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CloudStack vs Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Management
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (5th)
CloudStack
Ranking in Cloud Management
10th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
Ranking in Cloud Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
88
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (3rd), Virtualization Management Tools (3rd), Cloud Cost Management (3rd), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 6.0%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CloudStack is 7.0%, up from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is 6.6%, up from 4.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Keldric Emery - PeerSpot reviewer
Saves time and costs while reducing performance degradation
It's been a very good solution. The reporting has been very, very valuable as, with a very large environment, it's very hard to get your hands on the environment. Turbonomic does that work for you and really shows you where some of the cost savings can be done. It also helps you with the reporting side. Me being able to see that this machine hasn't been used for a very long time, or seeing that a machine is overused and that it might need more RAM or CPU, et cetera, helps me understand my infrastructure. The cost savings are drastic in the cloud feature in Azure and in AWS. In some of those other areas, I'm able to see what we're using, what we're not using, and how we can change to better fit what we have. It gives us the ability for applications and teams to see the hardware and how it's being used versus how they've been told it's being used. The reporting really helps with that. It shows which application is really using how many resources or the least amount of resources. Some of the gaps between an infrastructure person like myself and an application are filled. It allows us to come to terms by seeing the raw data. This aspect is very important. In the past, it was me saying "I don't think that this application is using that many resources" or "I think this needs more resources." I now have concrete evidence as well as reporting and some different analytics that I can show. It gives me the evidence that I would need to show my application owners proof of what I'm talking about. In terms of the downtime, meantime, and resolution that Turbonomic has been able to show in reports, it has given me an idea of things before things happen. That is important as I would really like to see a machine that needs resources, and get resources to it before we have a problem where we have contention and aspects of that nature. It's been helpful in that regard. Turbonomic has helped us understand where performance risks exist. Turbonomic looks at my environment and at the servers and even at the different hosts and how they're handling traffic and the number of machines that are on them. I can analyze it and it can show me which server or which host needs resources, CPU, or RAM. Even in Azure, in the cloud, I'm able to see which resources are not being used to full capacity and understand where I could scale down some in order to save cost. It is very, very helpful in assessing performance risk by navigating underlying causes and actions. The reason why it's helpful is because if there's a machine that's overrunning the CPU, I can run reports every week to get an idea of machines that would need CPU, RAM, or additional resources. Those resources could be added by Turbonomic - not so much by me - on a scheduled basis. I personally don't have to do it. It actually gives me a little bit of my life back. It helps me to get resources added without me physically having to touch each and every resource myself. Turbonomic has helped to reduce performance degradation in the same way as it's able to see the resources and see what it needs and add them before a problem occurs. It follows the trends. It sees the trends of what's happening and it's able to add or take away those resources. For example, we discuss when we need to do certain disaster recovery tests. Over the years, Turbo will be able to see, for example, around this time of year that certain people ramp up certain resources in an environment, and then it will add the resources as required. Another time of year, it will realize these resources are not being used as much, and it takes those resources away. In this way, it saves money and time while letting us know where we are. We've saved a great deal of time using this product when I consider how I'd have to multiply myself and people like me who would have to add resources to devices or take resources away. We've saved hundreds of hours. Most of the time those hours would have to be after hours as well, which are more valuable to me as that's my personal time. Those saved hours are across months, not years. I would consider the number of resources that Turbonomic is adding and taking away and the placement (if I had to do it all myself) would end up being hundreds of hours monthly that would be added without the help of Turbonomic. It helps us to meet SLAs mainly due to the fact that we're able to keep the servers going and to keep the servers in an environment, to keep them to where (if we need to add resources) we can add them at any given time. It will keep our SLAs where they need to be. If we were to have downtime due to the fact that we had to add resources or take resources away and it was an emergency, then that would prevent us from meeting our SLAs. We also use it to monitor Azure and to monitor our machines in terms of the resources that are out there and the cost involved. In a lot of cases, it does a better job of giving us cost information than Azure itself does. We're able to see the cost per machine. We're able to see the unattached volume and storage that we are paying for. It gives us a great level of insight. Turbonomic gives us the time to be able to focus on innovation and ongoing modernization. Some of the tasks that it does are tasks that I would not necessarily have to do. It's very helpful in that I know that the resources are there where they need to be and it gives me an idea of what changes need to be made or what suggestions it's making. Even if I don't take them, I'm able to get a good idea of some best practices through Turbonomic. One of the ways that Turbonomic does to help bring new resources to market is that we are now able to see the resources (or at least monitor the resources) before they get out to the general public within our environment. We saw immediate value from the product in the test environment. We set it up in a small test environment and we started with just placement and we could tell that the placement was being handled more efficiently than what VMware was doing. There was value for us in placement alone. Then, after we left the placement, we began to look at the resources and there were resources. We immediately began to see a change in the environment. It has made the application and performance better, mainly due to the fact that we are able to give resources and take resources away based on what the need is. Our expenses, definitely, have been in a better place based on the savings that we've been able to make in the cloud and on-prem. Turbonomic has been very helpful in that regard. We've been able to see the savings easily based on the reports in Turbonomic. That, and just seeing the machines that are not being used to capacity allows us to set everything up so it runs a bit more efficiently.
Wido Den Hollander - PeerSpot reviewer
A solution that strikes a balance between user-friendliness, scalability, and stability
The market keeps changing, and so does technology. I think that container technology in CloudStack is an area that needs to be improved. Regarding container technology, Kubernetes is something many people want to use and something which, as of now, many are using currently. However, there is still room for improvement in Kubernetes, particularly with networking functionality and network virtualization. When it comes to what needs to be improved in CloudStack, I would say that it should stay the way it is currently. It should continue being a stable product that people can rely on since many may be inclined to follow the latest trends and hype, which is not always good for a solution's stability. It is crucial to prioritize stability, which is a key factor that companies seek. In my view, the platform could benefit from adding more metrics. More metrics would offer more insights and data on the platform's performance, utilization, and usage. Overall, I believe that having more metrics available would be highly desirable.
Kyle Naidoo - PeerSpot reviewer
Nutanix gave us three and a half hours back
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.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"My favorite part of the solution is the automation scheduling. Being able to choose when actions happen, and how they happen..."
"The biggest value I'm getting out of VMTurbo right now is the complete hands-off management of equalizing the usage in my data center."
"The proactive monitoring of all our open enrollment applications has improved our organization. We have used it to size applications that we are moving to the cloud. Therefore, when we move them out there, we have them appropriately sized. We use it for reporting to current application owners, showing them where they are wasting money. There are easy things to find for an application, e.g., they decommissioned the server, but they never took care of the storage. Without a tool like this, that storage would just sit there forever, with us getting billed for it."
"The feature for optimizing VMs is the most valuable because a number of the agencies have workloads or VMs that are not really being used. Turbonomic enables us to say, 'If you combine these, or if you decide to go with a reserve instance, you will save this much.'"
"With Turbonomic, we were able to reduce our ESX cluster size and save money on our maintenance and license renewals. It saved us around $75,000 per year but it's a one-time reduction in VMware licensing. We don't renew the support. The ongoing savings is probably $50,000 to $75,000 a year, but there was a one-time of $200,000 plus."
"The tool provides the ability to look at the consumption utilization over a period of time and determine if we need to change that resource allocation based on the actual workload consumption, as opposed to how IT has configured it. Therefore, we have come to realize that a lot of our workloads are overprovisioned, and we are spending more money in the public cloud than we need to."
"It is a good holistic platform that is easy to use. It works pretty well."
"It helps us get a consolidated view of all customer spending into a single dashboard, allowing us to identify opportunities to improve their current spending."
"It gives us the ability to manage and segregate a guest network with openvSwitch and VLAN IDs."
"The platform is very simple to scale-out.​"
"When compared to OpenStack, CloudStack is also an open-source platform that is continuously improving its features and capabilities with each new version release. Having worked with CloudStack 4.7, 4.14, and most recently, 4.17, I have noticed significant enhancements in the platform's features and customer experience, such as the introduction of a new user interface in the latest release. Notably, the latest versions have made major improvements to VM live migrations, making them more efficient and effective."
"CloudStack is simple to stand up and get off the ground in a hurry. Its centralized design allows for easier troubleshooting when compared to OpenStack. Out of the box, it’s very well suited for white labeling and IaaS."
"The most valuable feature from my point of view is access to environment via console through separate browser window."
"It is very easy to install and manage. It has the all modules in one node, unlike other software (OpenStack). The product allows a customized look and feel, and the ability to add custom workflows."
"It works, and pretty much always has. Reliability and support for enterprise features, with a multi-tenant interface, makes CloudStack a very compelling solution."
"Killer features for me were: support for many hypervisors, ability to match business logic, "everything in one box," available APIs."
"It is interesting to me how Nutanix manages hyperconvergence, the possible failures that can occur in the platform migrating machine machines to nodes without problems while solving the failed node, but without a doubt prism is the feature that I value the most since I can manage and monitor everything in a single tool, giving me simplicity, statistics, states of equipment resources, alerts, updates in a single click, migrate equipment nodes manually or automatically."
"Among the most valuable features are the one-click upgrade, that Nutanix is very easy to understand, and that it's very user-friendly."
"I like being able to expand my workload with Nutanix Cloud Manager at the best cost."
"The capacity planning, forecasting, and Runways are worth their weight in gold. NCM has saved us time in IT, and that's money."
"You can see the health status of the clusters in one view. There is one view of the health of your systems which helps you to have an overview any time you have a problem. You can dig into the tools that Prism Pro has to give you all the options to take on the problem. You can monitor things and manage the cluster really easily."
"It is a stable solution."
"Simplicity is most valuable because, with a single click, we have visibility of the entire infrastructure."
"The Nutanix technical support is very, very good."
 

Cons

"The management interface seems to be designed for high-resolution screens. Somebody with a smaller-resolution screen might not like the web interface. I run a 4K monitor on it, so everything fits on the screen. With a lower resolution like 1080, you need to scroll a lot. Everything is in smaller windows. It doesn't seem to be designed for smaller screens."
"If they would educate their customers to understand the latest updates, that would help customers... Also, there are a lot of features that are not available in Turbonomic. For example, PaaS component optimization and automation are still in the development phase."
"I would like Turbonomic to add more services, especially in the cloud area. I have already told them this. They can add Azure NetApp Files. They can add Azure Blob storage. They have already added Azure App service, but they can do more."
"The planning and costing areas could be a little bit more detailed. When you have more than 2,000 machines, the reports don't work properly. They need to fix it so that the reports work when you use that many virtual machines."
"While the product is fairly intuitive and easy to use once you learn it, it can be quite daunting until you have undergone a bit of training."
"I do not like Turbonomic's new licensing model. The previous model was pretty straightforward, whereas the new model incorporates what most of the vendors are doing now with cores and utilization. Our pricing under the new model will go up quite a bit. Before, it was pretty straightforward, easy to understand, and reasonable."
"The implementation could be enhanced."
"Turbonomic doesn't do storage placement how I would prefer. We use multiple shared storage volumes on VMware, so I don't have one big disk. I have lots of disks that I can place VMs on, and that consumes IOPS from the disk subsystem. We were getting recommendations to provision a new volume."
"CS has very descriptive logging, and every time I faced issues and asked for help, I didn’t get any reply from the community. Reason? Its quite obvious. CS runs on specific environments, unique to each case. So, unless it is a functional issue of CS, nobody can help you. All issues were resolved by myself going through logs. This is another reason why you need smart enough people to manage it. Engineers must have knowledge of hypervisors and understand how CS interacts with them."
"It would be a good to have more specific error messages within administration processes (e.g. problem with creating new instance)."
"My teammates have complained about the upgrade. The source code had massive files that had to be merged with our own development to upgrade to the latest version of CloudStack. It was quite painful for them. CloudStack could add some cost management tools to give me some control over the costs associated with the number of users of my services."
"I would like to see support for native VLAN, and fault-tolerance."
"This product needs a lot improvement on the development side. Every new version introduces new bugs. It lacks many features needed for NFV like DPDK, SR-IOV support, etc."
"For time consuming operations like storage migrations, volume Snapshot restore and the like, we faced issues like MySQL operations timing out and status update failures. Those areas needs improvement."
"Environment is sensitive, so, unlike VMware, you can not afford middle-skilled engineers, they will ruin everything."
"The absence of the feature, deploy an instance from a snapshot, is the weak point of the platform. It is a feature that everyone needs nowadays."
"In the gambling industry, you have a lot of regulation from different countries. One of those regulations states that you have to be able to send all the logs of your Prism to a separate server, what we call the syslog server. On Prism Central, this doesn't work. We have opened a case for it, since this is a basic feature nowadays. We spoke to Nutanix, and they said that it will be in future updates. We did an update, following their support, but once we did the update, it wasn't fixed."
"The machine learning can be improved. There are a lot of false positives at times. For example, I'm actually looking at some alerts right now, that some service was restarted multiple times. It is like the same alert, spammed over and over again. But really, it turns out that that event didn't happen."
"There is room for improvement in making the solution easier still. If you don't know Calm, it's not so easy to use... It is a really good solution for doing simple tasks, but it's not a good solution for complex tasks."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"One suggestion is for the Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Prism Pro element to have a built-in support feature that allows you to simply click a button to get support from Nutanix whenever a new alert comes in, rather than needing to call support to ask about the new alert you received."
"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."
"I think one of the points to improve is having the platform with multiple languages, for example Spanish, seriously, one point to consider is a valid point for me, my native language is Spanish, being in Venezuela."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it."
"I have not seen Turbonomic's new pricing since IBM purchased it. When we were looking at it in my previous company before IBM's purchase, it was compatible with other tools."
"What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."
"The pricing and licensing are fair. We purchase based on benchmark pricing, which we have been able to get. There are no surprise charges nor hidden fees."
"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."
"If you're a super-small business, it may be a little bit pricey for you... But in large, enterprise companies where money is, maybe, less of an issue, Turbonomic is not that expensive. I can't imagine why any big company would not buy it, for what it does."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
"You should understand the cost of your physical servers and how much time and money you are spending year over year on expanding your virtual farm."
"The Apache CloudStack is open source, so you do not have licenses to purchase."
"The solution is open-source and free."
"CloudStack is an open source solution, so you don't need to pay anything for it. When our company develops something specially for CloudStack, it is donated to the Apache Software Foundation and provided to anyone that wants to use it."
"​Give an effort to planning. If possible, contract a specialized consultant company for the initial setup and knowledge transfer.​​"
"It is a 100% open-source solution needing just an Apache license. Also, there are no hidden fees to be paid."
"As far as I know, CS is still free of charge. If you want to pay some money, Citrix Cloud Platform is based on CS, I think. As for hypervisors – everything as usual, you need to pay for VMware and vCenter. As for XenServer, recently they changed the free feature list, so you may need to pay some money to get useful features like XenMotion."
"There is no license, so the product is free unless you are buying professional technical support services."
"CloudStack is an open-source product."
"I think it can be more cost-effective."
"In my opinion, the pricing is reasonable."
"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."
"It's always difficult to discuss Nutanix pricing because the cost varies wildly depending on the customer and the region. Desktop virtualization is simpler because there is a defined scope. You can tell the Nutanix salesperson how many users you have. In a more traditional environment, it's always best to have NCM for monitoring because you'd be crazy not to."
"I rate Cost Governance an eight out of 10 for pricing. There are different plans, so you can pay monthly or yearly. You can also sign a three-year contract. It's quite flexible. I can't give it a perfect 10, because customers always want a cheaper solution."
"In my opinion, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is expensive."
"We have the ultimate license, so I don't know what it would cost individually."
"Its price is correct."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
8%
Computer Software Company
22%
Educational Organization
11%
University
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
38%
Educational Organization
21%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Manufacturing Company
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?
It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is...
What needs improvement with Turbonomic?
The implementation could be enhanced.
What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?
We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting...
What do you like most about CloudStack?
The initial implementation process was quite good.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CloudStack?
CloudStack is an open-source product. I rate the pricing an eight out of ten. It provides good value.
What needs improvement with CloudStack?
The product had some limitations. So, I decided to write my own stack from scratch. The product does not have an easi...
Which set of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) features do you find to be the most useful?
For me, the features related to cost savings are the best part of NCM. Of course, the whole product is worth using an...
Are the setup process and further maintenance of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) difficult?
When I came into my current organization, NCM was already set up. According to the team that dealt with it, the produ...
Is Nutanix Cloud Manager’s Intelligent Operations feature effective?
Yes, this is a highly effective feature and the rebranding only made things better as they introduced more improvemen...
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
Vmops, Cloud.com
Nutanix Cloud Manager Intelligent Operations, Nutanix Cloud Manager Self-Service, Nutanix Cloud Management Cost Governance, Nutanix Cloud Manager Security Central
 

Learn More

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Interactive Demo

Demo not available
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
GreenQloud, Exoscale, TomTom, ASG, PC Extreme, ISWest, Grid'5000
JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, Volkswagen SAIC, Brighton and Hove City Council, Foresters Financial, Janus International Group, Cloud Comrade, Serco
Find out what your peers are saying about CloudStack vs. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.