Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

We're using Nutanix Beam and Flow. They are the cloud cost governance and cloud security governance products, but they may have different names now.

We're a large university. We have hundreds of cloud accounts in all three of the vendors: Microsoft, AWS, and Google. This product allows us to look at all of them with one dashboard and do a lot of pricing and cost work across them with one dashboard for the finance side. For the flow side also, it has a lot of good tools for AWS and GCP but not as many for Azure. As a big university, we use it to protect ourselves and keep ourselves safe while we're using the cloud.

We also have this other thing called cloudbank.org. So, we have two different licenses with Nutanix. One for CloudBank, and one for the University of California, San Diego. The CloudBank one is all about researchers from all over the country. We have about 115 different researchers there doing all kinds of things.

We saved a ton of money by having awareness of how we're spending. We can see where we were spending incorrectly.

We haven't done much automation with it. We have some automated reports on a monthly basis that are very useful for billing. There are also automated security checks and flows, which have helped us stay safe a number of times. We had one instance a couple of weeks ago where somebody opened up a public S3 Amazon storage folder to the internet. They shouldn't do that, and it told us.

The way it aggregates all the accounts and lets me do math across all the accounts, even across multiple vendors or multiple cloud providers, is valuable. The other part is Chargeback. We use that to validate our bills.

Some of the UI is a little clunky. They do listen when I tell them about this, but one thing that drives me insane is that it defaults to a cumulative view of how much you've spent, as opposed to day-to-day. Even when you've selected day-to-day, you have to turn off a cumulative switch. They've done some work on fixing that in the UI, but I don't know why they're thinking that way and why they think people would want to look at it that way.

The one thing I wish it had was that it worked more closely and more cleanly with custom data inputs, which I know is a lot to ask.

It could probably have a nice warning page for all the things. Not for me, not for the big administrator, but for all my users to whom I give accounts so that they can look at their own things. It would be helpful if they had a landing page that just said, "Hey, you're losing money here. You're possibly losing here or there." It expects you to have a certain amount of knowledge of what you're doing when you first come in. It does have a dashboard, but it's very esoteric. Something just right on top that says "You're bleeding cash right here," and a graphic would be nice.

If I want to set up a new account, there's no API. It's all done by hand. It would help us in the deployment of new users if there was a new user API that we could call with a program, as opposed to doing it by hand.

We would like to be able to report how busy our machines are so that if a machine has been sitting there idle all week, we should turn it off. Sometimes, it's not just how busy the processor was, it's also about how much RAM was being taken up when that thing was running. Often, it can run low CPU and high RAM, and we still have to keep it running because of that. There is this arcane workaround to get that to work by installing something special on the individual machines one by one. Deploying that way is very arcane. I wish there was a better way of doing that. It seems it works with CloudWatch, at least on AWS, or CloudTrail, to do it, but I don't know for sure. They probably would've done it if it was easy, but it would help a lot if, in the deployment, it also was aware of memory usage, not just CPU usage by default.

We've been using it for about three years. 

Its stability is very good. In three years, we have had one actual outage, and maybe two or three data outages from something we need to do ourselves. We haven't had many problems on that end at all. They've been doing some interesting things with the user database backend, which threw us off for a little bit one time. It was to get some features done that I wanted, so I don't care.

Its scalability is great. That was the whole reason we bought it. It was the fact that it can handle so many accounts at once, all in one dashboard to get to things. It's great.

We have 40,000 students and almost the same amount of staff. The University of California is the largest employer in the State of California. We work mostly with UC San Diego itself, but we also work with CloudBank in the National Science Foundation (NFS) to give out awards for cloud usage for researchers from all over the country. It is a big academic, an R1, with about two billion a year in research and other things. 

I would rate their support a 10 out of 10. They really care, and I appreciate it.

Positive

We had spreadsheets, Perl scripts, and things like that. 

It's a SaaS deployment. You just log in and go. It would help us in the deployment of new users if there was a new user API that we could call with a program, as opposed to doing it by hand, but everything else is just web-based. So, it's very easy to deploy.

Its initial setup is very straightforward. There are only a few bits of information you have to give the system for it to go and start looking at your stuff. You need to provide some information or some permissions, and then you can go. That's great, but one caveat, which is not Nutanix's fault but Microsoft's fault for how they license, is that it could be a little arcane, although their wizards walk you through it very well. I only had to get help once on that, and then from then on, I knew what I was doing going forward. There are about six or seven screens of details that you have to put in and pull from this place, and this place, and this key, and that key, but that's the cloud. That's not Nutanix's fault. The fact that we could get it to work is great. It's hard to say standards because nobody is setting standards here, but there are some conventions that they follow which are really nice.

It doesn't require any maintenance. They do it. They take care of all the backend.

We used a reseller for the purchase but not for the implementation. We did the implementation ourselves. Nutanix was great. The reseller was great. They're both focused on what they should be focused on. One of the great things about Nutanix is that they have Slack. We've set up a Slack channel for them there. We could talk quickly about problems that were happening. They also have their India team on Slack. I can't talk to them in real-time, but with about a 10-hour lag, by the time I get up the next morning, they've answered pretty much everything I've had a problem with. In terms of responsiveness, that has been helpful.

We have certainly seen an ROI. There have been cost savings, and when people know we're watching, that also helps keep the costs down.

We've got some very good deals on it. We have very active resellers in the middle who've done a good job of keeping us at a good price. Nutanix is treating us really well because we're academics, and they want people to use the product. I do give a lot of feedback on what they've done. Before COVID, I used to do a lot of talks for them as well.

Its acquisition and support cost isn't any harder or easier than others. We have a good sales team, and I appreciate that good resales team in the middle that takes care of us and pays attention. Its cost is reasonable. The features are very good. Once in a while, I talk to my friends who use CloudCheckr to see how we're doing in comparison. It seems Nutanix reports are a lot richer, and you can drill down more to where you want to go, but I haven't spent hours and hours in CloudCheckr.

Nutanix has been hinting at it a little bit that things are changing or changes are coming in terms of multiple tiers, but I'm not thrilled because I liked what I've had to work with so far, and I don't know where that maps into the tiers. I guess tier could work if I knew there were upper-level services I just didn't need, but if they're trying to tease more money out of us by isolating a few things in an upper tier, we won't be happy with that.

We evaluated other options. CloudCheckr was a pretty good product, but we didn't think we could work as closely with them as we have with Nutanix. They have been phenomenal to get changes made for things that we need to do. Especially because we're an academic institution, as opposed to a corporate, we flow a lot of credits and a lot of research grants. It does a lot of funky things to our financial data. They worked with us very closely on that to get it all done.

CloudCheckr is a fine product. A lot of the UCs do use CloudCheckr. We talked to them, but we weren't sure they could do the custom stuff that we wanted them to do, whereas Nutanix could do that.

We also looked at CloudHealth pretty closely, which is the VMware one. They got acquired. So, it wasn't useful to look at anymore. There was also one more that was a non-player. So, we've been keeping an eye on the space to see what's going to happen here. We thought somebody would buy Nutanix, but they're so big in some other ways that it hasn't happened yet. That was it. All these products are kind of the same, but it was also about the people we would work with. The Nutanix people we've worked with have been very helpful, and we knew that talking to them. So, we picked them.

In terms of the setup and ease of use, we did some testing on the VMware product, and it was a nightmare. The cloud setup in general, especially at an enterprise level, can be a real nightmare, but Nutanix and their engineers had a lot of experience with this. So, we were able to get through a lot of it that way. When we worked with the VMware product, it was endless meetings and back and forth. They were just not understanding where we were coming from. They also wanted to span VMware and cloud at the same time. We have very thick VMware instances here, which made it a lot more complicated than just looking at the cloud itself. For the most part, getting the VMware product set up was very difficult, whereas getting Nutanix set up was not difficult at all. It was difficult only when we started customizing it and hurting ourselves. Cloud is a mess anyway. So, I wouldn't expect anything to be easy, but once it's set up, it just works. It's not that big a deal. If it was really hard, I'd have a problem with it.

We don't use NCM to manage Nutanix and VMWare infrastructure. We only use it for vendor clouds.

We've done a little bit of work with their query language, and that's always very fast and very useful. These faster outcomes are pretty important, but I'm not expecting huge performance from a product like this. It's not like a hospital or something like that, but they are as up-to-date as the cloud providers can provide the data to them, and that's what matters to me. If the cloud providers were real-time, I would expect Nutanix Cloud Manager to be real-time as well, but it's not. So, it's perfectly fine for us.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

We use Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for the hyperconverged platform and to be able to centralize all our workload in a resilient platform.

We have integrated NCM with our service portal to provide seamless delivery of services, from the demand portal to the deployment of virtual machines. Both the help desk and service desk can manage everything from clusters to disaster protection and protection groups using the same API. We also have integrated IBM into the system.

Regarding Calm, which I am familiar with since Nutanix acquired it, it has become a very useful feature. However, the main concern currently is the licensing issue.

The challenge with Calm lies in its licensing model. We deploy it once, but we cannot manage it afterward, and we cannot purchase more licenses than what we have. When we deploy an application, it consumes a license, which limits our ability to use Calm as intended. Despite this challenge, Calm is a great tool for managing the life cycle of an application.

We use various APIs to enable automatic project delivery and one-click upgrades for all nodes, ensuring minimal downtime during the process.

I cannot give you an exact amount of time saved, but I can say that we have been able to reduce the number of people managing the platform by more than twenty percent since we started using automation and a simplified management approach. This is the best figure that we can provide.

The first use case is the hyperconverged platform with back-end storage.

The file management feature is also useful to us. Currently, we are also using Object Store.

Although we have evaluated Calm, we have not yet implemented it as it does not seem to be a valid use case for our role as a broker of IT solutions. 

We do not manage Azure workloads or life cycles, and it seems to be more suitable for developers.

For instance, let's consider File. The benefit of using File is that you can leverage both block and file use cases on the same platform with a single admin console. This makes it a valuable tool for managing storage efficiently.

Consider Files, for instance. Its value lies in the ability to leverage both block and file use cases on a single platform with a unified administrative interface.

We are able to simplify our storage infrastructure by replacing some of the older file system platforms. By using public cloud stores, we can offer new storage capabilities on the same platform, which is beneficial. We can also link these storage capabilities to our Splunk application, making it easier to manage and analyze data.

The primary benefit of using a unified platform is to simplify the management of the platform and reduce the skills required to manage it. 

With the natural attrition of skilled workers, companies must do more with fewer resources, and the most skilled people often lead the company. 

By using a unified platform, we can complete tasks that may have required highly skilled personnel in the past. 

This does not diminish the value of skilled personnel but allows us to accomplish more with fewer resources, which is beneficial for us in terms of simplification and cost-effectiveness.

The solution is designed to be easy to onboard and learn, even for those who have never used it before. This is because it is a unified platform that encompasses multiple technologies, reducing the need for users to learn and maintain multiple systems. 

The unified platform is also very user-friendly and clickable, similar to the Windows environment, making it easier for users to navigate and maintain.

This simplicity also enables the service desk to provide level-one support, which covers basic tasks and troubleshooting, leaving more complex issues to the experts. 

Additionally, the unified platform streamlines the support process, making it easier and more efficient for the service desk to resolve user issues.

The flow and management capabilities of the platform could be improved to handle additional features and functionalities, especially since the company currently uses some other solutions from a competitor. 

With the right enhancements, NCM could be capable of handling more features than the current hypervisor and offer a more comprehensive and robust platform for the company's IT needs.

While VMware is no longer part of NCM, it would be beneficial to include additional features such as AHPs, HyperAnalyzer, and similar capabilities found in VMware's ESXi. These enhancements would add value to the platform and increase its competitiveness in the market.

To maintain a competitive edge against ESXi, it's essential to have a dual bundle strategy, which is what we are currently pursuing. Having feature parity at a comparable level is important for us to succeed in the market.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for more than five years.

The stability and resiliency of NCM are among the main factors that have kept us using it.

The operational method and process have remained the same since the beginning.

We have continued to use NCM due to its consistent operation method and process, as well as its unchanged UI look and feel over time.

The reason for our ability to scale and extend the platform is due to its scalability. With multiple data centers across different regions in North America, Europe, and APAC, we have a global platform that allows us to add a new team each year to manage it worldwide.

Scalability is another strong point of NCM. We don't have an excessively large cluster, but rather a big one that is very stable, and we can scale it as needed.

Currently, we have over two hundred nodes deployed across various countries, with the majority located in France.

We do not have a direct support agreement with Nutanix as we purchase the entire Lenovo infrastructure. However, our experience with their support has been very positive and valuable.

I have direct contact with the new Nutanix team and they are always available when we need them, providing us with valuable support.

I would rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

There is always room for improvement. 

There is some turnover in our supply chain, with changes happening once per year or once per two years. We experienced a significant shift in personnel in the last two years.

Previously, I worked with Symptivity. It was the first Hyperconverged platform.

Symptivity was a good solution, but at the time Nutanix was just emerging and VMware's VSAN was not yet available. Since then, Nutanix has continued to grow and expand its offerings, while Symptivity did not see the same level of growth.

In my opinion, Nutanix stands out from its competitors because it has invested heavily in developing its platform and expanding its offerings to cover various areas. Moreover, Nutanix has also obtained certifications from different vendors, including Red Hat, which has enabled it to be recognized and accepted in the industry. 

This was something that was lacking in the past, and it has helped Nutanix gain an edge over its competitors.

Nutanix has done an excellent job of ensuring that its platform meets the requirements and standards necessary to be used by a wide range of customers.

I was part of the initial deployment team during the early stages, but at that time, the offering was not the best. However, I am still involved and play an active role in the ongoing growth and development of the platform within the company.

The platform met our expectations and was straightforward to deploy and onboard. We experienced no issues as long as we continued to use ESXi.

We were able to observe how easy it was to handle Nutanix in comparison to Simplivity at that time. This is because we faced a lot of issues with Simplivity, but we did not face them with Nutanix.

Although we have seen a return on investment, it wasn't as high as we were expecting. This is because running ESXi on top of the new device platform incurs additional costs in terms of run operations, resiliency, and new capabilities. 

While there are already some benefits, there is still room for improvement in terms of simplifying the platform to further increase ROI.

In my opinion, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is expensive.

Based on what we have, we always aim to meet our pricing requirements and we are open to discussing and negotiating to get the best price possible. However, in my experience, I didn't find the pricing model for Calm to be satisfactory. 

As a large company with numerous instances, the pricing for Calm was not favorable for us. There is definitely room for improvement in this area.

I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) a nine out of ten.

We wanted to optimize our process. We were going into a cloud architecture, so we wanted to see how we could leverage the existing Nutanix framework instead of manually managing the servers. 

We currently have a physical VM set up. We had slowly wanted to migrate to the cloud. Since we are already using Nutanix, my senior architect gave me some access to play around with the solution and explore how we can deploy code as a platform as a service instead of writing our own scratch code. If we want to use it as an independent platform in the future, and as a core developer, I wanted to write code to make sure it is interoperable in any of the cloud services we might use.

The scaling is good. We now have dynamic scaling and other scaling policies set up.

In a physical server, we have to define our items upfront, and then we are stuck. With this solution, we can increase it dynamically and define the threshold, and auto-enhance the features. 

We cannot say the traffic is always the same. Over the weekends, it's slow. Over the weekdays, it's higher. They gave us some configurations so that if it is idle, we run on one part, and if there is more traffic, we can run on multiple parts.

The local automation is good. We've seen a huge improvement in our code. I personally worked with the performance teams to compare the product with old physical VM architecture versus the cloud architecture, and I see the difference. I was not able to break it. It was very scalable. While my physical VM crashed at some point in time, the cloud ran fine.

It offers high availability and consistency. We have a lot of batch jobs running and handling that data, so we need a pretty good service. Instead of horizontally scaling, they are scaling vertically. 

I like Cloud Manager from AWS more based on the handling of the UI. This solution could be more user-friendly. The UI could be better. It would be nice if it offered a simple GUI where we would have one view.

We'd like the solution to be a one-stop shop. We have a requirement of having a single GUI setup. Nutanix is like an ocean. We'd like everything tied all together. 

We've used the solution for a couple of months for running some POCs.

The solution is very scalable, and we like the configuration options. You can pick and choose. You don't just have a standard way of doing things. It's pretty dynamic. 

I have not had a chance to speak with support. Our infrastructure team manages to troubleshoot items. 

Recently, we have had one physical server managed by Nutanix that had a snapshot issue (in that the server was not taking snapshots for two months). It's a production server. They sent us a proactive email. There was pretty smooth communication in that regard. They did have pretty quick support for that issue. They are rebuilding the image and archiving the data based on the fact that there are backup issues. That said, when it comes to production servers, they should have a 24-hour turnaround and not 72 hours. Support in these cases has to happen fast. 

Positive

I previously used AWS Cloud Manager in my previous organization. Currently, based on the sensitivity of the data, we are moving to a hybrid approach. Many are still using physical VMs. In my new organization, a lot of my team is already on Nutanix. We were the first team to head into the cloud, and I was handling the project. 

The setup is pretty quick, like all the clouds. The ease of use could be improved a bit more. There is pretty good documentation that helps make the learning curve smaller. My approach is to go to the documentation first before jumping in. The person I was working with provided good information, and we built our own documentation on top of that as well. 

As an application team, it was easy to implement. Maybe it was easy since we didn't get into too much complexity. The APIs are playing a good role. The configuration is pretty straightforward. 

I did not handle the pricing or licensing aspect of the project. 

I did not evaluate other options. We are only licensed for OpenShift and Nutanix at this point. 

We use OpenShift on top of Nutanix, and all the physical servers are cloud servers, and they are all managed by our team. 

As for the built-in playbooks, I haven't done much exploration. One of my team members did more work in this area. He helped me and did all the configuration. He explained what he was doing. However, I was not involved in the playbook at all. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It needs to be easier to use. However, it is improving. The market has shifted. A lot of companies are trying to get in. Yet Nutanix is doing a great job in collaborating with so many organizations. It's going to provide us with a one-stop solution that helps us avoid running around between vendors. 

I would advise people to read the documentation. That will definitely help. It's pretty sophisticated. Reading the documentation and following up with Nutanix support will keep you from stumbling into the process blindly. Get in touch with an account manager. They can help you understand the requirements first and then look into your options. If you have an expert that can guide you, you won't be wasting too much time.

We have Cloud Manager deployed across multiple departments, and each has an individual cluster. NCM manages all of those clusters from a single bandwidth source. About 60 people at our company use the solution.

Cloud Manager is a resilient solution with high availability and uptime. It also speeds up our rollout if we want to provision virtual machines or containers for development. It gives us visibility into Nutanix and VMware from a single pane of glass. This capability is crucial during the reporting phase.

It's also instrumental during capacity planning. Cloud Manager helps you take inventory of your existing resources so you can augment them before they run out. Capacity forecasting and reporting are some of the best features.

Cloud Manager decreased our continuous validation time by about 15 percent because many of these operations are prebuilt out of the box. The built-in playbooks come in handy during scheduled activities. We can write playbooks and execute them at a scheduled time. For example, if I want to perform an activity over the weekend when I'm not in the office, I can run the playbook to trigger it. The playbooks reduce the time spent on these tasks by 30 to 40 percent.

The Nutanix stack is hyper-converged. I don't need to buy expensive SAN storage because it's integrated into the hardware appliance. That's the best part. We get excellent latency by leveraging local storage.

NCM's analytics could be better because we're not getting an accurate analysis of our virtual machines, and we're over-provisioning some of them. 

I have used Cloud Manager for more than seven years.

Cloud Manager is a highly stable product, and clients can request custom enhancements based on their specific needs. You can ask Nutanix's engineering team to build a custom solution for a customer.

Cloud Manager scales linearly with the best performance. There's something called Controller Virtual machine available on every node. When you scale the solution, it never affects your performance.

I rate Nutanix's support a ten out of ten. Nutanix has the best support of any solution I've used.

Positive

We previously relied on VMware tools like vCenter and vROps for reporting. Now, we are 70 to 80 percent reliant on NCM. Nutanix is easier to manage and use. It has a short learning curve if you come from a VMware background. I was already well-versed in VMware, so the learning curve was short. 

Deploying Cloud Manager was extremely straightforward. You can typically finish the deployment and put it into production in a day and a half.

Cloud Manager is fairly priced. I like the pricing model, which includes multiple tiers. It all depends on the customers' use cases. Each customer might have a different opinion about the features NCM offers. We match our customers' expectations with what NCM offers. That might change from customer to customer. NCM is more appropriate for enterprises than small or medium-sized businesses.

I rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a nine out of ten. 

Prism Pro is the heart of our organization. If Prism Pro dies, then our system dies.

We are in the gaming industry with approximately 85 servers. This solution increased our productivity and reduced our time performing server checks.

We also use Prism Central for our monitoring on the administrative side.

Nutanix Cloud Manager has increased our productivity higher than what it used to be. We used to spend four hours on server checking. Nutanix gave us three and a half hours back from those four hours to do normal work.

The system gives you an aggregate of how you will be using the system.

I really appreciate the Life Cycle Manager (LCM) feature, which provides upgrades to clusters. Offers a single-touch upgrade, where you just click "upgrade", then do nothing else.

The dedupe is amazing and reduces space. For example, if you have a file server with a document named April 2013, then somewhere else in your file system, there is another file called April 2013 with similar information, it will combine those two files. If there are two files that are one gig each containing the same content, then Nutanix analyzes that data and makes it into one document. Therefore, instead of using two gigs of storage, you are only using one. It can also combine multiple files from different global locations.

Recently, I have had quite a few issues with Nutanix Guest Tools (NGT). When you do a full update from LCM, your NGT doesn't automatically install on your VMs. You need to go back to Prism Central and select a list of VMs, then install NGT. You need to go to each of those VMs, then restart them to get the NGT installed. Also, there are some VMs that we have on our system that we used to run on an old environment, which was Hyper-V. Previously, we had VMware, so some of our VMs are Windows 7 32-bit and Windows 7 64-bit. However, the NGT no longer allows for installations on those.

We constantly get packet drops. We are actually looking at upgrading them in the future. While Windows 7 is not supported anymore from a Microsoft perspective, Nutanix could allow NGT to still be installed since people still use Windows 7. I have five VMs currently running on Windows 7. This is not a major issue. The VMs still work, but you get an alert in the mornings, saying, "Hey, NGT is not installed." When we go there, we try to install NGT, but it won't allow us since Windows 7 is not allowed anymore.

We have been using Prism Pro for three to four years and the Nutanix Cloud Manager version for the past few months.

Even if you forget about Nutanix for five days, Nutanix will take care of itself. This takes the strain off the business since you don't constantly need to worry about Nutanix this or Nutanix that when monitoring an environment. You get an email or a report at the end of the day, saying, "Something is not working," or, "Some system services stopped here," or, "Storage is running low here," or, "Memory is not being utilized properly."

The stability is very good. In the past three years, it has not shut down. Maintenance is not really required, as long as you do your LCM updates every two to three months. 

We can scale it.

Currently, there are about 980 users on all nine of our casino properties. 

We can go a few more years with the package that we currently have. Right now, the solution is running perfectly. We may have to look at increasing memory in the next year or so. While our CPU and space are fine, it is the memory where we need a bit more. Right now, we have about 28 terabytes but are using about seven.

I deal a lot with the Nutanix support, especially if I don't understand something, I just start a call with them. They have local support in South Africa. So, if there are any issues or problems during the upgrade, their support team can be contacted with just one email, and they respond immediately.

From a support perspective, no other solution comes close to it. If you have a support issue, Nutanix is there. Obviously, they don't come onsite, but they log into your system and do full checks. On top of that, they help you understand the problem. They don't just go and fix it, then say, "Okay, it is done." Instead, they are like, "This is not the problem. This is what caused it. You could have had a power dip (or whatever) that could have prompted this."

I would rate Nutanix technical support as 10 out of 10 because they are well-versed in the solution. I have had plenty of experiences with the support. If they don't know something, you are guaranteed within the next hour that they will learn it and get back to you. I've had plenty of experiences with them and the support is top level. 

Nutanix has a strong community called Test Drive, is a community forum for people who use Nutanix. If you have a problem, there is a whole knowledge based on everything. You just type the word and it brings up all the articles on that subject, giving you step-by-step instructions.

Positive

We previously used Microsoft Hyper-V and were on physical. With Hyper-V, if a shift was nine hours, then it took up four hours of time from the person who did server checks. This means logging onto every server, checking resources, CPU usage, space, and the events monitor. 

With Nutanix, there are no server checks anymore. You just log into your environment for ten minutes in the morning, then you get a report saying something like a VM is high on CPU usage and another VM is high on memory usage. You can then investigate those particular VMs. You don't really have to go through everything, due to the reporting on Nutanix's side. It shows you everything that you need to know about every server in your environment. 

I used to use HP 370s. If I had to do an update within HP, it would take me about five hours of work. This meant that I had to mount an ISO for set up, put my VMs in maintenance mode and then ensure afterwards that the maintenance mode has been turned back off, update my VMs, and then make sure that the software is working. Now, with LCM, we do an inventory check for available software and firmware. It updates without affecting our environment. I don't have to do anything. Nutanix does it for me, in terms of migrating VMs and switching clusters off from maintenance mode.

The initial setup was simple. You get a completely blank Nutanix environment. You just install your Nutanix software. You give it your IP addresses, communicate to your environment, and that is it. It is so advanced that it can take your whole Hyper-V environment and migrate it into your Nutanix environment via Move-VM. From that Move-VM, there is a communication point between Hyper-V and Nutanix so you can make a connection from your Hyper-V onto Move-VM as well as from your Nutanix onto Move-VM. So, you can pull all your VMs through with no downtime, which is amazing.

We bought it from a partner who supplied us with experts. 

It has saved us a lot to focus on other tasks since you can really let Nutanix run itself. Employees can focus on other projects, so productivity has increased immensely.

The pricing was quite competitive and a lot lower compared to other solutions. It wasn't cheap, but it was not as expensive.

You get many functions by just buying one solution. You don't need to continuously add in this or that, then next week you need to add more storage or space. Instead, it is always there. It is economical compared to other products. For example, HPE is all about add-ons. Whereas, Nutanix comes as a whole solution. They aren't coming up with a new monthly cost. 

If you send them an email, which says, "I would like to investigate the reporting of this tool where we monitor only the memory usage of the device." They don't come up with another story about, "Oh, that is an add-on service. You have to pay for that." It is a complete solution. You get everything at once.

There was a good pitch to move towards Nutanix. I was part of the panel. They were cost-effective compared to the other solutions that we looked at. 

We looked at Microsoft Hyper-V, Azure, and had VMware previously, but we disconnected from both those solutions. We had a 3PAR solution from HPE, so we also looked at them. However, Nutanix was the most economical solution and its functions were way above Hyper-V in terms of adding resources, monitoring VMs, reporting wise, and latency. Deduplication was the main thing that we looked at since file service plays a major role in our environment.

We did look a lot deeper into Azure. In fact, certain divisions of our business, from a head office level, started using Azure for more complex stuff, such as linking with Smartsheet. For the unit casino level, we all have Nutanix.

I have worked on Hyper-V quite extensively, but it doesn't come close to Nutanix. Nutanix has a completely informative dashboard to view your entire environment on one page. You don't need to go to a server, then pop up your resource monitor and have a look at whatever. Using Nutanix, you have a health page and homepage. Your homepage will give you your full description of the health of your environment. If you want to run a health check, then it tells you about your services, password checks, and VM utilization. That check runs for about five minutes, then it gives you the full rundown of your entire environment. From your home page, you can see everything in your environment. Whereas, with Hyper-V, you need to click on each cluster, then from each cluster, you need to look for your resources. That takes awhile. But, with Nutanix, it is quick.

I also like Azure, but Azure is a bit more complicated to use than Nutanix. From a user perspective, Nutanix helps the user. They don't complicate the user with 5,000 functions. If you get a good product, you just want to know what it does. You don't need to know where the info is from. Nutanix brings the full functionality to you, and everything works.

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

Don't look any further. Nutanix is second to none.

Nutanix Cloud Manager's biggest use case is compliance management, which includes configurations and drifts.

Cost estimation is another use case, but I don't know whether Prism moved that service because I've not used this product for cost estimation for the last eight to ten months. I've used other products for cloud health and other aspects.

The biggest generic benefit is the business value. There is no direct dollar benefit. The benefit is that the clients see MTTR reduction happening. They see low P1 or P2 calls or cases, but this decline happens over time. These are the benefits, but Nutanix Cloud Manager doesn't give you the benefits upfront. It's a journey because the system matures as you resolve low alerts. The outcome of this journey is the business value. For a small customer, it can take two months. For a mid-sized customer, it can take five to eight months. For a large enterprise, it can be twelve to eighteen months. There is no straight dollar productivity or dollar value benefit they will get. They cannot quantify those benefits. They can only say that their MTTR reduction happened, their system uptime is high, or their systems are more resilient.

In terms of the speed of the outcomes received using Nutanix Cloud Manager's low-code automation, I'm a supplier, I'm a GSI, and for me, the outcome is straightforward, which is a productivity improvement. The people who are doing day-to-day services don't need an automation engineer to automate their daily mundane tasks. With Nutanix Cloud Manager's low-code automation, I can just click and automate a task if the number of times an instance is repeated is high. It's a very simple left shift of the resources. An L1 engineer can do it for me, and I don't have to deploy highly skilled engineers. I can use their time to do more projects and provide value to the customer, so the low code in Nutanix Cloud Manager is always linked to the left shift of engineers.

The way we deliver it to our clients is that we don't tell them it's Nutanix Cloud Manager. We sell the functionality. If a customer wants to have end-to-end observability and AI ops built up for it, it's irrelevant to them whether I'm deploying NCA, or I'm deploying anything else. All that matters is the service, the functionality, and the cost for that functionality.

The most valuable feature is less or no implementation time. It should be up and running at any point in time so I don't spend time in transformation. I should spend more time in the operations cycle. The time to market is something that is very important. When it comes to operations, it should bring in the highest level of automation. I don't want teams to keep on troubleshooting in terms of whether it's a false alert or not.

I've seen that Nutanix Cloud Manager has fewer false alerts as compared to other products, such as SCCM.

Nowadays, we see systems breaking a lot. I know that the current features of Nutanix Cloud Manager help to monitor the container world and modern applications, but as more microservices are getting deployed, more micro-management of those services needs to be done. If NCL needs any improvement, it's in the microservices area because, over time, you will see more microservices getting deployed. Monitoring of those is an area that needs to be looked into.

I know this product from the time when it was launched as Prism. I have been using Prism and Beam since 2015 or 2016. Being a System Integrator, I deployed it in a lot of customer environments.

It's a highly stable product, but it's yet to be proven for very big customers.

It's good for up to mid-sized enterprises. For us, a mid-segment company has ten thousand virtual machines. They are running somewhere around 400 nodes of containers for elements. One of my big customers is running 6,600 Nutanix nodes.

There were multiple solutions that were built, integrated, and deployed. All the incident correlations used to happen in BigPanda, SolarWinds, and ServiceNow, and the automation engine used to pick up those events and triggers and then automate them. They were there, but I required resources with multiple skill sets. With Nutanix Cloud Manager's low code solution, with a single click, an L1 engineer can do a task. My life is easy, and their life is easy. There is a productivity gain.

In terms of the comparison of Nutanix Cloud Manager with other solutions, as a supplier, every product is good for me. We just need to find the best and low-cost solution that delivers the functionality, even if that functionality is delivered by a small tool.

ServiceNow CMP is a comparable solution. It does the monitoring and other functionalities, but it does not look into the niche, modern technologies that are there right now, such as the containerized environment and multi-cloud container-native architecture. ServiceNow CMP needs another automation engine to deploy it because while it connects workflows to your end-to-end playbooks, it does not run them, whereas, with Nutanix Cloud Manager, I'm getting everything in a box.

I'm a Chief Architect. Based on the customer's requirement, I do the big-picture stitching for the customer. Once our solutions team picks up the products, I can influence product usage. I'm currently handling database-as-a-service in the UK and Europe. I influence the selection of the products but not deployment.

My advice would be to go for it without asking. As a mid-segment enterprise, you get everything in the box. You don't need to spend more money. You don't need to first spend money on VMware, then on SolarWinds, and then on your automation engine. 

Prism is used a lot in terms of server and service monitoring, but it's not used for observability. It feeds into observability, but I'm trying to explore if it can be used for observability in a service model.

I'd rate it a nine out of ten.

I work at a distributor. We use it for partner-facing demos, and it has been really great. My mission is to help partners see the light with Nutanix, and that's where I use Nutanix Cloud Manager the most.

It's highly capable. In an organization, you can make it easy to use, but you still have advanced features. You're not simplifying or dumbing it down. You're still enabling an advanced user to design solutions and leverage the full product suite. It's highly capable, so you have that great ability to be successful for a lot of different users. You can have a very low-level, simplified user experience and you can also go advanced. In terms of organization, that's really key. As you get into hybrid cloud IT environments where there's a lot going on, Nutanix storage is very powerful.

The speed of the outcomes received using Nutanix Cloud Manager's low-code automation is very fast. The beauty of it is that because it's low code and no code, even as a beginner, I was able to go in and walk myself through it. I didn't need a lot of coaching or instruction to get there. It was fantastic.

In terms of the importance of these outcomes, it's not just about delivering an outcome. Anybody can deliver an outcome if you offer enough time, but delivering that outcome more reliably and faster enables that business to benefit a lot sooner. They then see the cost get lower. They see efficiency go up, and they start to really benefit from technology as opposed to seeing technology and IT in general as a cost center and as a liability.

It's awesome for helping teams address their current automation needs while planning for future expansion. That's because of the way that it enables a broad variety of users to accomplish what they want in a very efficient and simple way. It brings an iPhone user experience to IT, and that's a really powerful story right now.

The best part of it is that when you use the product, there's no secret proprietary magic that you experience as a user. The real genius is under the covers, so it makes the user experience very straightforward and easy. It's a wonderful solution to teach partners about. The ease of use is something a lot of suppliers talk about, but Nutanix does it better than anyone else.

Nutanix has room for improvement around the partner tools and making them approachable and easier to learn.

I've been using this solution for about one year.

It's highly stable. I haven't had any issues. It's very easy to run, and it keeps running. I don't have to do much with it. That's the beauty of it.

The details around scaling, like Prism Central and scaling the resources, are highly technical and get highly specific per use case, but it's always scalable. You can always find the documentation very easily, and it's very straightforward to do so.

Their support is terrific and world-class. Nutanix always talks about their NPS scores, their success, and their commitment to customer service, but I've seen its boots on the ground level. People try to help me even if it's outside of their role. Ever since I stepped into this role, it's been a really wonderful surprise to see Nutanix try so hard to help us. I'd rate their support a ten out of ten.

Positive

I supported other suppliers in different roles. In my IT career, I worked with a number of different suppliers, typically more on legacy three-tier work, such as fiber channel attachment and the like. All those suppliers struggled to evolve to support modern workloads, and that's where I feel that Nutanix has always been ahead of the game. I chose this role to support Nutanix on purpose. It wasn't by accident that I ended up here.

I can't say that I had this same level of experience with the competitors. We are an HPE shop. We have a huge HPE presence, which is great, and I have experienced a few other hyper-converged providers. I've done some VMware training over the years, but I haven't really gotten my hands on them in the administrative sense. It's not as deep as with Nutanix.

Simplicity is a key function for helping a customer really benefit from technology. You can have technology for technology's sake, but suppliers are really stuck in a world that's proprietary. Even to navigate an administrative tool, you see a lot of proprietary terms, whereas a generalist can sit down and run Nutanix very quickly.

In my role, I didn't really decide on Cloud Manager myself, but in talking to partners and end users, it's a very strong consideration. There are a lot of competitors in the space that Nutanix plays in, so the value that Nutanix brings has to be superior in order for them to be effective, and, of course, they are. That goes back to simplicity and the efficiency that comes with it.

I was involved in its setup for our lab. It was very straightforward. We had some help from Nutanix. Nutanix is always falling all over themselves to help us, which is wonderful. It only took a little while. We just did it via a remote session, and it worked out great. I'm located in Minnesota. My lab is in Georgia. The help from Nutanix was in another place, and we had no issues at all. It was very smooth.

It's not necessarily from leveraging NCM or NCI itself just because of the way that it works for us, but our ROI is tied to our partners and to customers in a way. Their success is our success, and that's why we're gaining a lot of momentum with new partners. We're reactivating dormant partners and trying to broaden the Nutanix message. There are a few core partners that do it really well, and that's great, but we try to broaden things, and we have success with it.

For customers, the ROI is primarily around efficiency and simplicity. So as an example, Life Cycle Manager isn't just a great tool for updates and upgrades, it's a way to have happier staff. It's a way to give your staff weekends back, which is great for the staff. They're happy, but it also means you don't pay overtime. There's a win-win there. There's a great symbiosis if that happens when people adopt the technology.

I've never heard a customer ask for a higher price. Everyone says everything is expensive, and that's true. Nutanix is really smart to understand that the most important fact is the value to the customer, not the price tag. 

While you do get some sticker shock sometimes, as soon as you show this and you prove the value, all of a sudden, it looks exceptionally affordable. We've had wonderful success when we get a buying decision in front of an economic buyer, like a financial leader. They start to see the TCO benefits of Nutanix very, very quickly.

Sometimes it's about the little things. It's about what your experience is like and how much time you spend trying to learn how to use the product. It's about how much time and money is it going to cost you to understand their proprietary terms for things as opposed to having a generalist sit down and be off to the races. That can save a lot of hassle and frustration but also time and money. With these projects, it is important to get outcomes, get that workload deployed, and enable a business or a customer to focus on what keeps their lights on, which is probably not managing infrastructure. That's how I see it. 

I'd rate it a nine out of ten. There's always room to improve, but as far as what's on the market today, it's a unique value add.

Our first use case is for ransomware. We have two more use cases that we identified. The second one is going to be for DR, and the third one is going to be for capacity.

Currently, we do ransomware on-prem. We use a shared cluster in our disaster recovery site. With Nutanix Cloud Manager, we hope to use the NC2 clusters in Azure and move all the ransomware activities from on-prem to the cloud.

We are an insurance company. Data security is our top priority. We take ransomware very seriously. We always want to be careful and make sure that our data is secure, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. We go through ransom activities at least once a month on-prem, and that's what we hope to do with Nutanix Cloud Manager as well. We hope to continue to provide data security to our business and to our customers.

We use Nutanix Cloud Manager's built-in playbooks. They absolutely freed up our team's time to focus on other tasks or projects. We were looking to use these playbooks for a while. From an automation perspective and from a day-to-day management perspective, creating these playbooks definitely freed up our engineers to focus on more strategic tasks and more solutions than day-to-day activities. They saved about 40% of their time. As we move forward and use more playbooks, we see more and more time freed up. It freed up at least six to seven percent of our engineers' time.

The ability to do Layer 2 stretching across data centers is valuable. The migration of VMs from one location to the other is also valuable.

There should be more APIs to integrate with different vendors and to integrate with the existing solutions that we use on-prem.

I've been using this solution for about a year.

We had some hiccups with Nutanix Cloud Manager, our on-prem networking solutions, and all that, but as we went on, we overcame all those issues. There has been no showstopper whatsoever. All the issues that we came across were just small things that we had to work through. Nutanix's support has been very helpful. They worked with us all the way to help us overcome all these issues, and so far, it has been great.

We are looking forward to it. We only have a small NCM platform built, but as we move forward, we look forward to using it for other use cases. We definitely want to explore expanding our NCM presence in Azure or in AWS.

Their support was excellent. I'd rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We used Azure's cloud-native management. We still use it to some point to manage our Azure entities in the public cloud. Other than that, we haven't used any solution.

The setup was easy. We had help from Nutanix support, which was excellent. We got wonderful support from people who gave us a hand along the way. It wasn't very difficult, and within two or three days, we were fully functional to some extent. As far as the ease of use goes, our engineers love it. They use it every single day. I've not heard any complaints from our users. The user experience that we always look for has been great so far.

Learning is wonderful. There's so much available on Nutanix's portal in terms of the KB articles, knowledge base, user guides, and admin guides for Nutanix Cloud Manager. To have all that available to our engineers online is a great help.

I'm sure we will see an ROI. We've only been doing it for a year. It takes time, but I'm very confident that as we grow and mature, we will definitely see some positive returns.

https://www.peerspot.com/produ...When we started to look at Nutanix Cloud Manager, the cost was a major factor. Management comes into play. Hosting on-prem is getting expensive. We did find a lot of cost benefits to using the NCM and NC2 clusters in Azure. Being a Microsoft partner, we always get a big discount. When we use Nutanix Cloud Manager in Azure or AWS, there is an ease of management. We have a single pane of glass to look through and manage our on-prem entities and Nutanix Cloud Manager. It becomes very easy.

The pricing was very good. We were very pleased with what we were offered by our account manager. Because of that, we expanded Nutanix Cloud Manager, and we hope to expand even more. Right now, we are in Azure, and as we build up more and more within the NCM platform, we hope to expand into AWS as well.

We chose Nutanix Cloud Manager because of the pricing. Also, the features and the capabilities that it offers within the Nutanix ecosystem were very attractive. We've been using Nutanix on-prem for almost six years, and to be able to extend them on the cloud was a no-brainer.

We use Calm for on-prem automation, and we are looking to use Calm for our cloud automation as well. We have PoC flow for Microsec on-prem, and we hope to extend that out to the cloud as well as we segregate the traffic between on-prem and cloud entities.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is very easy to use. Our users and engineers have become very knowledgeable in a very short time, and as far as the cost goes, it has been very effective.

We only started using it about a year ago, and there's a lot more we need to use Nutanix Cloud Manager for. We haven't fully explored all its capabilities from an automation, AI, or machine learning perspective. We hope to use all the built-in features within Nutanix Cloud Manager.

Overall, I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a nine out of ten.