Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

We provide Test-VMs to users. Currently, we deploy only Windows-VMs from Windows 10 1803 up to 20H2 and Server 2012 R2 to Server 2019. The blueprints consist of a base Windows Image (which is used as a template for the VM to be) and several tasks you can define and use remote PowerShell to get whatever you need to get done, like install additional software, set registry keys - you name it. Each task is then executed in the defined order and results can be reviewed even during execution time. Hardware specs can be made configurable, so users can adjust the amount of RAM or CPU core count but can also be set to static.
We recently set the machines up to configure customary passwords and give users an email notification when the machine is ready to use. Also we differentiate machine networks based on the users department to separate machines.

Previous inquiries took us almost a full day to prepare the VM to the liking of our users. Now, the deployment time is below 15 minutes and users can do it on their own! That leaves us to only update the blueprints if new requirements come in or new Windows Versions are published. As we have now predefined setups the testing team can rely on common ground for their product tests. Development teams can experiment with alpha versions in a secured environment (separate VLANs) without harming production machines.

The self-service for users is key to this solution because the creation is done solely on the users' terms and time. No waiting for IT or such.

Previously written scripts can be checked in a library and be reused for other blueprints.

Blueprints can be made available per project so each user sees only items tailored for their specific use case.
You can also Setup multi-machine blueprints to Support 3-tier applications with reverse proxy, Web Server and database Server, or any other concept there might be.

As always, the Nutanix support team assists with any obstacles you might come across. This led to various enhancements we and all other customers had benefits on.

There is now runbooks to use for things like automatically patch machines.

The list of blueprints and applications could be more configurable so you see all the fields you need and not just some predefined fields which are not customizable now.

There are lots of pre-defined blueprints in the online marketplace but often it is a trial and error to get the pre-defined blueprints to work due to some firewall issues. But that may because of our internal firewall being too restrictive.

More support for VMware environments would be great. Most blueprints are tailored for Nutanix AHV or the cloud providers. Hyper-V is currently not supported.

We have used Calm for over one year now.

Calm has no issues with stability. But Calm is heavily worked on by Nutanix, so any issues there might be are fast resolved and updates often help to mitigate problems. Given Nutanix unique 1-click-updates nature, updates are just as easy and reliable. It is advisable to wait for 2 - 3 weeks before upgrading to the latest and greatest so can look if any x.y.z.1 hotfix updates are published to avoid .0 glitches. But they are rare with Nutanix in general and Nutanix support is very helpful if you run into any of them. If you're in doubt simply ask support for help to see for yourself and be ready for your chin to hit the floor ;_) . Reading release notes before doing updates helps a lot to figure out what to expect. Another source for guidance is the compatibility matrix to look for any cross-requirements with Prism Central or AOS version of your target cluster (the cluster you deploy the Calm VMs on).

Scalibilty is second name to Nutanix. Scale-out of Nutanix Calm is just another node on the target cluster if things get sluggish.

Since Calm is dependent on Prism Central  you could simply scale-out that too. Nutanix has sizing recommandations for that, conveniently packed at Identify Prism Central requirements - Virtual Ramblings. Up to 25000 VMs should fulfill most requirements.

Nutanix support is outstanding. As stated above, it does not matter which continent you reside.

Nutanix NPS score is 92 -> https://customer.guru/net-promoter-score/nutanix

Our previous solution was hand-crafted VMs which cost IT a whole day or more depending on the requirements. That is why we had to find a more automatic approach. Nutanix Calm broke the duration down to 15 minutes. You even get a notification when the machine is up and running with Name, IP-Address and pre-selected password to get started.

Initial setup is simply activating it in Prism Central and configuring your target cluster which has to be connected to Prism Central as well, of course. So it is pretty straightforward. From there you can use some of the marketplace blueprints to see how it is done or just see on youtube on nutanix university calm - YouTube

We hit up our Nutanix partner for implementation to get up to speed as fast as possible. Implementation was half a day and we went on with setting some machines up. Expertise was great as we new them from the start and they just get what we want. Thanks to

ErikSterck!

This solution is greatly supporting a user-centric IT with less OPEX. Our ROI was covered within 18 month.

Setup can be done with Nutanix documentation by yourself to save up some money. Getting a consultant to support on the first steps has its perks, though. But you can always count on Nutanix Support to help out with questions or contact community. Does not matter if where your location is. We had outstanding support from europe, india and the US support offices.

Licensing should be a no-brainer but since there came up various options you should take a close look on the feature matrix to see what is in it and if you need it. Nutanix Calm has a 25-VM-license per customer for free. You only need to license Prism Central Pro node licenses for the cluster you are running Calm against. Every nutanix partner should be able to assist with this.

Other solutions are rare when considering to what extent Nutanix Calm covers the lifecycle of VMs. To answer the question: no, we did not evaluate other solutions. Calm integrates so nicely into Prism Central that any other solution appeared rather bloated in comparison. Also other solutions have problems with day-two operations (altering configuration).

Take a tour for yourself online: https://www.nutanix.dev/ad/at/

You shoud REALLY try this. It is just 5 minutes of your time!

We started migrating from VMware to Nutanix four years ago, and we're seeing much better performance.

We had a difficult disaster recovery situation that we handled with Nutanix Cloud Manager. We also migrated licenses from on-premises in a local environment to the cloud, which is much cheaper.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is easier for technicians than VMware, so fewer people are needed to do the same tasks. It's critical because if we do things faster, we do them at a lower price, especially if we use fewer human resources. 

NCM’s built-in playbooks have freed our IT team to focus on other tasks in some areas, but we also have our own local playbooks. This has freed up time for our IT team. Since 2023, we have spent an average of six hours completing an implementation, which allows us to use our IT staff more effectively for other tasks.

The learning curve has been smooth, and the technicians are performing a little better regarding response times. The only thing that makes a little difference is the virtualization part, which I believe is compensated by the performance part. A short learning curve is important because the infrastructure team is a bit large, so doing things with less time is better. If we take longer, then it will be more expensive.

We are still learning about cloud usage and the integrations we are targeting right now at the event. I believe there is room for improvement, especially with the prices, which are not very friendly.

I have used Nutanix Cloud Manager for four years.

We haven't experienced any downtime. 

It's easy to scale Nutanix Cloud Manager for the cloud and local services.

I rate Nutanix support nine out of 10. We are happy with the customer service.

Positive

We used VMware previously. It's okay. We made the switch four years ago when we purchased another company that was already using Nutanix. From that moment, we started working with Nutanix, which we didn't know about before.

Deploying Nutanix was a smooth experience. The technicians were fluid, and the deployment had no major problems. 

We used the help of EDVAL, an integrator company. I liked working with them

Due to the migration, we are at around 9 percent. We are now talking with them because we have VMware things we are going to migrate to Nutanix. There is a migration and expulsion plan, there is an optimal communication process with them. We are talking to salespeople about reaching around 15 percent or 20 percent reduction thanks to Nutanix's approach and scaling nature.

I rate Nutanix Cloud Manager eight out of 10. I wouldn’t give it a 10 because of the price.

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.

We evaluated Calm primarily as an automation platform because that's what it is. I work for a service provider and we represent a lot of customers.

Our journey with Calm started because we wanted to decentralize our platform of services to customers, because agility is one of the biggest concerns. As a service provider, we have very rigid practices because we follow ITIL processes. If we're managing a customer's environment, we need to have controls. The unfortunate reality of controls is that they add rigidity, and that works in contrast to the agility of cloud where customers want to be able to adopt and migrate and move quickly, based on their businesses needs.

We're developing Calm in a way where we give customers choice and flexibility, so that we don't have to consume workloads for them. We give them Marketplace, and part of Marketplace is that we publish open source applications, as well as managed applications and unmanaged applications. These applications could be as simple as a stack of load balancers, middleware, and database. Or it could just be an operating system. It's really the customer's choice. We've given them a platform, similar to the way public cloud providers do, a marketplace where they can go consume, but in our marketplace, that consumption can be on their platform. We provide a shared platform like a public cloud, and the hyperscalers, so they can consume it in Amazon and Microsoft Azure as well.

Part of our journey with Calm was that we wanted to speed the process up, but at the same time, have a standard catalog in that process, and let that catalog evolve with our customer feedback.

In our organization, we are both a partner, a service provider, and reseller of Nutanix. We have a very strong relationship with them. We have adopted Nutanix as a standard for our service provider cloud, which is located in five data centers in the central United States. In these environments, we have deployed Nutanix for our own services and shared services, and we are also selling private cloud, based on the Nutanix platform, to our customers. With these deployments, we are standardizing on Calm as a centralized management marketplace. So it's doing a couple of things. It's letting customers consume against their own platform, and it's allowing customers the access to be able to consume hyperscale and/or our shared platform if they choose to do so.

Our journey, right now, is balancing between managing operating systems and our managed service practice for our customers. We're trying to automate that managed service practice with Calm and their blueprints and the openness of scripting that they support, so that we can automate adding an application, an operating system, from our catalog. It goes through an ITIL process of creating a customer asset in our service library. It grabs values of that asset—naming conventions, components of the infrastructure, et cetera—and puts them into the customer's asset library.

These are all bits of underlying automation that you normally wouldn't necessarily have to do, but as a managed product we do so on behalf of the customer for inventory purposes. And that's just one aspect, what a managed platform does. The other aspect is an unmanaged platform. A customer can say, "I want to do 10 things and I'm managing them myself, and I'm going to probably destroy them when I'm done." We wanted that ubiquitousness, so a customer can choose whether they want something managed by us or managed by them, but where we keep the experience for doing so the same. It's a standard journey instead of their having to open a ticket and request something and then wait for a period of time for it to be executed. We're trying to remove ourselves as friction.

Our use case for Calm has been wrapped around giving customers a marketplace to standardize their experience and to determine what the components of that standardization are, which includes workloads that we manage, workloads that the customer manages, and those two scenarios can be on their private cloud, our shared platform, or the hyperscalers.

The beauty of the Calm platform is that it's really an open platform so you're not locked into a language that you're forcing developers and your team to use. We're working on enabling a DevOps journey inside of our company where we're not forcing people to adopt a tool and use a framework that they're not familiar with. We're allowing Microsoft people to use PowerShell. We're allowing our Linux teams to use shell scripts and Python. They have their choices. It's also allowing other components, like JSON. Our DevOps team that uses Terraform and other technologies uses JSON as a component for infrastructure automation. Blueprints allow all of that functionality.

You can also create a library of these scripts so that other team members can use what you've already developed to help speed and accelerate the automation journey. That is the next step for us. We're getting all this source that is very decentralized today—where people write their scripts, they store them, and they're not really a shared platform—and we're using Calm as a mechanism to bring it all together. The next step will be to integrate Calm with our source library and CI/CD pipeline. That is a forward-looking statement. Those are things we're working on. The DNA within our company, historically, wasn't as a software development shop, but we're transforming that now and using Calm as a mechanism to get there.

We have long-time customers, and our method of managing their workloads has been very traditional. When a request comes in, we go through a process of provisioning and deploying that request. We've enabled Calm on their platforms, so when a request comes in, one of our engineers executes the request, but instead of manually pulling triggers for the customer, to execute that request we now use Calm to deploy the customer's request and allow the automation to do the rest. We have scenarios with some customers where we are completely hands-off. They come to us and they say, "I want 10 of these and 20 of those." We execute that request for them using Calm, but that experience is somewhere on an order of magnitude of a fraction of the time that they used to have to wait previously, to have that request delivered.

In addition, by using Calm, we have the ability to keep these blueprints and images up to date. Previously, we had an automation process that built these images but they were constantly having to go through a management lifecycle. With Calm, we have been able to streamline that lifecycle so that what we're providing our customers is really the latest and the greatest.

Calm's abilities, in terms of team collaboration, come out in our standard marketplace or platform where teams are using the same experience. It's the same UI, so they're able to talk through their experience and talk through what they run into. We're using some of the functions of Calm to build project teams so they have the same access level and the same control. They're sharing the platform together. That gives them the ability to collaborate better across the platform.

And Calm is an HTML5 interface. It's all web-based applications at this point. Given what's happened over the last 12 months [as a result of COVID-19] and that everyone is remote, it's a lot easier to collaborate because it is all HTML5 and web-based. Our teams don't have to worry about legacy tools and applications to try to work together. From that perspective, we haven't really lost time in the journey because of all the recent events. We've been able to keep on working and keep on moving things forward.

In terms of Calm's ability to optimize, the analogy we use is a T-shirt because we have an extra small, a small, a medium, and a large. Those are really just subsets of components of the underlying infrastructure: this many CPUs, that much memory, this much storage. We use that to catalog our resources. The beauty of that catalog that we're building is that it is consumed against an infrastructure. By "T-shirting" these consumption models, we're able to maximize the available capacity of the environment that these workloads are sitting on. By contrast, when you randomly consume, which was typical in the "old days" where you would manually provision something, you provisioned them to non-standard tiers of infrastructure. That meant you were not consuming a platform linearly and that you were usually under-consuming something. You would make an investment and not maximize the output of that investment. By standardizing our "T-shirts" with Calm, we have also standardized the infrastructure that things are consumed against. So when our customers invest thousands of dollars on both infrastructure and tools with us, we allow them to get the maximum utility of that infrastructure investment, by using Calm as a mechanism to consume against it.

When it comes to application development and deployment, we have a series of management tools that we provide to our customers but those tools have a backend. We're trying to build automation into those tools so that they can be deployed and distributed automatically. We're using Calm to centralize and deploy those scripts automatically, in a distributed way, down to customers' private clouds and other environments. The intent is to build an application catalog with our customers so they can consume against it, using the Nutanix Marketplace to purchase those applications, very similar to what Amazon and Microsoft marketplaces are like. We're easily seeing a 20 percent improvement, and probably more, in that application development. That's a conservative number.

Calm is also transforming the way we QA and operate—the whole nine yards. Our process for delivering an application, an environment, goes through what we call a readiness exercise, a validation exercise. In the software world you would call it an SDLC stack where you go through dev, test, UAT, and release. That can be a very static and manual process, and it's very hands-on. What we're doing with Calm is transforming the process. We're saying, "Well, instead of manually doing the exercise, why don't we build triggers in our automation so that we can validate whether things are working properly or not along the way." We're making it a continuous validation process and an automated validation process. We're going through that journey right now, but when it ends, in all likelihood it will cut our validation time in half. We probably spend half our time validating an environment before we hand it over. If we automate that validation, we don't have to actually spend time doing it. Currently we spend time meeting with teams to do acceptance of our validation. So all that time will be freed up because we won't need a meeting to talk about validation.

Overall, we've gone from deploying workloads in 45 minutes or 90 minutes and we've taken that down, in some cases, to seven minutes.

The greatness of the Calm platform is that it removes itself, in a sense, so it's unknown to many people. It's a marketplace. You consume resources. If you design it properly, it obfuscates itself. Part of our challenge in the journey working with customers is to have them understand that that is what you want. You want it to be simple. But usually making something simple on one side is fairly hard to do on the other.

We use Calm's one-click self-service feature and it's really transforming the team's efficiency. The teams are used to being reactive, which is typical of what you find in IT organizations and service providers. Customers run into problems and teams react. What we're trying to do is reduce that slope and be more proactive in approach. The one-click ability is enabling us to take some of those activities and put them into operation, versus people manually responding.

We have a very close relationship with Nutanix and I have a very close relationship with the Calm team. I've given them a lot of feedback around multi-tenancy. Because we're a service provider, multi-tenancy is a big deal. 

Another aspect is that, while there are multiple clouds supported, we want less friction around the ease of delivery. We want the ability to integrate other clouds, unify the accounts.

Identity access management or IdP are other areas we've talked to Nutanix about, to move toward more of an identity access model, not just with the ability to use IdP to authenticate, but to also attach our back controls to the IdP so that we can have that centralized and decentralized model with customers.

And we want the marketplace and the blueprints to be a little bit more "brandable," for lack of a better word. This is really a service provider play, but we want the ability to make that a little bit more brandable so that we can scale that marketplace. We want it to be easy to determine which cloud you're selecting when you're picking something from the marketplace to consume. 

We also want to show cost to the customer. We want a model that says, "Well, if you consume that, this is approximately what it's going to cost you, depending on where you consume it, which cloud you're consuming it in."

I've been using Nutanix Calm for about two years now. We evaluated it just over two years ago. I was familiar with it in its early stages.

We haven't had any issues with Calm. Nutanix is really embracing that reference architecture within other aspects of its core applications. Calm is a containerized application that Nutanix deploys within their platform.

Calm has the ability to autoscale resources, so that if you need to scale up a resource, you can build those mechanics into your blueprints. We're consuming that ability internally, for testing purposes. We've talked to our customers about that and we're going to introduce it to them as that agility becomes reality.

The challenge is whether their applications have that "breathability" or not, and whether they are familiar with that. We want to be careful on the autoscaling aspects for customers because not all customers have web-scale applications. A lot of them have traditional applications. But we're definitely adding that to our subset of tools and resources so that there's an automation lifecycle with the ability to scale out a resource. Calm definitely has that capability and we've been using it for a while ourselves, evaluating and testing it. We're trying to work that into our discussion with our customers.

Overall, Calm is highly scalable and we haven't had any performance issues with it. The specifications numbers are in the specs, but we haven't hit anywhere near that. Those tolerance ranges are fairly significant. If you were to ask me about this a year from now, I might say that we will hit some scalability issues based on adoption. The good news with Nutanix is that they're constantly looking at this stuff as well. We're in constant communication with them about the platform.

The people in our organization using Calm include our DevOps team, our "high-end" engineers on both Windows and Linux, and our architecture team. That's roughly 20 people who are using Calm or developing within it. Those teams also work with customers against the Calm platform. We're now working on the next half of the journey, which is to bring the rest of the company along, extend our product catalog with Calm, and to start showcasing it to customers.

Nutanix technical support is a top-notch team. It's really one of the best experiences we have had and that I've personally had. When we call into Nutanix, their SREs are just phenomenal. Their discipline is absolutely amazing. We can get through escalation if we need to and get to a team, whether that's Calm or any other team, in a very short period of time. And that extends, for us, into their product team, into their engineers, or their QA if we need to.

It's an amazing experience to go through with Nutanix. Their knowledge is phenomenal. Their agility is phenomenal.

And with the Nutanix platform, they have the ability to see everything remotely as well, through logs. The platform uses a tool called Pulse which collects all the background information. It's a follow-the-sun approach, depending on what you need and what your escalation is. They can hand that ball around across the globe to get you to your result.

It's not that you'd ever want to have to call in to support for a problem, but with the way they have built the platform and the great team they have built, if you do have to call in, you can really feel comfortable that they're going to get you to where you need to be and they're going to get you there quickly.

Before Calm we tried many solutions. At some point tried Morpheus. That was prior to my joining our company, although I had previous experience with Morpheus. One of the challenges with Morpheus were some of the core things we have talked about. It was a completely independent platform. We had some API issues with it, as a service provider, and it didn't necessarily accelerate our journey. It unified things, because it was one interface, but the core, underlying infrastructure pieces weren't necessarily transformed as a result of it. While the experience became unified, it still took 30 minutes or 45 minutes or an hour to get something deployed. Whereas Calm now sits on top of a whole new ecosystem and that ecosystem has transformed a lot of things. 

We played with the VMware tools for a period of time, but those are expensive tools. It was very expensive to adopt that platform. We were trying to figure out the best mechanics for accelerating the platform without adding too much cost. That's when we started our Nutanix journey.

Nutanix makes the deployment easy, just like everything else that they have in their software stack. It's a very simple deployment model. It's part of the Nutanix software tool chain.

We have a combination of a uniform implementation strategy for Calm and taking different customers' requirements into account. We work with our customers to get feedback. We've started with a baseline of operating systems, primarily, because most of our customers are still in the traditional consumption model. And we're complementing that based on their feedback. We're also working with Nutanix because Nutanix has a large customer base as well. We've just really started that journey.

When we adopted the platform, we engaged Nutanix's services team so we could accelerate our journey with them. We had nothing but a great experience with them and their team. We were able to get Calm and core components of the platform up fairly quickly and get base applications going. 

Now we're taking that framework and applying the aspects of our business to it.

The biggest thing with Calm is that it has helped to fill a hole in our journey: How we were going to automate across all these different environments in the cloud, and without necessarily having to go build and develop a platform.

We're a service provider with a very strong relationship with Nutanix. We have multiple mechanisms of licensing Calm. From our perspective, the pricing is flexible and it's also unique. As a service provider, we can talk to Nutanix at a different level around how we license Calm.

You typically license Calm against your environment or you can license it by the workload. That makes a lot of sense, because workloads can live within your private cloud or the public cloud, it makes no difference. With any deal with Nutanix, they provide a certain number of seats with your purchase. So you get to use it from day one. I believe you get 25 seats with a purchase. There's nothing stopping you from embracing the journey because you've already paid for it.

My advice would be patience. It's very exciting and sometimes you want to jump in with both feet and go really fast. It's not that I'm against that, but my take is that it's such a capable platform that you should take on things that you can achieve and then achieve them. Take on activities that you can succeed with and show that incremental progress. Sometimes you want to take on too much and go big-bang. As enticing as that is, take on pieces of Calm and succeed with them, and let the platform evolve. Don't try to wholesale adopt it too fast. If you're more traditional in nature and you're doing typical project management, your windows could be big. Those steps up can be huge. So you want to make sure you show some incremental progress.

There's a plethora of automation tools out there as well as methods for how you build automation. Most of these platforms are frameworks and you have to build your own methods and use your own sets of tools. And when you're a service provider, and I think this would apply to the enterprise, cloud is an ubiquitous platform. In today's world, cloud is a ubiquitous term where companies don't necessarily look at just a cloud. They look at a cloud ubiquitously, because while you have three or four major hyperscale cloud-platform providers, they all have their different sets of software-based tools. In some cases, one cloud does certain things really well, while other clouds do other things that are better.

Limiting yourself and your business to one cloud might not be your best choice. And that has historically been the case in a lot of companies' journeys, but that situation is now evolving. Now, you don't just look at one cloud. Suppose you're a company that is heavily invested in Microsoft solutions. There are certain aspects of Microsoft, either your technology or your financial investments, which behoove you to use Microsoft Azure because it's beneficial to you. But there are certain things in the lifecycle of your software development where Amazon might be a better fit for certain aspects of what you do. In today's world, companies are evolving and they're open to the flexibility.

In that scenario, how do you decide your tool chain? How do you decide to invest in the use of tools from one platform provider or the other? Part of that assessment is cost and this is where Calm comes in because, as a lifecycle automation manager, it doesn't care which cloud you provision. You have choices. And the good news is that you control your source. So you don't have to use the tool set that Microsoft provides and then try to automate into Amazon from it, or vice-versa. You can try to develop those tools to automate by yourself, and a lot of large companies have made that significant investment in software—both in resources as well as capital. But these are platforms that consist of a lot of tools which have costs wrapped around them. The beauty of Calm is that it gives you your choice. Nutanix uses the expression "freedom of choice." That's really the conclusion we've come to, as a service provider. Part of what we want to do is give our customers choices. We want to help them along their journeys and help them make good choices, both technical and financial. And of course, those two pieces work off of each other.

Calm's support for scripts is a tale with two stories. First, it's exposing the scripts to a lot of people within the team. They can now use the same sets of scripts and augment them to do a specific function, versus starting from scratch. It may save them from having to research something. We have a library of these scripts that we're building.

Second, it's a step back before it's a step forward, because the team members have to get familiarized with this mechanism and with the delivery blueprint. We're ramping things up to get everyone slowly trained on the platform and to get them used to the platform, and that takes time. The mechanism of delivering the scripts is different from what they're familiar with. We're probably 10 percent into that journey. We've got a core team that has been working in it. Now, we're trying to extend that across other areas of the organization. Once we get everyone to participate and get a standardized library of scripts, we will see a very significant reduction in time. We'll see the agility of building applications a lot faster. 

What Calm has done for us is it's enabled the rigidity to be lifted. We're looking at a lot of different ways of changing things. It's a transformative tool. If you embrace it and adopt it properly, it opens the door to developing a life cycle process and the tools to use around Calm in terms of a repository and pipelining. Calm is also bringing us to discuss mutable and immutable infrastructure. Do we need to use tools like Puppet or Chef as a version control? Or, now that we have Calm, and we can strip out an application-ware or a middleware or something else, and start moving into a quasi microservices journey, does that infrastructure now become more mutable, where you can just destroy it and recreate it? Why try to save its configuration?

These are core topics, and they are big. It's traditional and nontraditional. This is a journey that Calm enables. If you embrace it, a lot of things become transformative with it. When you look at all those things, in many cases, you have to take a couple of steps back. But can you embrace Calm and do a lot of things right upfront? Of course you can. How quickly depends on your company size. We have a fairly large organization and we have a lot of customers, so we have to think of all those moving parts in embracing the journey. The good news with us is that we're going to be able to extend Calm to a lot of our customers. Calm will be a platform that a lot of customers will be able to use and embrace.

It's a great platform and I would rate it at eight out 10. The difference between eight and a nine is in the different things that we're asking for as a service provider. An enterprise or a commercial business might look at it slightly differently, but for me eight is a great score. It's a score I don't usually give out. Calm is a great team. They have developed a great platform and it's continuously improving. I look forward to seeing a lot of people adopt it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have a group of sister companies with different types of applications, from web-based to server-installed. 

We segment our clusters into different areas for each company to use, from development to staging to production. 

Currently, we mainly use the production area, and our staging is off. With the new NCM, we may use a different hardware or environment. 

Since moving to Nutanix, the development and support teams prefer it more.Due to differences in hardware and workload deployments.

One of the solution's greatest strengths is its "Single pane of glass" feature, which allows users to access all pertinent data in one location immediately upon logging in. Additionally, the solution's ease of deployment and mobility are notable aspects that I personally find appealing.

During my attendance at Nutanix, I personally discovered a significant benefit. Although we currently operate a separate division for our public cloud infrastructure, we have yet to leverage the potential of integrating it with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) or Nutanix Clusters (NC). 

What I've learned is that we can seamlessly migrate and manage the details displayed on NCM's dashboards, consolidating everything into a unified environment. 

While we haven't taken advantage of this opportunity yet, I am eager to take full advantage of it in the future.

Our sister company currently uses an outdated database technology, Sybase, which presents challenges in migrating to a newer database. Despite our efforts to encourage them to move to a different database, the company's 25 years of code and data basic make it difficult to do so. 

We are open to any level of support or guidance that can help us manage the Sybase database, even if it's not a fully managed solution. 

Direction on how to scale, improve, and optimize tables and queries within Sybase would be greatly appreciated.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for less than a year.

The company has been using Nutanix for the past four or five years and has gone through different versions. However, we have been using NCM for about a year to a year and a half.

I am satisfied with the stability of the system. Our engineers have had no issues accessing it and I have not received any reports of bugs or accessibility problems.

This solution effectively addresses our current automation requirements, especially with regard to repetitive tasks that the team needs to learn how to automate. 

As our company expands, we are interested in shifting the bulk of our workloads away from the public cloud and into our private cloud clusters.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) offers a lot of automation capabilities that we can take advantage of in the future. While there are already some basic automation features like Nutanix Move, there is significant potential for additional automation within NCM. 

This automation will greatly assist us in scaling our operations without the need for manual repetition. As we continue to explore NCM and prepare for transitioning away from the public cloud, we can leverage a substantial amount of automation to streamline our processes.

The scalability of the system is straightforward, even from a hardware standpoint. 

Simply adding servers to the data center and integrating them into the cluster is a remarkably effortless process. 

I have not come across a solution that offers such ease of scalability.

I have had the opportunity to engage with Nutanix support through various channels, including email, meetings, and post-installation calls. Even when we added two nodes to our infrastructure last year, Nutanix engineers were on-site to install the cluster, and I must say, they provided excellent service.

The support we received from Nutanix through emails has been excellent, with detailed and concise information provided.

Our experiences with Nutanix's account management and technical account management calls in early 2019 were extremely productive. They were highly focused, aiming to gather detailed information about our environment and workloads. This allowed them to effectively assist with scaling out, gaining a thorough understanding of our environment, and troubleshooting as needed. The level of support provided by Nutanix has been consistently outstanding.

Although I am not directly involved, from my observations, everything has been great, including the engineers who assisted us in adding nodes to our cluster. They were very helpful and knowledgeable.

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

On a personal level, I would rate Nutanix at a nine and a half. However, this rating is based on my limited direct involvement and is not a comprehensive assessment from a Nutanix perspective. Taking into account the algorithm used to evaluate performance, my interactions with Nutanix have been highly positive.

I did not participate in the initial setup process.

We have experienced a significant return on investment (ROI) through our implementation of Nutanix. Initially, we started with two Nutanix systems, using them in our staging environment. However, as COVID-19 emerged in 2019, we acquired six additional nodes and deployed them in our production environment. Almost immediately after putting them into operation, we witnessed the tangible value they brought. The returns generated from this implementation have been substantial.

We initiated a gradual migration process, gradually transferring workloads into the Nutanix environment. As our workload demands grew, we reached capacity in the system by the end of last year. To accommodate this expansion, we have already acquired and installed a new cluster. Additionally, we have a dedicated disaster recovery (DR) site, and our objective is to transform this DR site into a fully operational production site by deploying another new cluster there.

On one side, we have our production environment, while on the other side, we have our disaster recovery (DR) setup. As we continue to witness the positive impact and returns on investment (ROI), we anticipate further growth in our Nutanix infrastructure. Initially, there was some hesitation and uncertainty, but once we experienced the immediate benefits and ROI, we realized the immense value Nutanix brings to our operations.

Implementing Nutanix brings both cost and time benefits. With an initial investment, the focus shifts toward recovering and maximizing the value of that investment. In contrast, when relying solely on the public cloud, there is a constant ongoing investment and potential challenges in controlling costs. While efforts are made to maintain control, it can still be a never-ending endeavor. However, by adopting Nutanix, engineers can quickly grasp and adapt to the system, making informed decisions and judgment calls more efficiently. This ease of learning and system familiarity empowers them to navigate and optimize the infrastructure with confidence.

With the ease of use and automation provided by Nutanix, our engineers can make informed decisions on workload management such as migration, reduction, or scaling up. This saves them time and provides opportunities for personal and professional development.

We evaluated AWS as a file management system, and it appears to be a possible solution.

When it comes to setup, both AWS and Nutanix offer attractive features from a management perspective. However, AWS can sometimes be a bit confusing, requiring repetitive actions and causing potential challenges. 

On the other hand, Nutanix, particularly with the support of NCM and its accompanying university resources, simplifies the transition from learning to live environments. 

The comprehensive coverage in the university program facilitates easier implementation in the actual environment, further aided by features like the test drive, which allows for experimentation without concerns about breaking anything. This emphasis on ease of use was the primary topic of discussion.

From my personal preference, having everything consolidated in a single pane of glass is important, and Nutanix excels in this aspect. 

While AWS has recently introduced cost statistics upon login, Nutanix had already implemented this feature earlier. 

Not only does Nutanix provide a comprehensive overview, but it also allows for effortless navigation into deeper insights with just a click. In contrast, AWS requires more extensive digging or clicking to access detailed information, making the process less user-friendly compared to Nutanix.

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

I have about 85 virtual machines that rotate between cloud and on-premises. I use the tool for databases, applications, and service communications. I use the solution for my complete infrastructure. Since I work in a Casino, we have a lot of work on the databases with respect to our gaming applications and their servers. Our applications also run on workstations. Therefore, I use the Nutanix platform to store all our applications. I use it for file servers, email servers, DHCP, DNS servers, and domain controllers.

I like the solution's duplication feature. For example, there is a file created by an employee from the finance department. However, there are other employees working on that file, say from the surveillance department and gaming department. It’s about five people who work on that same file. So, Nutanix cross-checks all five versions and saves them as a single file. It saves document space by consolidating all five documents into one.

I also like the fact that the solution manages itself. It has one interface where you can basically see all your servers. So, you can manage your servers and see whether you are falling short on space or disc usage. Also, in case your RAM only uses four Gigabytes of memory instead of eight, you can extend out the over-provisioned mail and save your cluster for four Gigs of RAM.

The solution also helps you save costs. In case your servers use less space, you can cut down your hard drive by 100 Gigabytes which you can provision for another server or create another server on the cloud.

While using Nutanix, we need to switch off the VM in case we are doing an update. We have to turn off the VM if we are updating the memory or hard disk space. In a normal scenario, we switch off the VM, update it and then update the RAM. Once updated, we need to switch on the machine and wait for the RAM to initialize. The same goes for hard drives as well.

I would like them to improve the solution so that we can operate it live without switching off the VM. Switching off the VM causes downtime. It would be great to log back without switching off the VM and affecting the services.

I have been using this solution for four years.

The solution is stable.

Nutanix is a scalable solution.

I contact customer service and support at least two times a month. Their services are quite excellent since their response time is exactly the same as the SLA provider.

I have used Hyper-V before Nutanix. 

The solution was very easy to install. We had only three nodes to install since we moved from Hyper-V. The deployment process took us around four days to complete since we had to recreate the VMs on the Nutanix platform and move them over from Hyper-V. We created a VM called Nutanix Move on our Nutanix environment. Nutanix Move enables you to take a machine from the Hyper-V environment and convert it to the OS used in the Nutanix platform. I had 85 machines and downtime was an issue while deploying the solution. I had to do the switching over mostly during the night or early hours of the morning.

However, the process was quick. We recreated about 20 VMs a day which is quite impressive.

The pricing is lower compared to Hyper-V.

I would give a ten out of ten for the solution. Nutanix has saved our company from doing multiple general server checks which used to take around three to four hours in our old environment. Nutanix gets the checks done within 20 mins at the most. The solution's capabilities are endless. It is a stable product that will sustain your environment. It is really good and works like magic. Apart from Nutanix's pricing aspect, our company decided to use the solution because of technological advancement.