We work in the public sector, which includes local governments, fire departments, and transportation. The most interesting use case is that we have set up a private cloud with two sites where they are replicated, and from the same console, we have synchronous replication using 1M Ethernet. The RPO is zero.
Commercial manager at E-minkatech S.A.
Provides visibility into the entire infrastructure with a single click
Pros and Cons
- "Simplicity is most valuable because, with a single click, we have visibility of the entire infrastructure."
- "The interoperability with different clouds can be better so that one can even integrate the infrastructure of different clouds. They can interoperate better with other clouds because currently, you have to buy Nutanix resources in the cloud."
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
Our clients like its simplicity. That is a great value. We moved from a three-layer infrastructure to a private cloud infrastructure. It has resulted in a lot of simplicity which is reflected in the availability of services.
Simplicity is the biggest value that we can see. This is super important for us because the technical team is dedicated to looking at the data and how to generate value for the business instead of worrying about the technology.
Using the built-in playbooks has freed up the time for our IT team. Instead of managing storage, CPU, and memory, they can dedicate their time to thinking about the needs of the business and attending to those needs. We have had clients who reduced their operations time by 60% to 70%.
Nutanix Cloud Manager helps your team a lot to address your current automation needs while planning for future expansion. You have a forecast of how your infrastructure is being used. This allows you to have visibility of what actions you should take to avoid reaching day zero. It helps you a lot.
Its installation is relatively simple. The administration is very intuitive. You have an HTML 5 interface that you can use on any device. I have clients who manage their infrastructure from their smartphones, no matter where they are. Its being very intuitive has helped us to deliver 4-hour workshops. We had an interesting case in the sector of transportation in Quito, Ecuador. A person who provided support and was with the help desk went on to manage the data center with just a 4-hour training. He went from being help desk support to being the data center manager, all with Nutanix. That easily gives an idea about its learning curve.
Nutanix Cloud Manager’s setup, learning curve, and ease of use were definitely important when deciding on a cloud management solution. In fact, we have been growing in infrastructure, and it has been maintained precisely due to the ease of use and small learning curve. It frees up time from the daily issues of looking at technology. The customers are happy and continue to grow.
What is most valuable?
Simplicity is most valuable because, with a single click, we have visibility of the entire infrastructure. We can focus more on the availability of services instead of being aware of the CPU, memory, or hard drives. With one click, we can see the availability of our services.
What needs improvement?
The interoperability with different clouds can be better so that one can even integrate the infrastructure of different clouds. They can interoperate better with other clouds because currently, you have to buy Nutanix resources in the cloud.
Buyer's Guide
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
November 2024
Learn what your peers think about Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.
For how long have I used the solution?
It has been four years as partners and service providers for our clients.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Its stability is very good. We did not have any issues for which we had to stop our services.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is a very important aspect of Nutanix solutions.
How are customer service and support?
It is efficient and fast. It is in Spanish, which is an advantage. There is always the option for technical support in Spanish.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
In Ecuador, Nutanix began to introduce itself in 2016 in such a way that the customers moved from traditional infrastructures to Nutanix right away.
How was the initial setup?
We have both kinds of deployments. We have clients who have private clouds, and then we have clients who have hybrid clouds. Our clients use Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
As a company, we do the implementations autonomously. It is simple. I do not personally do it. Our technical team does it. We can do the deployment or migration of about 15 to 20 virtual machines in four hours, so investing about four hours to move an entire legacy data center solution to a Nutanix Infrastructure is more than fine.
We have an implementation strategy. We follow the best practices. We have a trained technical team, and they follow the objectives.
What was our ROI?
If you compare it with a traditional model or with a native cloud, then definitely the best alternative is to make an investment in Nutanix solutions. The return on investment varies depending on what you compare it with. In Ecuador, in the public sector, they force them to buy a three-year licensed solution. So, if you compare it to three years with traditional or cloud-native infrastructure, the Nutanix solution is definitely a winner.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
For Ecuador, this is a sensitive issue. It is a small economy, so the issue of budget is very sensitive. You find many small businesses and government clients who do not renew, for example, support or guarantees, which raises the risk level for them. We are always advising them that it is necessary to renew the services or infrastructure.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated many solutions before switching to Nutanix Cloud Manager. However, once the customers get to know Nutanix, they always prefer to stay with the solution.
Our customers choose Nutanix for the experience. Our customers have stayed with Nutanix because they did feel a change before and after. Before Nutanix, managing storage required time and working on weekends outside of business hours. Having to shut down the services to make firmware updates of different components of the data center was an issue. Now they can do this during business hours without the risk of services being unavailable.
What other advice do I have?
Overall, I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a ten out of ten.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Last updated: Jul 8, 2024
Flag as inappropriateIT Manager at Editus Luxembourg S.A.
Good price, excellent support, and a lot of time savings
Pros and Cons
- "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."
- "The web interface could be improved at some points."
What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
We migrated to Nutanix last summer. It has been almost one year.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
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.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Its price is correct.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
There was a competition with VMware for the virtualization part and with different types of vendors, such as Cisco, HPE, etc.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager an eight out of ten. Some interfaces can be improved, but its performance is perfect.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Last updated: Jun 16, 2024
Flag as inappropriateBuyer's Guide
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
November 2024
Learn what your peers think about Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Expert Offering Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Good documentation, easy to extend, and offers high availability
Pros and Cons
- "It offers high availability and consistency."
- "The solution could be more user-friendly."
What is our primary use case?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
We've used the solution for a couple of months for running some POCs.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
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.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I did not handle the pricing or licensing aspect of the project.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I did not evaluate other options. We are only licensed for OpenShift and Nutanix at this point.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
User-friendly, attractive features, unified platform, with several automation capabilities
Pros and Cons
- "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."
- "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."
What is our primary use case?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
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.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
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.
How was the initial setup?
I did not participate in the initial setup process.
What was our ROI?
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.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) a ten out of ten.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Senior Technical Solution Architect at CitiusCloud LLP
It's a resilient solution with high availability and uptime
Pros and Cons
- "The Nutanix stack is hyper-converged. I don't need to buy expensive SAN storage because it's integrated into the hardware appliance. That's the best part. We get excellent latency by leveraging local storage."
- "NCM's analytics could be better because we're not getting an accurate analysis of our virtual machines, and we're over-provisioning some of them."
What is our primary use case?
We have Cloud Manager deployed across multiple departments, and each has an individual cluster. NCM manages all of those clusters from a single bandwidth source. About 60 people at our company use the solution.
How has it helped my organization?
Cloud Manager is a resilient solution with high availability and uptime. It also speeds up our rollout if we want to provision virtual machines or containers for development. It gives us visibility into Nutanix and VMware from a single pane of glass. This capability is crucial during the reporting phase.
It's also instrumental during capacity planning. Cloud Manager helps you take inventory of your existing resources so you can augment them before they run out. Capacity forecasting and reporting are some of the best features.
Cloud Manager decreased our continuous validation time by about 15 percent because many of these operations are prebuilt out of the box. The built-in playbooks come in handy during scheduled activities. We can write playbooks and execute them at a scheduled time. For example, if I want to perform an activity over the weekend when I'm not in the office, I can run the playbook to trigger it. The playbooks reduce the time spent on these tasks by 30 to 40 percent.
What is most valuable?
The Nutanix stack is hyper-converged. I don't need to buy expensive SAN storage because it's integrated into the hardware appliance. That's the best part. We get excellent latency by leveraging local storage.
What needs improvement?
NCM's analytics could be better because we're not getting an accurate analysis of our virtual machines, and we're over-provisioning some of them.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used Cloud Manager for more than seven years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Cloud Manager is a highly stable product, and clients can request custom enhancements based on their specific needs. You can ask Nutanix's engineering team to build a custom solution for a customer.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Cloud Manager scales linearly with the best performance. There's something called Controller Virtual machine available on every node. When you scale the solution, it never affects your performance.
How are customer service and support?
I rate Nutanix's support a ten out of ten. Nutanix has the best support of any solution I've used.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We previously relied on VMware tools like vCenter and vROps for reporting. Now, we are 70 to 80 percent reliant on NCM. Nutanix is easier to manage and use. It has a short learning curve if you come from a VMware background. I was already well-versed in VMware, so the learning curve was short.
How was the initial setup?
Deploying Cloud Manager was extremely straightforward. You can typically finish the deployment and put it into production in a day and a half.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Cloud Manager is fairly priced. I like the pricing model, which includes multiple tiers. It all depends on the customers' use cases. Each customer might have a different opinion about the features NCM offers. We match our customers' expectations with what NCM offers. That might change from customer to customer. NCM is more appropriate for enterprises than small or medium-sized businesses.
What other advice do I have?
I rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
IT Specialist at a energy/utilities company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Upgrading our clusters is a very seamless, straightforward process
Pros and Cons
- "It saves time since it is a single pane of glass. Our efficiency has increased because of that. We don't have to log into multiple servers when we do upgrades. We can do it on one console. This saves us eight to 10 hours a month. Upgrade activity on servers, which was offloaded to the Nutanix platform, used to take hours on our Legacy platform."
- "There are some cases when there are multiple alerts for the same issue. For example, if I forget to put it in hosting maintenance mode, then I start getting multiple, duplicate alerts for the same host, which we don't want. If I have already received an alert, I don't want another alert. So, there are sometimes false positive alerts because of update activity where we forgot to put it in maintenance mode, then we get multiple alerts or emails."
What is our primary use case?
Initially, we deployed one cluster. Then, we deployed another two to three clusters. The main use case was to have a single console with all the alerts as well as viewing each cluster from a single pane of glass. That was one of the primary reasons for moving to this solution.
We are on the latest version because our company states that we need to upgrade every 30 days. Therefore, we are on a 30-day cycle, using the latest version of it. If Nutanix releases a new version, then in the next 30 days, we are on that version.
How has it helped my organization?
That solution gives requirements based on usage. It has helped us with workload and capacity planning. This is helpful for us to effectively plan.
What is most valuable?
The main selling point was the one-click centralized upgrade. Upgrading our clusters is a very seamless, straightforward process. We don't have to go through each individual server or cluster. We just do it in one click using Starter. Without logging into individual servers, we can do an upgrade. This makes our 30-day patching cycle easy for us, rather than going through a painful, time-consuming task.
The Capacity Behavior Analytics has been a good feature that we have been able to use.
It provides centralized upgrade simplicity as well as getting alerts and updates on a single pane of glass. That makes it very easy rather than missing any notifications or alerts. The alerts help if you don't log in everyday since you are notified of everything in Prism Pro.
We use the capacity manager, which we rely on. It gives us centralized management, and that is key for us. Everybody logs into the centralized console to find out if there is a problem. If someone needs to do a deep dive or troubleshooting, the central management lets them narrow down to the task or performance issue that they are dealing with.
What needs improvement?
There are some cases when there are multiple alerts for the same issue. For example, if I forget to put it in hosting maintenance mode, then I start getting multiple, duplicate alerts for the same host, which we don't want. If I have already received an alert, I don't want another alert. So, there are sometimes false positive alerts because of update activity where we forgot to put it in maintenance mode, then we get multiple alerts or emails.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using Nutanix Prism Pro for a year and a half. We have been using the Nutanix Cloud Manager version for the past several months.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The environment is pretty much stable, though at a year and a half, it is still new for us. In my experience, it is stable. We find it a very stable solution compared to other vendors. I think we have the best solution.
How are customer service and support?
We worked with the Nutanix Community team to find some templates. Based on our organization's specific security standards, we then created a standard template that we use when deploying.
Finding any type of documentation in the support portal is easy. Everything is available online. If you are stuck with something, needing documentation or some kind of guide, those are readily available.
The tech support has been really good. I have worked with Dell and their support is not as easy to use when you need something, have to find a solution, or are stuck on something. Whereas, the Nutanix support is very helpful. As soon as you open a case with the support team, they provide support based on the case's priority level. The Nutanix solution and support are better than Dell's.
Their technical support has been knowledgeable. They understand us as a customer: our issues and what we are looking for. They are able to provide support in a timely manner based on the kind of support ticket that is open. I would rate them as nine out of 10.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Previously, we had purchased Prism Pro but had not installed it. When we started increasing the capacity of our clusters, we installed Prism Pro. Then, in the next three to six months, a lot of things had been fixed and streamlined.
Previously, we had a Legacy platform. We would have to do a hardware refresh when hardware went end-of-life. A lot of time was spent doing upgrades. We were having problems with hard disk failure when the environment got to the end of its support life. We wanted a solution that was less time-consuming and more efficient, bringing more simplicity. That is one of the reasons that we moved in this direction.
Moving to Nutanix from our legacy platform has saved us a lot of time (30% to 40% of our time) to focus on other things, such as troubleshooting.
How was the initial setup?
I was involved in the initial phase of setting up the test drive and doing the proof of concept. Also, I was part of the migration.
We used the Nutanix tool for our migration. We had a deadline and talked with the application owners, which went smoothly. We were able to migrate the workload from our legacy platform to Nutanix. It took almost six months of time to move our workloads from our legacy platform to the Nutanix platform, but it was not that complicated.
What about the implementation team?
We worked directly with the Nutanix support team.
What was our ROI?
It saves time since it is a single pane of glass. Our efficiency has increased because of that. We don't have to log into multiple servers when we do upgrades. We can do it on one console. This saves us eight to 10 hours a month. Upgrade activity on servers, which was offloaded to the Nutanix platform, used to take hours on our Legacy platform.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We looked at VxRail because we were thinking about having a Dell hyper-converged platform. However, Nutanix Prism Pro was more comfortable.
One of Nutanix's best features is monitoring a cluster, which is useful. Anyone can manage it. Specifically, you don't need to have someone with VMware or hypervisor background to do it. It is not rocket science; it is very easy to manage. It is easier to manage because it provides centralized administration of the entire environment, instead of having something like multiple vCenters. With this solution, you don't need to log into multiple consoles.
What other advice do I have?
There was a talk earlier that we will plan to use the monitoring automation, but since we have other tools that we use for automation, we don't have X-Play. However, that may change down the line because we want to add more clusters. So, we may need to think about how we can update our license to have X-Play.
We have plans to add Nutanix in our corporate infrastructure too. There, we will be using VMware in Prism Pro for our corporate environment.
Nutanix has a partnership with Red Hat. Therefore, there are some Ansible scripts that we use. Because we have Red Hat Satellite, we use that to leverage some sort of automation for our deployment servers.
I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Assistant Manager at Ahli Bank of Kuwait
Saves a lot of time and provides visibility and uptime
Pros and Cons
- "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."
- "We have some Oracle systems. The licensing is a big challenge over here because it will be very costly if we go with Nutanix."
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager for the past five years.
How are customer service and support?
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.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We do a PoC for everything. We explore other solutions as well, and depending on the final outcome, we choose the solution.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Last updated: Jul 18, 2024
Flag as inappropriateTechnology director at xpi
The learning curve has been smooth, and the technicians are performing a little better regarding response times
Pros and Cons
- "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."
- "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."
What is our primary use case?
We started migrating from VMware to Nutanix four years ago, and we're seeing much better performance.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used Nutanix Cloud Manager for four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We haven't experienced any downtime.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It's easy to scale Nutanix Cloud Manager for the cloud and local services.
How are customer service and support?
I rate Nutanix support nine out of 10. We are happy with the customer service.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
Deploying Nutanix was a smooth experience. The technicians were fluid, and the deployment had no major problems.
What about the implementation team?
We used the help of EDVAL, an integrator company. I liked working with them
What was our ROI?
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.
What other advice do I have?
I rate Nutanix Cloud Manager eight out of 10. I wouldn’t give it a 10 because of the price.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Microsoft Azure
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Last updated: Jun 30, 2024
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