Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

Our company is a telephony provider for small/medium-size businesses, as well as large scale enterprises. Our primary use of Nutanix Prism Pro is for virtualization of cloud-based Private Branch Exchange (PBX) VoIP/SIP compatible systems that are privately accessible to our clients over the internet. We use Prism for the creation and management of virtual machines for customer use as well as for configuring backup solutions for the systems that we offer. It is one of our main tools for what we offer.

Nutanix Prism Pro and Nutanix AOS have greatly improved our organization by providing a reliable and simple solution that requires little to no maintenance in order to successfully offer a stable service to our clientele, as opposed to the competitors.

For the approximate two years that we have been using this solution, we have not once had an instance where we were left inoperable or non-functional due to the integrated high availability features that are integrated with the product. Even among experiencing hardware failures, we were able to function as if nothing had happened and we could seamlessly repair or replace key components without customers even realizing that there was ever an issue.

The features I have found the most useful are the health checks, extremely fast snapshots/restores, and the high availability service.

The dashboard for Prism Pro is extremely elegant, powerful, and simple, with everything needed at a glance, including but not limited to, the health status of the cluster, the operational state of your environment (in our case virtual machines), and ease of navigation through fields that are less common, but none the less necessary such as disk imaging and simple one-click upgrades.

There is not much to say in this regard. The system is very feature-rich and if it cannot be taken care of in the Prism GUI then it definitely can be in the ACLI.

I do, however, wish that the cluster would come preinstalled with the OS, as ours did not, and it took quite a bit of tinkering, trial and error, calls to Nutanix support, and an ample amount of time to figure out how to get everything up and running. I feel as though this can be greatly improved by providing more documentation and instructions if the system does not come preinstalled with any OS.

We have been using this solution for just over two years.

A1! As I said in one of my previous statements, even in the midst of a critical hardware failure, the solution was able to carry on as if nothing happened due to the way the High Availability feature functions.

The sky is the limit with the scalability of this solution, new nodes and cluster integrate seamlessly and quickly.

Yes, the previous solution that we had used was VMWare ESXi. While it is one of the more popular Hypervisors, it is not nearly as intuitive, or even in the same range of power as Nutanix.

The initial setup was complex initially due to the lack of the base operating system being installed on the cluster.

We implemented in-house.

It is hard for me to speculate on ROI as I am not deeply rooted in the financial aspect of our company, I would estimate that we hit our ROI a year after integrating this product.

While Nutanix can seem more expensive initially than the competition, the return on investment is much faster and all in all, very much worth the price.

We also evaluated Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix, KVM, and a new ESXi solution on newer hardware.

We use Nutanix Prism Pro for central management. We have three clusters and we manage them with Prism Pro. We use it as a central point of managing Nutanix, it's concentrated on Prism Pro's dashboard. Our strategy is to only have one tool to manage our clusters and Prism. 

You can see the health status of the clusters in one view. There is one view of the health of your systems which helps you to have an overview any time you have a problem. You can dig into the tools that Prism Pro has to give you all the options to take on the problem. You can monitor things and manage the cluster really easily.

It's very easy to understand. The interface is very clear.

We plan to use the solution's X-play or Cross-play automation features. This is in contract. We moved to Nutanix and we have a lot to do. For now, we are more concentrated on blueprints but we plan to have a look at these features. 

We have a lot of projects so we cannot always dive deep into the material that Nutanix offers. We would like to but we have other priorities. It was a busy year. We have an external company that does things for us so we can make the process go faster. We know what we need and what we would like to achieve. I'm still on the learning curve. I think Prism Pro is very good and straightforward.

I have been using Nutanix Prism Pro for a year and a half. 

The stability is very good. I cannot say that we have had an issue with the Prism Central dashboard.

Scalability is very technical now. I think you can install a second instance. 

We are three people that work with Prism Central and they're all in service core IT. It's the people from the infrastructure.

We have an external partner that does the maintenance. We will be getting it handed over to us, but until now this external company does all of the maintenance and upgrades. They announce that there is a new upgrade, we plan when we can do it, and then we participate.

We are still in the learning curve and we need really a company that has a lot of experience because it's mission-critical. We have systems that are very mission-critical. We really should be sure that we have people that really know what to do. When we are over the learning curve, then maybe we can take it over. For now, we give all of this stuff to an external company.

We don't use Nutanix as a self-service platform. In our IT, we manage Central so it's not that we use it like many other companies. Like a company that can say "Okay. This department can create the resources that I need" themselves. Now, it all comes into the Central place and we do that. It's still in this little team. Only these core IT people have contact with the Nutanix dashboards.

We have blueprints in the Marketplace but it's not a goal that we made for other people. When a service asks for resources, they communicate to us what they need and we create it with this. When they have a project and they need some new software, they tell us, "Okay. We need this database, those application servers," and then we set up it for them.

We had some issues so we contacted their support. They're great. When you compare to other companies, their support is really great.

This is the first hyperconverged system that we have had. Before, we had XenServer. It is a virtualization framework like VMware. We also used templates. The goal of Nutanix is to have a central place to manage all the network storage. We are still using Virtualization Framework, which is good. We are still doing the migration, but for that, you must have knowledge about SAN management, like SanDisk. This infrastructure has a different discipline and different tools to manage the clusters. Nutanix has one starting point where you can manage all this stuff with one software. So it's a paradigm shift. It's easier. Sometimes SAN can be complex because you need special hardware switches for a SAN connection to the disc system.

With Nutanix, you can grow with your needs. If we need more storage or CPU, we add a node so we get both, we have the storage and the CPU power. The good thing about hyperconverged systems is that you can grow as your needs come.

The initial setup was straightforward. It's a one-click installation. You have to set up the VM  with one click. It's very easy. It's not complex to have this dashboard. It's a one-click installation. The setup took five to ten minutes. 

You click to install Prism Central and then you create a VM and start-up the VM. There is a dashboard that goes over more than one cluster. You don't need to have a background for that. It's a one-click thing.

We planned from the beginning to use Prism Central. When we started with Nutanix, we began with a multicluster system. When you have a multicluster system, you need Prism Central. Then you can manage cluster by cluster. Other than that, you have only Prism Element and that makes no sense. It was clear that we should have Prism Pro.

We see ROI because Nutanix enables us to reduce our hardware footprint. We had a lot more nodes. We don't need SAN anymore. We reduced this need to make a point to save money.

We reduced by 22 nodes. We reduced the hardware so we have cost-saving. With hardware, you need to buy it again every five years and pay for support. We had some nodes for more than five years, and today the new machine has more power. It's hard to compare sometimes.

With Nutanix, we don't really use old hardware. We buy new hardware that's fast because every year the hardware gets faster. If we move the same load to the new hardware, we don't need so much hardware anymore because the machine itself is more powerful. The fact you can reduce and grow as the need comes saves money. 

When we calculate all that we needed before, I think Nutanix is cheap. When you take into account that you need a SAN and all that stuff and you know you can grow as the needs comes in, I think you can save money. With the analytics from Prism where you can see that you have oversized or you can predict how it will grow, you can really react in a timeframe that you also have time to buy the hardware. I think you can save money when you compare to before Nutanix.

My advice would be to go for it. 

It has fulfilled our hopes. We have been doing virtualization for long enough and we see what the pitfalls are. Nutanix gives us a centralized, easier to manage platform. 

We bought a little cluster for the proof of concept and we saw really quickly that this solution is the right way to go. Now, we're focusing on a strategy to replace all the other stuff and to go with Nutanix straight ahead. We plan to use the file cluster but for now, we have a separate file cluster. We prefer to use Era. It's a database central management tool from Nutanix. 

I would rate Nutanix Prism Pro a nine out of ten. 

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.

El producto es muy estable, también proporciona una interfaz extremadamente intuitiva, pero al mismo tiempo logra un nivel de control sobre todos los recursos. Tuvimos muchos problemas de monitoreo de plataforma ya que trabajamos con un gran volumen en términos de equipos de servicio, esto se debe a que somos una empresa cuya función principal es proporcionar servicios a los usuarios finales a nivel de soporte, requisitos y fallas. Por lo tanto, es de vital importancia mantener un mejor control de nuestro centro de datos. Una vez más, menciono que es un producto 100% recomendado.

Como una mejora, me gustaría ver una variedad de idiomas y un poco más simplificado el proceso inicial de conexión de red, a pesar del poco tiempo que tengo administrando esta plataforma en mi organización, considero que realiza el trabajo especificado en el Para los requisitos de la empresa para la que trabajo, también tengo poca experiencia en el área, por lo que recomiendo esta herramienta como el primer paso para un gran nivel tecnológico de conocimiento, mis colegas y yo estamos felices de haber adquirido Prism Pro.

Tiene una mejor gestión de la plataforma de ahorro de costos y un mejor control y mantenimiento de los recursos. No puedo pensar en ninguna mejora en este momento, pero el soporte es de primera categoría. Hemos tenido muchos problemas para actualizar desde el principio. Al principio, vi el manual de usuario del producto, pero al instalarlo y administrarlo de una manera práctica, pude ver que es muy amigable y confiable a nivel de interfaz, al mismo tiempo muy específico, muestra características de los recursos nunca observado al menos por mí en plataformas similares

Considere que es una plataforma interesante y muy amigable que permite una mayor eficiencia de gestión, permite un mejor escenario de monitoreo. Sin embargo, sabemos que la tecnología avanza día a día, una buena estrategia sería crear una aplicación gratuita, el usuario puede estar aún más interesado en la plataforma, puede controlar el monitoreo a través de teléfonos y enviar manuales o folletos de información por correo para ir a mano junto con la plataforma y sus actualizaciones, además de las actualizaciones realizadas por el monitor en cualquier lugar donde estemos encriptados.

He estado usando Nutanix Prism Pro durante seis meses. 

La estabilidad es increíble.

I have not used previous solutions

We leverage virtualization most of all. Prior to this, we had 5 virtual hosts using 4 SANs and dedicated network resources. Our back up solution for this was also a bit clunky as we had to back everything up daily so we had a disaster recovery in the event that we lost a SAN due to hardware failure. Our hardware had aged us and was in need of replacing. Having 4 nodes in our cluster allows us to have replication and if 1 node fails that is no data loss but in an entire san fails that falls into disaster territory

Prism Pro has given us a central administration of our entire virtual environment. Everything can be managed and updated through Prism. Being able to turn features on and off with one slide of the mouse is such a great feature. It allows us to manage storage and containers as well as the actual machines through one pane of glass. No need for any additional software. Pulse is in my opinion is one of the best features. Having the cluster monitor itself and notify support of any issues is a plus plus. 

Customizable Dashboard allows each admin to have things the way they like. Admins can just add the features they use most and remove the ones they don't. Alerts and tasks are easy to see and access.

Capacity Runway which shows us behavior trends. We can analyze trends from the past and predict future growth. It can also address potential capacity issues in the future based on past growth. This also includes the VM behavioral learning engine which allows us to plan for future growth at the single VM level. This is helpful in preventing over or under-provisioned VM's

I would like to see a P2V feature like Move or Xtract. The interface for migrating from one VM infrastructure to another is one of the best but going from a physical machine to a Nutanix VM is a bit too challenging. Especially if you are migrating a busy SQL server to Nutanix. No matter how you convert this you will lose transactions done during the actual migration. This can also be a bit challenging when trying to upload the disk images after converting the disks P2V. Uploading is primarily done via a browser. Most browsers cannot upload files in the TB area. There are ways but nothing straight forward. This really needs to be addressed in the future. 

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

We used a different product but the annual was adding up and our equipment was due for replacement. Nutanix was a little expensive for the initial outlay but when added up over a few years in made financial sense.

The only advice I give people is to make sure you understand your support contract with your vender. If you buy direct from Nutanix then you deal direct with Nutanix support. If you buy from a vender such as Dell you must go through Dell support. Then Dell support contacts Nutanix support and it gets a bit messy in my opinion

We were a VMware environment and looked at HyperV.

We have two different clusters in the environment one is an all flash cluster of 40 nodes and other one is a hybrid cluster of 4 nodes and are on the way to introduce another all flash cluster of 9 nodes in the environment. All the clusters have VMs as well as file servers hosted in them. 

Managing multiple clusters with mix of VMs and file servers by logging into multiple console will lead to additional operations overhead and also can cause delay in incident resolution as operations team will have to login to particular management console and carry out the remediation activities. 

First of all, the product is very stable. We did not see any breakages happen due to product misbehavior.

Thanks to multiple automations and self-explanatory dashboards, the overall operations load on my team has come down considerably. On top of this, since we are utilizing the Files feature also from both of our clusters, it is easing out the management overhead in that layer as well. 

Though the console is highly sensitive about any small alerts, which makes the dashboard through many alerts even for one single issue with the server, network, or connectivity, it is always better to have alerts even for small things than having no alert at all. 

One more thing to notice is the strong customer support team that Nutanix has. In the initial days when we were not familiar with this technology, we had raised many support requests and they helped us with all of them with outputting them into non-an issue buckets which we have seen many large enterprises do.

Reporting features in the console is so self-explanatory that even a non-IT person in the office can also understand it. Our finance users have access to this console and they will get the consumption details without having any dependency on us. Also, this dashboard is extended to our NOC team who will be able to interpret the alerts and decide on what to inform us whenever an alert pops up.

Moreover, the deployment process was so easy and smooth that post rack and stack and management IP configuration, it just took less than 2 days to configure the cluster of 40 nodes, upgrade the firmware, create file service and VM space and integrate with our infrastructure.

From an AHV point of view, I look for the feature of setting a limit for the memory allocation for individual VMs. This will help in providing higher memory to VMs for users who always ask or more and more memory but end us not using it causing other needy to be deprived of it. It will be better if they can extend this to non-AHV hypervisors and also non-Nutanix clusters so that people who need this feature but can not goto HCI currently can make use of this product. 

Also, I believe they should take a relook into their licensing model to adopt to the current situation.

We have been using this from last 1 year.

From my past 1 year experience I can say that the product is very stable.

I would recommend keeping the cluster to smaller number of members which will help in faster maintenance and upgradation activities.

We use VMware in 3 tier architecture deployments. This was the first HCI deployment in our department.

It took less than 2 days to setup the cluster of 40 nodes. So need not say anything separately about the ease of deployment.

We took Lenovo professional services team support for this deployment and they are good at it.

1 year is too short term to recover the ROI.

This will be a better fit in the age of hybrid cloud and with Nutanix adding more and more products in its offering, soon Nutanix will become a complete package to run IT. So it will be easy to scale and add modules as and when needed.

We evaluated Horizon, Cisco Hyperflex along with Nutanix.

I know very well that when I was started with my organization with VMware Hypervisor solution for virtualization but we were facing very frequent and unforeseen issues with VMware and due to this outage on hosted services and servers means end-user productivity loss and indirectly loss on the business.

Then later on time, we came to know about the Nutanix and its interesting features, and the HA features attracted to us to use the Nutanix as a hypervisor solution in our company.

Now when we are using, our lives have been easy

Nutanix Prism Pro improves the quality and efficiency of IT operations for the modern datacenter. Powered by the machine learning and task automation, Prism Pro intelligently optimizes capacity, proactively detects performance anomalies, and enables the IT team to automate operations tasks with ease and confidence.

Prism Pro includes a powerful application and VM-centric capacity forecast, planning, and optimization engine powered by Nutanix’s X-Fit and X-Play technologies. Prism Pro enables smart IT operation and automation by optimizing capacity intelligently, monitoring and resolving anomalies proactively, and automating remediation and operations tasks

Prism Pro’s X-Play links intelligent signals with automated actions. With a few clicks, the IT team can automate their day-to-day operational tasks. They can build automation and improve the productivity of the operation with ease and confidence and zero coding

Using X-Play, the IT team can create playbooks for common remediation or troubleshooting steps. Those playbooks can be triggered automatically based on the alert polices along with predictive monitoring based on behavioral analysis to generate actionable signals and provide early warnings

In our company, Nutanix Hypervisor (AOS) is not fully operational for some things just because of what products & services offered to our end customers we tested but we found that it is as of now not supported. We are only allowed to use VMware, but I use AOS. I think the Prism Center needs to include more functions. I know that they're including the Nutanix Era, which is the database management and disaster recovery tool. I think that Era should include everything on a single tool where you can manage everything you need inside your organization.

It could maybe have better documentation. Nutanix does have really good documentation, but it could have more details in the future.

It has been more than four hours approximately.

We used VMware, we switched just to make our life easy and work-life balance.

Nutanix is the best product in HCI solution & cost & pricing is very less what other solutions available in the market.

Keep improving and including customer demands and make nutanix more powerful HCI solution.

We are currently running a pair of production at both our home office and our DR center as well as a dev cluster. Between our prod/dev/fileshare we are now running around 32ish total nodes, and we have only had one drive failure in 4-5 years of running. The level of support that Nutanix provides and the timely response is another great attribute of Nutanix. We now are sitting right where we need to in regards to sizing, function, and design to fit our organization. We will continue to evolve and build with Nutanix.

It has allowed us to easily manage multiple clusters in multiple locations through Prism. We have multiple sites that we use to manage and run VMware at which could be a bit cumbersome with Vsphere. Since we made the migration to Nutanix we now only have active servers at three locations, and we can manage them through Prism Central with ease. If you can't see information in one spot you are going to overlook something that might fail, but with Prism we don't have that issue.                                 

The one-click upgrades and single-window management through Prism are the two greatest advantages for us.                                                                                                                

I can't think of any improvements at this time, but the support is top-notch. We have had our fair share of issues while upgrading early on, but the process now is working flawlessly. Between the initial POC to rolling it into production, everything has been smooth, and we have also added ABS & AFS to our infrastructure as well.                                                        

We have been running Nutanix Prism Pro for about four years now.

Stability is not going to be matched by anything else on the market.

Extremely easy to add nodes to the clusters.

We wanted away from the licensing cost from VMware.

Be prepared to have time on your hands after deployment.

Just a POC with Nutanix.

None at this time.