Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

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.

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.

We used Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) with our dying legacy infrastructure that was sluggish and no longer compliant. We had a higher demand as our business operation became more fast-paced, so we needed a solution like Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) that could address all that, which was reliable with no downtime for upgrades and a single pane of glass for management.

What I found most valuable in NCM is the one-click upgrade and the analytics it can provide for hyper-converged infrastructure.

I found the X-Play feature nice, as it's basically a playbook that lets you pick an action based on what happens. The feature is also great for resolving anomalies because it reduces manpower to resolve issues manually and helps lower false positives.

Implementing automation in Nutanix Cloud Manager doesn't take long, and there's not much of a learning curve to it. Once you understand the basics and know your criteria and requirements, it should be up and running relatively fast, another likable feature of the solution.

I've also heard of the Runbook feature, and it's been set up for my organization as part of X-Play. Runbook saves time during manual intervention because it's all within the same ecosystem, so it makes sense.

Similar to other products that provide cloud automation, I find Nutanix Cloud Manager fast in terms of the speed of the outcomes.

My organization uses analytics and capacity planning, some of the good features of NCM. I find them very important in helping determine needs and demands in terms of business requirements.

The built-in Playbooks in the solution also helped free up time for my team to focus on other projects and tasks.

Nutanix Cloud Manager has also saved my organization time, particularly a week, as it lets you do one-click upgrading, which wasn't possible in the old solution my organization used to have. In the past, you had to contact different vendors for drivers, for example, and try to synchronize to ensure you were all on the same page, versus Nutanix Cloud Manager, which offered one-click upgrades.

For example, I could start the upgrade process via NCM on the weekend in the morning. There would be a progress bar, pre-checks, and assurance, and then, come afternoon, the upgrade is completed for a six-node cluster, while in the old solution, it'll take one whole week to complete the upgrade, which even comes with downtime.

I also find that it does its job well, particularly in helping the team address current automation needs while planning for future expansions, because the solution can analyze the number of VMs the team is using and whether the VMs are undersized and oversized, for example.

In terms of how it compares to other cloud management solutions for setup, learning curve, and ease of use, it's similar to Apple versus Android, where it's a matter of preference because both providers do the job. Still, one does the job more simplistically and caters to clients with low staffing, such as my team. My organization is very small and wanted to find a solution, such as NCM, that meets all criteria to help address all issues the organization usually experiences.

I also found that Nutanix Cloud Manager has phenomenal speed in delivering IaaS. My organization used to have servers that took over five minutes to boot up. Now, the process only takes less than two minutes.

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. 

Nutanix Cloud Manager offers the flexibility of the cloud, allowing us to easily create and destroy environments for proof-of-concept purposes without impacting any patched applications. This flexibility lets us clone existing Veeam instances for various sectors. After reading and patching the clone, we can either delete it or replace the original instance with the patched and updated clone, effectively running it from the Cloud.

We're impressed by the speed of achieving results with low-code automation. Previously, we used physical servers to run workloads. Now, we achieve the same or greater performance on virtual machines with significantly lower configurations. For example, a task that required 128 GB of RAM on a physical server can now run on a 32 GB virtual machine. Additionally, we can seamlessly upgrade memory on the fly from 32 to 64 GB or as needed, allowing us to scale resources without downtime.

We leverage Nutanix Cloud Manager's capacity planning and runway analytics to forecast storage needs proactively. By periodically running these analytics, we gain insights into cluster performance and identify potential bottlenecks, allowing us to plan for additional hardware requirements as needed.

We use Nutanix Cloud Manager for monitoring. It gives us visibility into our customers' workloads. It's easy to workload right on Nutanix, but you must be able to monitor how well it's running and the migrations occurring inside. 

Most of our customers have on-prem environments with NCI & MCM, so they can have a Nutanix cloud cluster inside one of the big hyperscalers. With NC2, you can use your existing Nutanix licensing or procure a cluster in the hyperscaler that looks and smells like what you've got on-prem. You have the CapEx model, where customers get their budget at the start of the year and buy what they need, and the OpEx model, where they pay monthly. This caters to both customers. 

Most of our cloud-based customers use Azure because they are Office 365 customers, and Azure is the path of least resistance. However, we do have GCP and AWS customers. In the case of AWS, it's more about the available tooling. 

Cloud Manager lets us have more informed discussions with our customers. We can tell them that their virtual machines are underprovisioned or overprovisioned. They can get more from their investment. The customers have already purchased the hardware and the licenses, so they are wasting resources and money if their machines are too big. If they are too small, the customer should make them bigger.

The capacity runway is useful for monthly and quarterly service reviews. We have a report that we can present to customers estimating their future needs. For example, we can say, "You will run out of memory in six months at your current trajectory." 

Cloud Manager enables those conversations. We provide each customer with a meaningful dashboard where they can easily see all their clusters and which ones are hot. 

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.

We use Nutanix Cloud Manager to consolidate and manage our Azure and AWS platforms, as well as our VMware server virtualization process.

We looked for a cost and security governance solution that is self-service and does not require any coding. Nutanix Cloud Manager is that solution.

RunBook has had a positive impact on reducing manual intervention, which has been very helpful. We looked for a solution that offered a single pane of glass, ease of use, and self-service orchestration without requiring a lot of coding. I think this really helps users get the policies in place so they don't have to worry. We just need to put in the initial effort, and then we can be hands-off.

The speed of outcomes we received using NCM's low code automation is good. We implemented separate network segmentation for all functions, including our DCS, corporate, and team control.

Our organization values speed and efficiency. We want to be able to upgrade our systems and processes quickly and safely, and we need to ensure that our IT and cloud applications always run smoothly. To do this, we need to have a good understanding of the costs and risks associated with these upgrades, as well as the ability to forecast and manage incidents. We also need to make sure that our systems are compliant with all security regulations, and that our employees have the ability to self-service their IT needs.

As a senior project manager, I am responsible for monthly budgeting and forecasting. The main aspect of this is cost, but proper forecasting is also essential to keep our company running smoothly. We have a policy of accepting variances of up to ten percent, so it is important to have a good management tool that can accurately predict costs. That is why we evaluated different management tools and ultimately chose NCM. NCM helped us to improve our forecasting accuracy, which saved us money and allowed us to better manage our resources.

It is important for NCM to be able to manage both Nutanix and VMware infrastructures because it provides a single pane of glass for management. This simplifies management and reporting.

Our IT team can focus on other tasks thanks to the playbooks. Once we set up the runbooks, we can relax until there is an additional instance of configuration on AWS or Azure.

NCM saved our organization approximately 50 percent of our employees' daily time. This is due to two reasons: One, we no longer need to worry about topologies and self-service orchestration setup, as NCM handles these tasks for us. Two, NCM provides a single pane of glass for all of our data, so we no longer have to spend time searching for different dashboards. This saves time on reporting as well, as we can now find all of the information we need in one place.

We have a multi-cloud and multi-virtualization environment. In this environment, we have many instances running on different platforms, including on-premises and cloud-based platforms. To ensure accuracy, we need a tool that can provide us with ease of use on a daily basis. A single pane of glass, such as NCM, helps us address our automation needs.