implemented.

The product requires maintenance. In this case, considering the breadth of our implementation, typically it's only one man dedicated for an hour or two a week. This is just to ensure things are kicking off as expected and things have been completed as expected.

I know the company was looking at other companies. I don't know which ones, however, as that was all pre my history with the organization. Likely, at that time, Nutanix was probably the best solution available.

I'm a customer and end-user and we're in a long-term stable release. 

There's a lot of naming in Nutanix. There's Prism Element and there's Prism Central. This depends on how wide a view you're taking. We use both here.

Prism Pro and Prism Element are different levels of feature sets in Prism. Ultimate has more features available than Pro has, however, it's the same product overall. Prism Element is tied to a cluster of Nutanix-based systems and Prism Central is a collection of those clusters. That gives a view of the entire environment. We are Prism Ultimate licensed.

We use a private cloud as our environment is all internal to our organization.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Whenever we face any challenges related to the movement of virtual machines from one cluster to another, we are using Prism Pro. It makes our life easy because with the help of the Prism Pro, we can manage the movement of virtual machines between clusters. We can validate and do complete health checks of physical hosts and logical hosts, as well as of the complete compute storage and other components. All those are converged and are a part of a single solution. With the help of Prism Pro, we are able to simplify our operations and administrative tasks.

It is deployed in an on-premises data center. Both data centers have a couple of pairs of clusters, and the clusters are interconnected, just like the data centers are connected. Both clusters are replicated between themselves to have their data synchronized and updated so that in the event of a failure in one of the data centers, the other data center can take over.

Its top benefits include:

• Time savings
• Simplification of operations
• Environment stability
• Application accessibility

We can assess the performance and the capabilities of the host. We can initiate sessions, and we can evaluate those sessions with the help of the Prism Pro dashboard, which helps with capacity planning. We can forecast our capacity planning, and we have complete infrastructure visibility through the dashboard to get an understanding of how to utilize our hardware and applications in a better way to gain maximum performance. It helps with ROI and achieving long-term goals. It also increases employee productivity and workforce satisfaction. 

It saves cost. After using this solution, we have clear-cut savings of more than 40%. It also saves time.  We were able to see the results within 45 days from the time of its deployment.

It simplifies the administration and reduces human errors. It simplifies operation by providing a single dashboard. It also encourages the use of more automation.

Its integration with third-party tools is very easy. We have complete visibility. We can very nicely use the solution in our ITSM model. We are using third-party tools from different vendors for more insights, and with the help of automation, we are able to do application optimization, alert optimization, etc.

We are using it to manage VMware and Nutanix. The important part is that we don't have to depend on a multi-vendor management prototype. We can extend support to third-party vendors as well.

It reduces our overall power consumption. We follow the go-green environmental approach. We like to utilize the resources in a more efficient way. With this solution, we are able to save power.

The fact that NCM is sold as one product with multiple tiers is very important for us. A single-vendor solution is easy to manage. A heterogeneous type of environment is very difficult to manage because we require different types of skill sets, and managing the solution becomes more complex.

We are using Prism Pro, and the features related to the reporting capabilities, health checks, and automated alerts to Nutanix call-home are very important. We are using it as a management and reporting tool, and we are able to get a complete overview or summarized form of clusters that we are using in the production.

It has been helpful for forecasting and planning. It has also been helpful for analytics. With the help of this solution, we can have a better understanding of how much storage we are utilizing and how many processes are currently in use. Based on this information, we get a better understanding of how much expansion we need going forward, which is very important because ultimately it saves cost. It simplifies operations and helps with more revenue and productivity. It brings stability to our production environment. With the help of forecasting and capacity planning, we can achieve all of our long-term organizational goals. 

It is more cost-centric as compared to other solutions. It provides us with a holistic view of all the applications that we are using, and the most important point is that everything is converged. It is a one-box solution. It fits well with our requirements, and we are happy to have this type of solution in our production environment.

For Nutanix, there are options to go with different types of hardware vendors for using the AOS operating system. We can deploy it on Dell, Lenovo, or IBM servers. If Nutanix had its own server, it would be good.

We have been using this solution for the last two years. We have been using the Nutanix Cloud Manager version for the past several months.

There have been no issues related to its stability. We haven't faced any challenges in our deployed solution. On a periodic basis, we receive notifications from Nutanix about any vulnerabilities. Whenever a vulnerability is identified, we immediately get a notification to apply a patch and fix it. The system is up to date, and there are no vulnerabilities. It is stable, and we haven't faced any challenges in accessing applications. The overall performance related to the CPU memory, IO processes, and storage is at an optimal level, and we don't have any challenges. We are good.

In terms of scalability, it is very flexible. There are no challenges. It is a highly scalable solution, and expansion and migration are very easy. Everything is good.

Their technical support is excellent. If we need any support, they have 24/7/365 support. There are multiple ways to reach the support, and we get immediate assistance. In case of any criticality, they are able to manage the issue. They were able to resolve small, moderate, and high-level issues in a quick manner. We didn't face any issues related to escalations or unavailability with them.

Their knowledge is wonderful. Their technical teams are well-equipped in terms of skills. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

Before this deployment, we were not using any similar solution.

It was straightforward because there was no migration or extension involved. We were using the solution as a first-time solution. So, everything had to be put in place new, and everything went well. We didn't face any challenges in terms of setup, deployment, and support. The deployment went well in a simplified case-to-case manner, and the operations have been very smooth. It didn't take more than 60 days.

Apart from the post-sales training where our resources got trained by Nutanix, our technical team members are also getting trained on a regular basis. We have regular schedules for technical training of our teams.

Its acquisition and support cost is nominal. It is not too high, and it is not too low. It is within the budget, and there are no issues on that part.

We looked at solutions from Cisco, Dell, and Nutanix. That's all. We chose Nutanix because of the cost and also because of the complete package. It included a multi-year support contract, and it is an all-in-one-box type of solution.

It is easy to migrate and expand. Most of the things are web-based. So, it is easy for anyone to understand and stabilize the operations. Our applications ran very well on the platform during the PoC. They are running well now too. These were the factors for using this solution.

This solution is very unique for our office. No other vendor has this type of solution in place, even though they are claiming to have a converged solution. As per our understanding and observation, Nutanix has a unique and excellent solution in place.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10 because everything is stable, and we are able to achieve all of our objectives. We are happy customers.

Initially, we deployed one cluster. Then, we deployed another two to three clusters. The main use case was to have a single console with all the alerts as well as viewing each cluster from a single pane of glass. That was one of the primary reasons for moving to this solution.

We are on the latest version because our company states that we need to upgrade every 30 days. Therefore, we are on a 30-day cycle, using the latest version of it. If Nutanix releases a new version, then in the next 30 days, we are on that version.

That solution gives requirements based on usage. It has helped us with workload and capacity planning. This is helpful for us to effectively plan. 

The main selling point was the one-click centralized upgrade. Upgrading our clusters is a very seamless, straightforward process. We don't have to go through each individual server or cluster. We just do it in one click using Starter. Without logging into individual servers, we can do an upgrade. This makes our 30-day patching cycle easy for us, rather than going through a painful, time-consuming task.

The Capacity Behavior Analytics has been a good feature that we have been able to use.

It provides centralized upgrade simplicity as well as getting alerts and updates on a single pane of glass. That makes it very easy rather than missing any notifications or alerts. The alerts help if you don't log in everyday since you are notified of everything in Prism Pro. 

We use the capacity manager, which we rely on. It gives us centralized management, and that is key for us. Everybody logs into the centralized console to find out if there is a problem. If someone needs to do a deep dive or troubleshooting, the central management lets them narrow down to the task or performance issue that they are dealing with.

There are some cases when there are multiple alerts for the same issue. For example, if I forget to put it in hosting maintenance mode, then I start getting multiple, duplicate alerts for the same host, which we don't want. If I have already received an alert, I don't want another alert. So, there are sometimes false positive alerts because of update activity where we forgot to put it in maintenance mode, then we get multiple alerts or emails. 

We have been using Nutanix Prism Pro for a year and a half. We have been using the Nutanix Cloud Manager version for the past several months.

The environment is pretty much stable, though at a year and a half, it is still new for us. In my experience, it is stable. We find it a very stable solution compared to other vendors. I think we have the best solution.

We worked with the Nutanix Community team to find some templates. Based on our organization's specific security standards, we then created a standard template that we use when deploying.

Finding any type of documentation in the support portal is easy. Everything is available online. If you are stuck with something, needing documentation or some kind of guide, those are readily available.

The tech support has been really good. I have worked with Dell and their support is not as easy to use when you need something, have to find a solution, or are stuck on something. Whereas, the Nutanix support is very helpful. As soon as you open a case with the support team, they provide support based on the case's priority level. The Nutanix solution and support are better than Dell's.

Their technical support has been knowledgeable. They understand us as a customer: our issues and what we are looking for. They are able to provide support in a timely manner based on the kind of support ticket that is open. I would rate them as nine out of 10.

Positive

Previously, we had purchased Prism Pro but had not installed it. When we started increasing the capacity of our clusters, we installed Prism Pro. Then, in the next three to six months, a lot of things had been fixed and streamlined.

Previously, we had a Legacy platform. We would have to do a hardware refresh when hardware went end-of-life. A lot of time was spent doing upgrades. We were having problems with hard disk failure when the environment got to the end of its support life. We wanted a solution that was less time-consuming and more efficient, bringing more simplicity. That is one of the reasons that we moved in this direction.

Moving to Nutanix from our legacy platform has saved us a lot of time (30% to 40% of our time) to focus on other things, such as troubleshooting.

I was involved in the initial phase of setting up the test drive and doing the proof of concept. Also, I was part of the migration. 

We used the Nutanix tool for our migration. We had a deadline and talked with the application owners, which went smoothly. We were able to migrate the workload from our legacy platform to Nutanix. It took almost six months of time to move our workloads from our legacy platform to the Nutanix platform, but it was not that complicated.

We worked directly with the Nutanix support team.

It saves time since it is a single pane of glass. Our efficiency has increased because of that. We don't have to log into multiple servers when we do upgrades. We can do it on one console. This saves us eight to 10 hours a month. Upgrade activity on servers, which was offloaded to the Nutanix platform, used to take hours on our Legacy platform.

We looked at VxRail because we were thinking about having a Dell hyper-converged platform. However, Nutanix Prism Pro was more comfortable. 

One of Nutanix's best features is monitoring a cluster, which is useful. Anyone can manage it. Specifically, you don't need to have someone with VMware or hypervisor background to do it. It is not rocket science; it is very easy to manage. It is easier to manage because it provides centralized administration of the entire environment, instead of having something like multiple vCenters. With this solution, you don't need to log into multiple consoles.

There was a talk earlier that we will plan to use the monitoring automation, but since we have other tools that we use for automation, we don't have X-Play. However, that may change down the line because we want to add more clusters. So, we may need to think about how we can update our license to have X-Play.

We have plans to add Nutanix in our corporate infrastructure too. There, we will be using VMware in Prism Pro for our corporate environment.

Nutanix has a partnership with Red Hat. Therefore, there are some Ansible scripts that we use. Because we have Red Hat Satellite, we use that to leverage some sort of automation for our deployment servers.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10.

I use the VM efficiency to figure out what services are over-provisioned. I've also been experimenting with the reports. In addition, I've been using it as a way of collecting all the data from all the different clusters into one portal.

One of the most valuable features is the hardware and how they have set it up to be pretty redundant. If something goes down, you can just swap it out and you're back online. If a drive or even a whole node goes down, it's pretty easy to get it back up and running.

Also, you don't have to actually mess around with external storage. Everything is in one complete package. The fact that the solution is sold as one product with multiple tiers is a seven out of 10 to me, on the important scale. If you get everything from one vendor, you have one place to turn if you have problems or if you need replacement parts. The whole "one-vendor" thing is pretty neat. Regarding the hardware, when you have everything in one package, everything is good to go. We haven't needed to purchase any other solutions for the type of automation this solution is intended for.

I've used the capacity planning and Runway analytics to help forecast storage and compute needs a few times, but just to check that we are a couple of years away from even having to think about it. It has been pretty good for helping our team address current needs while planning for future expansion.

I would like to see a desktop application for administration of the solution. That's the thing I missed the most. Other solutions have a client that you can install on your computer. You can actually connect to and do the administration from an application instead of using a web portal, which is what Nutanix provides.

We have been using Nutanix Prism Pro for a year and continued using it as Nutanix Cloud Manager Starter for the past several months.

I would rate NCM's stability at five out of 10. We started having problems with our nodes about two or three months after we started using Nutanix. We were getting errors. The IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) stopped functioning. After a long period of troubleshooting, we ended up having to send one of the nodes back for a deep root analysis. They had to send a replacement and try to figure out what the problem was.

I'm sure that kind of scenario isn't very prevalent among their other customers, but that has been our experience with it. We manage 10 nodes with the solution, and something like seven of them have had this problem.

The scalability of the solution is way better than anything else. Everything is plug-and-play. That part is pretty awesome.

Their tech support is pretty good overall. It depends on who you end up with. In about 30 percent of my cases, I've been lucky to get a person who speaks English very well and is awesome in every way, knowing absolutely everything. Every time that I get one of those guys, I instantly go into the survey they send, when they close the case, and praise them in the highest way.

If the English of the support person is worse than mine, or their vocabulary, pronunciation, or even the quality of audio is worse than what I have, it's pretty hard to get my meaning across. That has happened in about 20 percent of my cases. The person doesn't understand what I'm saying and I've been forced to escalate the case to get someone who has more knowledge and better English.

And in 50 percent of my cases, they have been totally fine.

Positive

We swapped out Hyper-V with products from Nutanix to try something else. It was time to upgrade and then Nutanix seemed like a good alternative.

When we ordered the solution, we had a pretty good understanding that we would get something where we could just plug in the network and power cables, turn it on, and it would be already set up in almost every way. We thought we were only going to need to do a bit of tweaking, providing IP addresses and the like. But what we got was pretty bare. There was nothing on them. We had to go through the whole setup with Phoenix.

We had to do it twice. The first time, one of our guys did everything and it seemed to be okay. But then the guys from Nutanix called and said, "No, we have to do this together because we want it to be set up the way it's intended to be." That's pretty fair. But the guys from Nutanix actually managed to mess things up in a huge way. So we had to set it up again. And that speaks to how complicated the setup is when you compare it to the other solutions.

I set up fully-functioning VMware and Hyper-V solutions a good number of years ago when I was young and didn't have as much experience, and both were no problem. But Nutanix is a step up regarding how complex it is.

You should get a hold of someone who is crazy good and then never ever lose their contact info. I have one guy now that I email every time there is something complex that needs to be done. If we are digging into config files that are deep within the OS, I always contact him because I know that he knows everything.

I have used Hyper-V with SCVMM. Part of that has some features that are similar to NCM, but they are different products with different features. I've also used vSphere from VMware, which has some of the same features, like the overall control over your VMs, data collection, and reporting.

Nutanix is pretty different from the others because it collects everything and displays it in a very nice way. To summarize the difference, you get the feeling that Prism Pro is new and more modern. The user experience and the user interface are more modern, and it's certainly easier to use.

The other side of that coin is that sometimes it fails. It's something like Mac and PC: If something fails on Mac, which doesn't happen very much, it's harder to figure out why. You might have to contact support and get them to fix it. A PC is harder to use, but if it crashes, it's easier to find out why. Prism Pro would be "Mac" and the others would be "PC."

Nutanix isn't as easy if you want to try to troubleshoot, at least not for me, because it's all based on CentOS. It's Linux-based. With Linux, it's easier to do things, but it's way easier to royally mess everything up if you make mistakes. You have to be pretty sure of your skills with Linux-based systems to try to troubleshoot things yourself. I've been using Nutanix a lot for a year now, and I'm just barely starting to get the hang of it.

The setup of Nutanix is harder than both VMware and Hyper-V, but Nutanix is the easiest to use among the three. However, the learning curve for Nutanix is pretty steep. The interface itself is pretty good and easy to use, but if you start working with the CLI, which you have to do somewhat frequently, it suddenly becomes way harder to figure things out.

Have we experienced increased uptime since we went to Nutanix? No, we haven't. It's pretty much the same with Nutanix as it was with Hyper-V regarding uptime. What has improved is the ease of use. And there is less cabling and fewer points of weakness.

We went big on the specs for the servers so when you have what feels like unlimited resources, you don't need to set up the whole automation part of it.

We use Calm as an automation engine for deployment of the cluster software over our network. We are also using it to deploy standardized workloads on the Nutanix clusters.

We also use it to create a "self-service shop," where we can select to deploy standardized workloads and choose a certain profile for a particular server, and the Calm engine will integrate with other solutions like our IP database and CDB. Everything is fully automated.

In addition to standardized workloads, we also can say, "Give us a generic virtual machine."

It really drives up our speed tremendously for getting workloads to the customer as soon as possible. Previously, it took a few weeks to get a virtual machine in place, including deploying the virtual machine and getting the administrative parts in order for it. That process takes a matter of minutes now, if the prerequisites are in place on the networking layer. Our delivery time is incomparably faster than what it was. We're mainly providing platforms to other application teams, and it greatly helps those teams to have a virtual machine in place. Indirectly, it will ultimately help us develop and deploy applications faster.

Calm has also enabled us to react faster to the changing needs of our business, with the significant decrease in the delivery time of certain machines.

I really like the Nutanix Marketplace a lot. We publish standard workloads there and that, in combination with the Projects, allows for self-service, which is the most powerful feature of Calm.

Also, the ease of use when building new applications and offering them in the marketplace is the most elegant feature of Calm.

It also works very well when it comes to optimizing capacity and performance. It allows you to have a framework where it is very easy to automate in a standardized way and provides you the boundaries for standardizing automation. It really helps to unify the way a team works. Calm's abilities when it comes to team collaboration are great. All the workloads are deployed in a standardized manner, and administered that way as well. This is the first time we have been able to do workloads for the machines in a standardized manner. Currently, we are expanding a lot, with a lot of new virtual machines. So if we don't focus on standardization, it will become really hard to manage with a small team. Standardization and automation are very important for enabling us to keep up with the growing infrastructure.

We also use Nutanix Prism Pro and it provides us with insights into application-related infrastructure to a certain extent. But in reality, we haven't done a lot with it yet. The dashboarding is certainly elegant, but we're not utilizing the clusters a lot yet, so it hasn't been very necessary to work with it. Second-day operations are something that we're working on. The deployment is not done and transitioning to operations is in progress.

There is room for improvement in the remote script execution. The way logs are shown in Calm, it's not always keeping up properly. It's really the interface that needs attention there. I believe it is something being worked on at the moment by Nutanix.

Also, the integrated scripting language, which is a very limited form of Python, should be improved. It should be made into a more modern version of Python, and maybe other languages as well. 

I would also like to see an improved ability to integrate with APIs.

I have been using Nutanix Calm for about a year.

It has great stability. We haven't experienced issues with stability with the product.

In terms of scalability, it just works. It has high availability, and we haven't run into any issues where we have needed to scale up.

We have Nutanix clusters located in at least half of our Vopak locations. This year we rolled out the Nutanix platform to 30 locations and, in the next year, 30 additional locations will follow. Currently, the six users of the solution are involved in infrastructure development on the DevOps team. Those are the people who are building on top of Calm.

In general, Nutanix support is great. They're responsive and skillful. We're really pleased with them.

Positive

We did not have a previous solution. Calm was a brand-new implementation for us.

The initial setup of Calm was straightforward. It was just a matter of enabling the product, and that process is very well worked out by Nutanix. Our deployment was done within an hour. It was very fast.

You will see great value from it if you utilize the self-service part of Calm. The price you pay for it will only give you equal value if you use the self-service part to enable other teams. If you only use it as a deployment mechanism, I think it's rather expensive.

We did not really look at other solutions. We chose the hypervisor platform, and Calm came with it. We also looked at VMware as a hypervisor platform, but we chose Nutanix and therefore we went for Calm as well.

Nutanix excels in making something that is very complex into something that is very simple. It's really easy to work with, and the time it takes to get familiar with the product, for an engineer, is way less than with the competitor's platform.

It's very important to think ahead about what your automation strategy will look like. You should really think about creating reusable components and also have good source control and a CI/CD strategy. If you start building without thinking about these things, you will have to do a lot of rework and re-engineering to be able to scale up.

In terms of Calm unifying container and virtual machine automation and orchestration in a single orchestration platform, we're not doing containers yet, only tenants. But in the future, I expect it will do so because our next step we'll be looking into container workloads. But that's not where we are for now at Vopak. Similarly, we haven't used Calm’s AIOps and automation capabilities.