Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

I do a lot of tasks via automation which I previously would have to hire people to do. The solution has helped me to eliminate a lot of low-skilled labor. I can put the money required for this job into other things.

Getting an update about my clusters is the most valuable feature of the product.

The support provided after office hours could use some improvement.

I have been using the solution for four years.

The product is really stable compared to everything else in my environment. I had one major problem over a five-year period.

I've had no problems with scale, and I keep growing my environment every day.

The support is good.

Positive

The initial setup was easy.

We used a combination of our employees and consultants to deploy the solution.

Since we are able to automate more, we are able to deploy faster. So customers are happier, and it leads to customer retention.

The solution’s pricing is not outrageous like other products. However, reducing the price would always be useful.

I've evaluated options across the board, and Nutanix’s structuring platform has saved me a lot of time and effort. It takes three times more people to do tasks on VMware than Nutanix.

I have different products. It seems like Nutanix is headed toward making things more seamless, which really excites me. I need solutions with improved speed of creating and automating the processes and making them seamless. I need solutions to grab everything from everywhere. NCM is self-sufficient. You don't need to know everything about it. It installs itself, and it takes care of itself. We have used the older versions of the solution too.

The speed of the outcomes is great. I couldn’t be happier. I can deliver to my developers and my end customers faster. Faster outcomes are very important to my organization.

NCM’s built-in playbooks have freed up time for my IT team by 25%. I love that the product allows me to fix things that are broken now and think about the future at the same time. Compared to other products, NCM is much easier to use. I don't need highly trained people to use the solution.

Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

We use Nutanix for management and capacity planning.

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

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

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

Nutanix is highly stable.

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

We started using Nutanix six months ago.

Nutanix is relatively stable.

Nutanix is scalable. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Its top benefits include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

We worked directly with the Nutanix support team.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use the solution for virtualization purposes.

The solution saves around 15% of standard time for our organization.

The solution is easy to use and has a very supportive team. It helps me with essential knowledge and planning for projects.

The solution's virtualization could be even better. They should improve the upgrade and patch engine features.

I have been using the solution for two years.

It is a stable solution. Although, one of its nodes might break if you don't follow the proper upgrading and patching steps.

It is a scalable solution. Our enterprise has three clusters dedicated to it.

The solution's technical support is good. However, it is complicated to communicate with the customer service team for the contract renewal process.

Positive

We switched to Nutanix because of its flexible pricing model compared to other vendors.

The solution generates a high return on investment.

The solution's price is reasonable.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We use Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) mainly for the centralized management of multiple clusters. We're running two clusters under the solution right now, and we'll be expanding to three probably within the next couple of months.

Using Nutanix Cloud Manager gives me another engineer on my team. The solution allows us to have constant eyes on the environment, and we're exploring some of its additional features for automation for management.

Nutanix Cloud Manager's runway features are a big help in predicting strategy for optimization. They help us so that we don't find ourselves in a patch, and we have time to budget with senior management for additional acquisition if required.

If you're still running tiered architecture for the storage, it would be good to give stats on the amount of data that is warehoused in the cold tier versus the hot tier. Additionally, it would be helpful to get some visual appreciation of the dataset and identify which VMs are harnessing the bulk of it. You could see an element of this feature in Prism Element that wasn't available in the Prism Pro or NCM.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for around two to three years.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is a completely stable solution, and I haven't had any issues. We always read the release notes before running upgrades.

I would expect Nutanix Cloud Manager to scale. Since our shop is pretty small, we would not plan to scale the solution, but based on what I've read, it is a scalable solution.

Nutanix Cloud Manager's customer support is fantastic. Most of the time, it's a one-call resolution. Fortunately, I don't have to call them very often. I've never had anybody that was difficult to work with, and they always seemed eager to help and follow up.

Positive

Nutanix Cloud Manager's initial setup was relatively straightforward. We worked with our SE when it was being deployed.

We have seen a return on investment with Nutanix Cloud Manager. It makes centralized management and viewing much easier without needing to bounce into different systems constantly.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is an expensive solution. However, its value is worth the cost versus trying to aggregate it across multiple other solutions.

We did evaluate other options before choosing Nutanix Cloud Manager. We looked at standard three-two-one solutions, but Nutanix Cloud Manager stood out because of its simplified management nature.

I advise users know their goals for utilizing the product ahead of time. Doing this will ensure that when they are deploying and want to create the playbooks, they will get the most value out of the implementation.

Overall, I rate Nutanix Cloud Manager an eight out of ten.