Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

I use Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for sales and enterprise needs. I implement NCM for clients, and I use it for university education. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) helps with the automation of the clusters and provides a unification platform, with the principal automatic communication in redirect. 

NCM helps with automation for the preparation of new VMs for other teams. This is important for me because I don't need to spend more time stopping my other operations to create new VMs. Using NCM's built-in playbooks has helped free up time for my IT team to focus on other projects, saving approximately 20% of time.

The best features of NCM include synchronization in the platform and the Prism Central. It provides centralized management and performance. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is far simpler to use compared to other cloud management solutions, and the technology is more practical to connect in other clouds. Nutanix is more expensive, but the presentation features more technology and integration. It provides more security and the experience is generally better.

I have two years of experience with Nutanix.

It's more stable, and the support is practical for any problem.

The scalability in Nutanix is more flexible, which makes it practical to add new nodes.

The support is the best support I have experienced in Nutanix. They have demonstrated excellent service when clients have problems with Nutanix and HDD issues, providing hardware replacement within 24 hours. The resolution, hardware technology, and hardware replacement are consistently prompt.

I don't use different virtualization as I started with the cloud computation of Nutanix. Other clients use VMware and Hyper-V, and my company consults for the transition to Nutanix.

I have experience with Nutanix products from working for Nutanix. I work with Nutanix solutions, and in my college, we discuss the technology with students. The outcomes are very fast, and the system is more flexible. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is simpler and more stable compared to other cloud management solutions, and the technology is more practical to connect in other clouds. It is more difficult to set up in other clouds. We use both public cloud and private cloud for NCM. I rate Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) a 10 out of 10.

We use NCM in a training environment.

The solution was picked as part of the hyper-converged platform using Cisco hardware and Nutanix hypervisor software. 

NCM was one of the vendors we compared technology-wise. It is more mature now, of course, and scalability is there. Our use case that I deployed was not around that as well. It was more around the simplicity and automation of that stand-alone system. It meets all those business use cases.

From the lab and proof of concept of NCM, it efficiently achieved low-code automation outcomes quickly.

NCM's learning curve is on par with similar cloud management solutions. This is important because we want a single platform to manage multiple domains. As the ecosystem matures, we want to be able to integrate with many vendors. 

The most valuable aspect of NCM is its ease of deployment. Nutanix provides the software and licensing to utilize Cisco's X86 hardware. It is a turnkey solution, so instead of building different infrastructure components, almost everything is out of the box.

NCM is a mature technology product, but it is more costly than some of the other solutions available, which leaves room for improvement.

I have been using NCM for five years.

NCM is scalable.

The five-year term for NCM's license cost and support was around five million. Compared to a competitive product that was almost half the cost of this system.

I would rate NCM seven out of ten.

The use cases differ for everyone, so they should evaluate NCM based on their requirements.

We work in the public sector, which includes local governments, fire departments, and transportation. The most interesting use case is that we have set up a private cloud with two sites where they are replicated, and from the same console, we have synchronous replication using 1M Ethernet. The RPO is zero.

Our clients like its simplicity. That is a great value. We moved from a three-layer infrastructure to a private cloud infrastructure. It has resulted in a lot of simplicity which is reflected in the availability of services.

Simplicity is the biggest value that we can see. This is super important for us because the technical team is dedicated to looking at the data and how to generate value for the business instead of worrying about the technology.

Using the built-in playbooks has freed up the time for our IT team. Instead of managing storage, CPU, and memory, they can dedicate their time to thinking about the needs of the business and attending to those needs. We have had clients who reduced their operations time by 60% to 70%.

Nutanix Cloud Manager helps your team a lot to address your current automation needs while planning for future expansion. You have a forecast of how your infrastructure is being used. This allows you to have visibility of what actions you should take to avoid reaching day zero. It helps you a lot.

Its installation is relatively simple. The administration is very intuitive. You have an HTML 5 interface that you can use on any device. I have clients who manage their infrastructure from their smartphones, no matter where they are. Its being very intuitive has helped us to deliver 4-hour workshops. We had an interesting case in the sector of transportation in Quito, Ecuador. A person who provided support and was with the help desk went on to manage the data center with just a 4-hour training. He went from being help desk support to being the data center manager, all with Nutanix. That easily gives an idea about its learning curve.

Nutanix Cloud Manager’s setup, learning curve, and ease of use were definitely important when deciding on a cloud management solution. In fact, we have been growing in infrastructure, and it has been maintained precisely due to the ease of use and small learning curve. It frees up time from the daily issues of looking at technology. The customers are happy and continue to grow.

Simplicity is most valuable because, with a single click, we have visibility of the entire infrastructure. We can focus more on the availability of services instead of being aware of the CPU, memory, or hard drives. With one click, we can see the availability of our services.

The interoperability with different clouds can be better so that one can even integrate the infrastructure of different clouds. They can interoperate better with other clouds because currently, you have to buy Nutanix resources in the cloud.

It has been four years as partners and service providers for our clients.

Its stability is very good. We did not have any issues for which we had to stop our services.

It is a very important aspect of Nutanix solutions.

It is efficient and fast. It is in Spanish, which is an advantage. There is always the option for technical support in Spanish.

Positive

In Ecuador, Nutanix began to introduce itself in 2016 in such a way that the customers moved from traditional infrastructures to Nutanix right away.

We have both kinds of deployments. We have clients who have private clouds, and then we have clients who have hybrid clouds. Our clients use Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

As a company, we do the implementations autonomously. It is simple. I do not personally do it. Our technical team does it. We can do the deployment or migration of about 15 to 20 virtual machines in four hours, so investing about four hours to move an entire legacy data center solution to a Nutanix Infrastructure is more than fine. 

We have an implementation strategy. We follow the best practices. We have a trained technical team, and they follow the objectives.

If you compare it with a traditional model or with a native cloud, then definitely the best alternative is to make an investment in Nutanix solutions. The return on investment varies depending on what you compare it with. In Ecuador, in the public sector, they force them to buy a three-year licensed solution. So, if you compare it to three years with traditional or cloud-native infrastructure, the Nutanix solution is definitely a winner.

For Ecuador, this is a sensitive issue. It is a small economy, so the issue of budget is very sensitive. You find many small businesses and government clients who do not renew, for example, support or guarantees, which raises the risk level for them. We are always advising them that it is necessary to renew the services or infrastructure.

We evaluated many solutions before switching to Nutanix Cloud Manager. However, once the customers get to know Nutanix, they always prefer to stay with the solution.

Our customers choose Nutanix for the experience. Our customers have stayed with Nutanix because they did feel a change before and after. Before Nutanix, managing storage required time and working on weekends outside of business hours. Having to shut down the services to make firmware updates of different components of the data center was an issue. Now they can do this during business hours without the risk of services being unavailable.

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

We completely migrated all of our data centers from VMware to Nutanix. We were running a hyper-converged infrastructure based on HPE systems. We chose the full Nutanix stack because of the level of performance and the availability. There was the robustness of the systems, and it also looked simpler to manage than VMware.

The system is more robust now. In terms of performance, some users mentioned performance improvement for some legal applications without having to touch anything.

When it comes to faster outcomes, we are not dealing with projects that need to be delivered to the market very fast, so that is not the most important point for us. Nutanix does help us with our DevOps operations. We can support our development teams in a better way by providing them with resources faster than before. We have completely automated the provisioning of Linux systems that are used to host web applications. We are better than before.

Its ease of use is very important because the team is limited in capacity. We wanted a good partner to support us. One concern before migrating to Nutanix was that the community is less developed than VMware. Now that we have migrated, it is not a concern anymore. Nutanix was able to live up to our expectations.

There is less management for the team than before, so there is a complete gain of time. It freed up our staff's time for other work. This is something that is important for our company. We have 130 people in our company, and my IT infrastructure and operations team has six people, including two people for the service desk. We do not have many system engineers or network engineers, so the more we can gain on basic tasks, the more time we have for the projects or to improve our different solutions. We are able to save 10% to 15% of the time or at least one infrastructure engineer's time.

The web interface could be improved at some points.

We are currently facing one issue regarding management. We have two clusters supported on different sites with synchronous replication. The central point of management must be completely deployed on a Nutanix system with a witness. That is something that should be improved in the future.

The other issue that we are facing is related to integration. There is a lack of integration with our Veeam backup solution. It is not very well integrated with that, but this issue is not completely on the Nutanix side.

We migrated to Nutanix last summer. It has been almost one year.

It meets our current needs. I would rate it an eight out of ten for that. In terms of future expansion, when we migrated last year, we already planned for the resources. We are okay for the next three to four years. We may install a new cluster next year on a third site.

Their technical support is excellent. They are easy to approach, and their action time is very fast. For all the priority cases that can impact production, I can directly contact my local Nutanix team. Within 20 minutes of opening a case, we get a message.

We did not use a similar solution before, so I cannot compare it with others, but it is easier than what we were doing before.

We are using only the Azure cloud. We deployed the new infrastructure in parallel to the old one. We interconnected everything. The migration lasted two weeks. In two weeks, we migrated all of our virtual machine servers from the development environment to the production environment.

It was a very simple process from Nutanix's point of view. We also moved to new firewall technology in parallel. It took two weeks because we were retaining all the firewall policies at the same time. If we had to move only from VMware to Nutanix, we could have done the job in one night for 1,200 virtual machines.

Its price is correct.

There was a competition with VMware for the virtualization part and with different types of vendors, such as Cisco, HPE, etc.

I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager an eight out of ten. Some interfaces can be improved, but its performance is perfect.

There are a lot of aspects. When we have issues in one data center and want to move to another data center, we have the flexibility to fail over to the second data center in the minimum RTO. If we have near-sync configured, we can go from one cluster to another cluster without rebooting. That is a very nice feature that we are using.

It saves a lot of time. Three-tier is difficult to manage and maintain, whereas, with Nutanix Cloud Manager, we have everything in front of our eyes. We have visibility into everything. It saves us one to two hours daily.

We have visibility and uptime. We can maintain the uptime. We also have support, which is very important.

There are a lot of good features, but the best one is data protection where it replicates your data from one cluster to another cluster. It is easy to create virtual machines.

The visibility is very nice to monitor the servers, performance, data stores, and other things. Everything is visible, and you can get the reports very quickly.

It can be improved in terms of replication factors. For example, the data protection configuration is for a full virtual machine. I do not have the option to choose hard disks or some big machines. That is where we need some flexibility.

We have some Oracle systems. The licensing is a big challenge over here because it will be very costly if we go with Nutanix. Speed and availability are two important factors. Especially in the case of databases, you need speed. We are exploring more things for the databases. Currently, our databases are out of Nutanix. We want to bring it into Nutanix. We did a PoC for NDP. We are just checking it out.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager for the past five years.

Their support is good. I have been using this solution for the last five years and never faced issues with the support. Whenever I registered a case, I immediately got a call. If I do not get a call, I can escalate it, and I will get a response in a proper time.

Positive

I have worked with other products as well. In my current company, I have been using it for the last few years, and, before that, I used it in another company. We started from there. We had a three-tier solution with HPE 3PAR storage and SAN switches, like a traditional one. After that, we moved to HCM, which is Nutanix. It was good. After joining ABK, we faced some issues because it was a cross-platform. The hypervisor was Microsoft Hyperion, and the hardware was Nutanix, which is HCI. Recently, we migrated everything to AHV, and so far, everything is good.

Nutanix Cloud Manager provides flexibility. There is visibility into your servers, which is generally not possible unless you use third-party tools. One of the best parts is support. We can contact them for any issue, and they will fix everything.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is easier to use than other products. I have an overall experience of 20 years in this field, and I find it easier to use than others.

It is very easy. I did the migration of multiple clusters, and it was very easy. 

There are different models. For nodes, we have the 8035 model and Gen 6, 8, and 10. We also have the 3,000 series.

We do a PoC for everything. We explore other solutions as well, and depending on the final outcome, we choose the solution.

We do not have automation because there are a lot of challenges in our environment.

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

We use the solution mostly for management. We also use it for disaster recovery on Nutanix clusters to keep a small group of servers running. We wanted one area so we didn't have to manage everything separately.

We use Prism Ultimate. The most valuable feature of the solution is the ability to run and open the management console from one place. We do not have to log in multiple times. We have all alerts for our clusters in one location.

The biggest benefits of the solution are cost savings and time savings for the management. The solution has a tool that helps you figure out your growth and how many nodes you would need to move to a different number of users. We've used that a few times, and it's been helpful.

It is a good product, and it allows us a lot of flexibility and the ability to do things quickly without needing much expertise. The product is pretty intuitive and easy to learn. When we first started, my team and I were able to use the solution after taking some basic classes.

The licensing procedures are not smooth and easy. I have to call the licensing support every year to renew our contracts because they keep changing the licensing models.

I've also noticed that some features in the on-prem products either do not work in the cloud product or work better on-prem. When upgrades do not run from the cloud portal, I must go back to the on-prem product.

We have been using the solution for five years.

We have not had any issues with stability. We've not had any downtime.

Support is very responsive. I've had very few issues with them. They usually give me the answers right away. The support site is very helpful. The site has a knowledge-based search. When we enter tickets, it gives us some good advice right then and there. I've been able to use it many times to avoid having to wait for somebody to call.

The support’s knowledge and expertise are top-notch. If the person I'm talking to doesn't know the answer, they quickly find someone who can help resolve it.

I wish other cloud solutions’ support were as good as Nutanix Support. Nutanix Support has been able to solve our issues quickly, and they're very patient and friendly. I've had to call them various times on weekends. They're always willing to help.

Positive

We worked with Nutanix to deploy the product. They were amazingly helpful in setting up and running the product. It appeared like it would be complex, but they simplified it. With a few clicks of a button, the product starts building and running scripts on the back end. It was really easy for us.

We also did a proof of concept, ran it for a couple of weeks, tore it down, and built a new one. Both times, the solution was up and running within a couple of hours. Four employees in our organization were involved in the deployment. Most of the maintenance is done on the back end. My team did not do any upgrades. We maintain the clusters.

One of our biggest returns on investment was disaster recovery. We had disaster recovery in a separate data center where we had to have an equal amount of hardware for both sides. Now we just have a couple of small nodes running in the cloud. So we're saving quite a bit of money doing that. We've also been able to maintain the same number of people supporting the solution, so we haven't needed to find experts in Nutanix to get it running.

The pricing has become an issue in our company. The tool is expensive.

We've been happy with the speed of outcomes. We haven't had any issues. Faster outcomes are very important to our organization. We're very sensitive to how long things take and how much energy and effort our staff and end users need. Our VMware is totally separate from Nutanix.

The solution has definitely helped validate the capacity requirements that we have and make sure that we have the equipment we need. We've been able to monitor and see how our use goes up over time, plan for future purchases, and ensure we don't have any outages.

Our company has been growing. NCM’s capacity planning and Runway analytics is very important to us. It helps us proactively forecast our needs in the next six months. The management appreciates the ability to forecast instead of having a knee-jerk reaction at the last minute.

We can't standardize certain things in the organization to use playbooks. I'm hoping to get to a point where we can use them more. The tools available in the solution are very helpful. The tools help us look at past trends and determine what we will need in the future.

The setup was easy. The learning curve has been a little bit steep because there are so many individual products. We haven't taken the time yet to sit down with our sales team and the support to review our options. I feel we're not using the solution to its full potential. Compared to other products, the learning curve is very similar. It has a licensed web management tool that can be accessed almost anywhere.

It's fairly important to us that NCM is sold as one product with multiple tiers. We're more likely to use features that are included. We push the team to try new things and find better ways to do things. So if we had to evaluate every single one right at the beginning and then try to figure out which ones we'll buy, it would slow down the process.

The acquisition and support costs of NCM versus other cloud management solutions are comparable. The solution works well. I haven't had any issues where I've had to wait and be frustrated. It's definitely been very usable and quick. NCM Ultimate's deployment time is comparable to or faster than other cloud management solutions.

Anyone evaluating Nutanix should get some training and figure out what all the parts do and how they work. They should make sure to size the clusters correctly. We ran into some issues early on with nodes and clusters since we didn't buy enough from the beginning. We run the solution on our central environment.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I use the company solution to manage all Nutanix clusters. We have three clusters, including one for VDI, one for the production server, and another for disaster recovery. The tool helps us manage everything in one view.

The product has helped my company to have a single point of view for managing the infrastructure, our environment, and virtualization. We use the tool for something important, which is the structuring of the code.

The solution's most valuable features stem from its ease of management of our infrastructure and virtualization hypervisor. I think the tool is better than the others on the market.

The speed of outcomes I have received using the tool's low-code automation is fast and has helped us a lot. We are a company that has the intention to want IaC to come first. We are changing how we manage things to facilitate the day's activities.

With faster outcomes, we can reduce the daily management needed to maintain the systems.

Considering how the tool has helped our company's team address the current automation needs while planning for future expansion, I would say that we have seen how it works after Nutanix launched Nutanix v4 API. It is important because we think it will be the most compatible with the other solutions in the market.

Compared to other cloud management solutions, Nutanix is the best solution, especially Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) since it has helped our company a lot. The tool's support is amazing, and I think it is the best. It is easy to work with the solution.

In our company, even though not directly in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), we saw that the tool has many layers in it. An integration between Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) and Nutanix Kubernetes Platform would be a great deal.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for a year, but my company has been using it even before I joined. The tool has been in the company for four years.

It is an okay and stable solution. Our company has not had problems with it.

For scalability, it is an amazing tool. Last year, we needed to scale our cluster, and it was easy. We had to just plug in and install the tool and nodes while including the cluster, and it is ready to go.

At the moment, there are no plans to increase the tool's usage, but we may plan to do so next year.

The tool's support is amazing. During the day, our team will need to solve the problems associated with the tool. I think it's the best company we have had business with, and its partners are okay with it. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

Previously, I used to use VMware and Dell VxRail. I switched to Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) from other products, considering its price, which is an important aspect. Another advantage is that when you use Nutanix, the cloud infrastructure is better, in my opinion.

The product's initial setup phase was simple.

The solution was deployed before I joined my company.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model. A little bit of our environment is in the cloud, but we have not yet integrated it with Nutanix. I use the cloud services from Azure.

During the product's installation phase, the consultant and a partner from Brazil greatly helped our company.

My company has not sought help from any implementors with implementing the cloud product yet, but we plan to do so in the future.

Recently, my company studied the movement to go to the cloud, and we concluded that it is better to stay in our solution quickly and use Nutanix's integration with the cloud, while not forgetting our infrastructure and going to the cloud.

The pricing model offered by Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is better than the ones offered by the other solutions in the market.

My company evaluated Dell VxRail and VMware against Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). We evaluated Dell VxRail because it was an integrated and unified solution.

I can't remember whether the tool's built-in playbooks freed up time for our IT team.

I rate the overall tool a ten out of ten.

We use Nutanix Cloud Manager for the daily administration of our Nutanix cluster. NCM provides one spot to go to for everything Nutanix related. It gives us a window into the overall health of our platform, allowing us to see everything at a glance. NCM tells us about the number of VMs running and all the other critical metrics you would want to see, such as host and virtual machine performance. It can provide a single-pane-of-glass view into multiple clusters, but we're only managing one. 

NCM gives us greater insight into our infrastructure because we have more reporting and alert capabilities. We can get a breakdown of VM efficiency and determine which ones are over-provisioned, constrained, or using up too many resources in an instance. 

Before NCM, we couldn't predict our future resource requirements accurately based on our current workload. I need to know if I will have enough memory storage and CPU for the next year so I don't have to ask for more money and get more hardware. It provides me with more analytics that I can use to improve the environment and make more educated decisions.

Features like capacity planning and runway analytics aren't too crucial for our day-to-day operations, but they're helpful when it comes time for long-term planning. We've only had this for a year, so we haven't needed to add any hardware in that time. However, in another six months or a year, we might need to add hardware to this environment if we see things are trending in that direction. NCM will help me demonstrate what we need to the accounting folks and business leaders. I can tell them that, based on these reports, it looks like we're consuming this amount of resources, so I need some funds budgeted to acquire more hardware. It's a cost-justification tool.

I'm looking forward to using NCM's playbooks as I become more comfortable with the platform. For instance, you can run a playbook to automatically shut down virtual machines during a maintenance window or allot more resources to a VM that needs them. I've only used it for reporting and alerts. It lets me know when something happens, and I or one of the other admins will resolve the issue. In the future, I would like to do that automatically. I know it can do that. I just haven't
done that yet. We'll start small and do some testing, but we haven't gotten there yet.  

From an automation standpoint, I don't think it's doing as much as it could because we aren't fully utilizing the platform. With respect to the analytics, however, We have a lot more information delivered automatically and consistently. It has significantly increased the amount of information we have at our disposal. NCM could also manipulate our environment more than what we're currently doing, but we haven't implemented it yet. 

I like NCM's X-Play feature. For example, we have a couple set up to notify us when our virtual machines require more memory, or they're over-provisioned. We automate alerts and send out reports so that we can address those. It does what I require it to do. We also have X-Play set up on the reporting side to notify us when new virtual machines are created. I need to be aware of the new machines in case we need to do anything further. 

When we're doing something new, it sometimes takes a couple of days to get our feet wet. We have to play around with it and test it on a small subset of whatever we're trying to do. It depends on whether we're automating something on the virtual machines or reporting on them. It will generally take a few days to get from a concept to automation in production. The solution's low-code automation works as expected. 

I think NCM's guest tools have some room for improvement. It's a minor pain point getting those installed and getting the virtual machines to recognize them. I know there are changes coming in the near future, but as it stands today, they could be improved. 

It's an HTML5 web interface. Sometimes you click on an action that you want to do, but the interface doesn't necessarily refresh as fast as you would expect. You need to force a browser refresh, but it would be nice if the interface would refresh automatically faster. It seems much slower than a full-blown application that you'd install on your end-user computer. 

I have used Nutanix Cloud Manager for about a year.

NCM is generally stable, aside from a few minor problems with the web interface. Our production workloads aren't going down daily, weekly, or monthly because of hard crashes or anything like that. We haven't had any outages at all. It is reliable from a performance standpoint. If we could work on some of those things related to the UI, that would be great. 

Nutanix Cloud Manager is highly scalable. I've been a part of various Wisconsin Nutanix user groups where people have upwards of a hundred nodes or more. While we may never get that large for our environment, it certainly does scale to a size that we could only ever imagine. I'm thinking we might add a node or two and an additional piece of hardware, but people are out there buying a lot more.

I rate Nutanix support 10 out of 10. It's one area where Nutanix shines. Each time I've called or opened a ticket, they've resolved the issue quickly. The support team is always willing to go the extra mile and help you out. It's a stark difference compared to what we were getting before. 

I feel confident that when we call or create a ticket, we will be connected to the right person the first time. I know that this person will be knowledgeable enough to assist. I don't recall any support cases where we've had to escalate it to someone more knowledgeable. Their front-line support helps us every time, and that's been a great experience. It doesn't take a long time to get a callback and you're not sitting on hold for a long time. I feel assured that I will get help immediately when I need it. 

Positive

We had Microsoft Hyper-V before Nutanix. Nutanix Cloud Manager has more capabilities, but there are also more things to learn, so it's a slightly more complicated solution. Hyper-V is a more straightforward solution with fewer features. There are more things to do and places to go, so you need to document more. It isn't a knock on the platform. It's relatively easy to use, but you must document more. 

Support was probably the biggest reason why we switched to Nutanix. When we had a problem with the Hyper-V infrastructure, we always tried to fix it ourselves before calling Microsoft support because we didn't want to engage with them. We couldn't get a timely response. It was a lot of run-around to get to a potential solution. Microsoft would try to blame the hardware vendors, who would blame Microsoft. It is a lot of back and forth. 

Also, Hyper-V lacked out-of-the-box analytics and reporting. It's essential to have that for justifying costs to the leadership. I must tell them, "We need more hardware, and here's why." I can tell the virtual machines are not using the correct number of virtual CPUs because Nutanix tells me they're over-provisioned. I have factual data we didn't have with Hyper-V to back up some of these things. At the end of the day, Hyper-V is a great small business solution, but we scaled it past what it's intended to do. It was time for us to make a jump to a more enterprise-class offering.

Deploying Nutanix Cloud Manager was straightforward. The initial installation took about two or three hours, but it took around a month to migrate the virtual machines from the Hyper-V platform to the Nutanix environment. We did it in phases over the weekend. 

We had a three-person team from my company. I was the primary admin, and I have a backup. We also involved our networking and security guys for various changes in the environment. 

Our Nutanix environment is deployed at one location - our main data center - and Cloud Manager covers only one cluster that contains every virtual machine for all the departments in the company. We have virtual machines for accounting and several other areas that benefit from this. 

Six people are responsible for managing the environment, but two admins perform most of the work. However, four other people also have permission to create virtual machines, run reports, etc. It requires a little maintenance. We have to apply software and firmware updates as they come out. 

Since deploying Nutanix, I'm spending less time babysitting the environment. Doing all the troubleshooting and research by myself could take six hours. We prefer to set a maintenance window in case we need to try something, and we don't necessarily know if it will fix the problem. 

With Nutanix, we call support and have them connect remotely. They can typically fix whatever problem we have immediately without any kind of downtime. That has saved a lot of time. It's a lot less stressful whenever there is a problem because I know I have somebody that I can call. It's hard to quantify that in dollar terms, but I know it has saved us a lot of time.

Nutanix costs more than Hyper-V, but the price is reasonable for the features we're getting. We have better support, analytics, reporting, and other capabilities that we didn't have before. That is more than enough to justify the cost. The hardware we purchased from Nutanix was priced fairly. The primary costs are software and support. It's a subscription-based service, which can be bad or good, depending on how you look at that. For me, it makes perfect sense. We get regular updates and can get support when we need it. 

I rate Nutanix Cloud Manager nine out of 10. NCM has been an amazing addition to our company. I have a few nitpicky complaints, but when it comes to the things that matter, the solution has always delivered. 

It's good that the solution is sold as a complete package. If we had to pick and choose the individual pieces, we might miss out on some useful features. Maybe we won't use some of them, but it's an opportunity to ensure you are diving into everything that it offers, which is quite a bit. There's a lot of great stuff in here.

Before you deploy Nutanix, I recommend participating in one of the Nutanix Boot Camps. You can sit down and work with people to see how the solution works firsthand. You can test-drive the solution on their site to experience the solution without deploying anything, so you can play with the environment to see what that looks like. Once you have played around with it a little bit, you can do a proof of concept or a demo lab to get a bit more experience. 

I would also suggest using Nutanix Hypervisor AHV instead of running Hyper-V or VMware on top of the Nutanix platform. The level of integration there has been excellent. I recommend using the Nutanix hardware. If you have a support problem, there's no back-and-forth between the hardware and software vendor. It's easy to say, "Look, it's your hardware and software. There's obviously a problem here. Let's get to the bottom of it, and then you never have to worry about the finger-pointing game."