Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

The use case for Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is that we can share data to the cloud and there is no need to sync manually. It automatically runs the job for the data sync from the on-premises to the cloud. Some users have data on their systems or servers, so there is no need to keep local data. It will go automatically over the cloud and we can easily access it without any issues. For applications, we can run them without any issues. If I compare with other virtualization such as VXI, there are some issues. However, when comparing with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), it performs better. There is no need to update any software manually as it will update automatically, eliminating the need for downtime.

What I appreciate most about Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is the compliance aspect. When following the standard procedure, we can easily monitor our infrastructure from a compliance perspective. When we match our compliance requirements, it becomes easier for our clients.

Recently, I have found some issues with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). When I raise a request for emergency support, I receive a response immediately. However, in some real cases, we have to wait for support. If there are production issues, we sometimes have to wait for 45 minutes to one hour. If they could minimize that response time, it would be more convenient for the client side.

We have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for the last one year.

We have used other solutions earlier, but currently we are fully implementing Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) on our client side. We do not need to use any other solutions at present.

The initial deployment of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) was easy. Simple tasks such as VM creation and data transfer are much easier than other solutions. We can automatically schedule VM snapshots for syncing, and we can easily create VM templates for development purposes.

Regarding the pricing of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), when compared to others, it is obviously very costly. However, considering the solution quality, I would definitely choose Nutanix. Today's management is focused on costs, and they frequently ask us to negotiate with vendors or suppliers. Nutanix has a fixed price, and during our last renewal, it was around one crore. Management attempted some negotiation but ultimately approved it. They constantly inquire about pricing and alternative solutions, but from an IT perspective, I prefer Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM).

For stability of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), I would rate it a seven. For scalability, I would rate it a nine. 

On a scale from one to 10, I would rate the solution overall as a seven. 

I have a small request for Nutanix to arrange sessions for end users. When there are updates or solutions, if they could be explained to end users through sessions or webinars, it would be beneficial. This would help us understand what features are implemented in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) and how we can use them effectively.

We mainly use it for infrastructure as a service. We use it for managing the clusters and hardware and running the VLCM updates. We do not use it to manage files and all the embedded because we have other solutions corporate-wide for it. It is pretty much being used to manage the infrastructure of the clusters and make sure that we have all the licenses applied to all the different clusters around the world.

We are multinational. I have clusters right now but not on all 53 plants. We have some Acronis data centers. They are called Co Lo data centers. We have a couple of those data centers with Nutanix in them. We have one in Tokyo, one in Ashburn, and then we have a couple of data centers in Mexico with Nutanix. We also have some in the US, some in Portugal where I am from, Italy, Germany, Asia, China, and Japan. We are around the world, and we use Prism to manage all those data centers.

Centralization is the main benefit. We are a company that is growing a lot due to acquisitions. Each of the companies we acquire does not use all of the same hardware or solutions. The mission of my team is to design and deploy solutions for all the new companies around the world and make sure they adopt our solutions. This is good to showcase to them what we have and make them see that they can manage their own side of the world. They can get granularity there and be able to support all their business locally. We still can have a backup team, which is my team, supporting them in case there are issues. There is always someone looking at it if something goes wrong. 

We do not have to be alerted by an outage. We can work on an issue before it happens or as it happens. Sometimes, when people get up, the issue is already fixed because we can do all that remotely. NCM allows that.

Nutanix Cloud Manager has saved our IT time. We got our weekends back. Previously, having a different type of infrastructure with Cisco UCS and VMware, updating the Cisco component, the EMC storage, and downloading everything sometimes was a week's worth of work. We had to do upgrades on weekends because we could not do it online. Since we started using NCM and LCM out of NCM, we went from one-day upgrades to one hour. Earlier, we were running it for a one-year period, and now we are running it every month and that is a complete cluster upgrade. There is no downtime and no business complaints. We just warn them that we are doing this. We have total confidence and total trust that it is not going to be an issue.

In terms of ease of use, I use a lot of hypervisors, and there is nothing that can be compared to it, whether it is VMware, Hyper-V, or even Azure. The Azure portal does not have a one-click to update everything. If you look at the on-prem things, I have Cisco UCS, Lenovo, and IBM servers that I use in VMware. There was no single panel where I could manage all that together. There were always different things to manage. You needed knowledge and training. Nowadays, a new hire can come in, and I can tell them to run this every week. They will be able to do it without training.

It frees up the staff that I have from having to deal with heavy troubleshooting. It is one less worry for me. We have 53 plants operating 24/7. We have problems on a daily basis. We have attacks. It is a huge asset not having the burden of dealing with upgrades because if we do not do those, we are open to vulnerabilities. With NCM, we can focus on everything else. Worrying about updates is a thing of the past. Anybody on the team can go ahead and take a look.

The single pane of glass is valuable. Seeing all my clusters there and getting all the alerts in one place helps to manage our global infrastructure. To me, the ability to view or see everything in one single place is very valuable.

We are also able to do lifecycle management and run updates. We have got our weekend back. That is very important. IT guys never have weekends. With Nutanix Cloud Manager, we are able to run updates during normal business hours. We are able to do it with the click of a button. Not having to worry and not having to see how it is running on the other side of the world makes a huge difference.

We have clusters not only with HPE. We have some with VMware to use Cisco Call Manager for VoIP. That only runs on VMware. They upgrade the ESXi host but not vCenter, which manages the ESXi host. It would be great if there is a way to include vCenter on the VM because you run the updates, but you do not update vCenter. It complains that you still have not updated it.

We started using the first version when it was called Prism in 2018. 

The technical support from Nutanix is excellent. It is not always the same experience. It differs. Sometimes you get someone who is very experienced on a given module or hardware. It depends on who you get, but even if you do not get the fastest guy at the first call, you will get it once the escalation happens. We have not had a case where the issue was not completely solved with a definite solution. I am very happy with Nutanix's support. 

We work with a lot of brands, and it is not always like that. Even with Microsoft, when we open a ticket, the first person is going to tell me to try things that my team has already tried before. We have to tell them that this is not the first rodeo that we are at. We have done this. We need to go beyond that, but they still have to do their due diligence. They do not care about that. They still want to run their script till they get to it. Nutanix is different. We tell them what we have done. They know we are certified. They take that into consideration and go to the next step, which is troubleshooting.

I would rate them a ten out of ten. They are by far the ones we like to work with.

Positive

The price depends. I struggle a lot with that because I manage a budget. Not all businesses have the ability to spend that amount of money. When I have a plant that needs 10 VMs running, the smallest cluster I can offer them for high availability is a three-node cluster. It is going to cost me a hundred thousand dollars, whereas I could get a Dell box with 6K Windows Standard installed on it and get Hyper-V running and a couple of VMs, but there is no high availability. We had plants that were running like that because they did not want to spend the money. We had a ransomware attack. In the case of sites with Nutanix, we were up in a week, whereas in the case of the sites with that kind of hardware, we were up three weeks later. They then understood the importance of having proper hardware that can support resiliency and high availability.

It is expensive when you are looking at small locations that need low-latency workloads, but for larger locations, as compared to other guys, even using VMware, it is not that expensive because if you add it all up, it is going to be pretty much the same value. You just need to look at a similar size solution to be able to make a comparison.

We do not use low-code automation. We support manufacturing plants. We do not have to deploy and stop VMs. We use Red Hat OpenShift for some containerized stuff but not a lot. We have some websites for looking for products. We do not have any need to build VMs and destroy them and build them again. It is pretty much what we do on our Azure footprint. We have 400 VMs there. We do not have automation there. We never build templates. We build one or two VMs per month when we get requests. My team builds those VMs even for our developers so that we have cost and check. We do not need to use automation at this point. We appreciate the automation of life cycle management and all those rapid tests that we have to make, but that is the standard automation we use.

I do use playbooks out of Azure but not out of Nutanix.

I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a ten out of ten. I have no issues with bad-mouthing it or praising it. In this case, praise is due for sure.

I use the solution in my company to manage around 27 clusters. It is all a single pane of glass to manage them and monitor them in a way that is not really associated with cross availability but more in the area of whether there are any impacts, alerts, or any such related stuff.

It is difficult to speak about the benefits I have experienced from the use of the solution because the product serves as a central point. Having a centralized single pane of glass is important. 

My company can also see our Pure Storage and ESXi landscape in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), even though such products may be third-party or foreign imports. You see everything in one control plane, which greatly adds to our value. The tool's ease of use is good because a lot more people can access Prism Central, allowing all to do simple operations without needing a lot of training, etc. The tool's user interface is intuitive.

The solution's most valuable features revolve around the single pane of glass it provides, which helps me see all my infrastructure and quickly manage VM operations without having to go to individual clusters. Some of the tool's good features are having one central place to monitor for alerts and one central API to interact with other clusters and deploy VMs.

Nutanix Cloud Manage helps our team address our current automation needs while planning for future expansion. Our company uses capacity monitoring, and it is quite valuable to see the growth and a view on resource consumption and get an alert if it predicts some kind of resource shortage coming up maybe. The runway in the tool is really helpful, but anything else apart from it is not there yet in the product.

Comparing Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) versus other cloud management solutions for setup, learning curve, and ease of use, I would say that Nutanix's learning curve is quite small, and the ease of use is quite high. The aforementioned area consists of the biggest advantage associated with the tool, especially since you don't have to have a degree in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) to be able to use it and get started or get a feel for it. The tool is quite easy to use. When deciding on a cloud management solution, the tool's setup, learning curve, and ease of use were not major but maybe small factors why my company chose Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). My company chose Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) because of the natural progression of our company's engagement with Nutanix. My company also uses Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) with Prism Central.

The product can be improved in terms of stability. The update process has to be more tough, meaning it should be more bulletproof. The switch to the CMSP should have been more thought out, tested, and validated by Nutanix. More frequent updates would be good in the tool. Better role-based access control would be good for the tool. Better documented APIs that can be used across all Nutanix products can be a good improvement. It would be good if you could have multiple Prism Central and combine them at a centralized point. From an improvement perspective, the tool should offer a real high availability platform because it serves as a central point, and you need it.

The stability of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is an area of concern where improvements are required.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for six years. My company is a customer of Nutanix.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) used to be a very stable product in the past. The versions released by the product before 2023 were great, but after that, I see that there is a big technical gap in the tool.

It is not kind of a scalable solution for now. The product could be used to scale up in the same cluster, but it was not something that our company wanted. My organization wanted to scale across clusters. For now, as far as I know, the tool's scalability part cannot be considered as a feature, but it may have new functionalities coming up in the future.

The solution's technical support is great. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

There weren't many solutions that my company used to use in the past, apart from maybe a few products for the central management of infrastructure components like a vCenter traditionally, and now we use it in parallel to Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) and not replacing it with any other tool.

Six years ago, the product's initial setup phase was easy, and since then, my company has been running the same installation process. With day-2 operations, like upgrades, which were normally easy, I see how a lot of the features have changed presently, including the whole architecture underneath, and because of this, my company has faced some challenges with the product.

There is no strategy required to deploy the project since it is very intuitive.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

My company uses the product in different locations and data centers.

My company did not seek help from an integrator, reseller, or consultant.

The ROI I have experienced from the use of the solution stems from the fact that it is easy to use, and the entry border of the tool is quite low, so a lot of new people can easily use it. With the tool, you have one single pane of glass across multiple infrastructures.

Nutanix changes its licensing models frequently, and it is difficult to figure out how and what is included in which package. The problem lies with how frequently the prices and licensing models are changed and the names provided for the packages. As per the main focus of our company, I would say that having Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is the cherry on top for us.

I have not evaluated The other products in the market offering the same features as Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM).

In terms of the importance of faster outcomes for our organization from the use of the tool, I would say that fast is not always best, but if you have a very good process in place, fast is good as long as you follow the process.

The use of Nutanix Cloud Manager or NCM's built-in playbooks has not freed up time for our IT team to focus on other tasks or projects. I know on paper and maybe for management, the tool's ability to have built-in playbooks and how it frees up time for the IT team so that they can focus on other projects sounds interesting, but at the end of the day, you don't want a lot of those things to be completely automated unless you have very strict quotas in place which also needs good housekeeping. In a historically growing environment, following the aforementioned areas is not always possible, so you may not want such automation happening, but what is nice about it is that I can forward all the alerts that are generated in Prism Central using a webhook to any kind of messaging kind of application, which removes the barrier of having to check on it. It is quite nice that with the playbooks, I have some low-code way of having some kind of automation going.

Considering the versions of the product before 2023, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Considering the versions of the product after 2023, I rate the solution a five or six out of ten.

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

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

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

Nutanix Cloud Manager's interface offers valuable insight, providing me with the comfort of knowing everything is functioning optimally and can be upgraded with a single click.

One challenge exists in our current setup. While two administrators are managing the Nutanix Cloud users, the users themselves maintain their VMs. We would love to offer them the ability to completely reinstall their VMs whenever necessary. Currently, users can only attach a new ISO to their VMs for a partial reinstall, but a full reinstall feature is unfortunately unavailable.

We have raised this issue with Nutanix, requesting the addition of these features. They have assured us that these features are planned for the future, but they are not currently available.

Therefore, we request the implementation of these features to empower our user group to manage their VMs independently and according to their needs.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager for over three years.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is stable. We have not had any stability issues.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is scalable. 

The technical support is great. They are extremely knowledgeable and helpful.

Positive

We used to have both Cisco and Nutanix, but Cisco cost us more, so we switched to mostly Nutanix systems.

The initial setup was completed by Nutanix and it was not difficult. The deployment took around 45 days.

Nutanix Cloud Manager offers tiered pricing, making it accessible to organizations with varying budgets. This allows them to start with a lower tier and scale up seamlessly as their needs evolve.

I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a nine out of ten.

Two of us are responsible for maintaining Nutanix Cloud Manager. We log in twice weekly to conduct a health check and ensure no new requirements, such as creating a new VM. If new requirements arise, additional work is necessary.

We use Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for big enterprises in Brazil, including Sebrae, the Minister of Brazil, and three local agencies in Brasília; we have 10 or 11 customers installed.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is easy to use. Last week, I studied the history of Nutanix, the principles, and KVM. It is simple, usable, and intuitive for me. NCM is easier to use, especially for layout. NCM does the best with the architecture of the CVM because one CVM for each node makes it more distributed and improves usability, offering more technical improvement compared to other vendors. NCM is very fast, as my implementation team appreciates it because it's fast to deploy.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is stable. I do not receive emails about releases or new versions, indicating that the solution is solid and safe with very good security.

I find the scalability quite easy; I only need to add a license for the core and install the new node for GPU, storage, processing, and memory.

I cannot rate Nutanix support since I never contacted them, but I have only heard good things from my team.

Positive

I have past experiences with vSphere and vCenter, which I had difficulty with. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is much easier to use, and I appreciate its graphical interface and colors.

The deployment process is easy.

It's important for us that deployment is fast and easy because my team has all the certifications for deploying Nutanix, and the steps are very easy to understand.

It saves time for implementation and deployment.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) pricing is reasonable, especially compared to VMware and other solutions that are more expensive. It's less expensive than competitors such as Broadcom.

I use AWS and GCP, but I have also used VCF for VMware and vCenter, which is similar to NCM.

Regarding installation or configuring, I only work in design, specifically with Sizer and quotation nodes; that's my focus.

The documentation is easy to search for; it's the bible of Nutanix, and I find it pretty good. I haven't used the documentation in my local language, Portuguese, because my English needs improvement, so I use it only in English. My team uses it in Portuguese because some technical people lack expertise in English.

Everything is satisfactory. We are Platinum Partners with Nutanix.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) a ten because it's very easy to use.

We have a platform of about 300 virtual machines, and most of the technology was very old, pre-existing legacy technology. We needed a world-class hyperconverged solution that would provide us with the ease of migrating these virtual machines and allow us to have a hybrid platform in the long term. We wanted some of the things in the private cloud and other things in AWS, which is the public cloud that we have. 

We have a local partner and all the support from the vendor. It has been a remarkable experience. The product is very easy to use, and the roadmap has been executed transparently. The administration has been quite fast. There are many things that were totally neglected, and we had to open some support cases. They have been responded to quickly and in a timely manner. It has been a success.

We have much better performance and efficiency. The uptime of the servers has also increased a lot. We have practically zero outages. It means that our service, which is key in the health industry in our country, is much more stable and has much better public reception. We are one of two companies that provide these transactional services so that people can receive discounts from their insurers when having exams or medical consultations. We serve more than 90% of the country's population for health and connect all companies that give these discounts or health benefits. Our government has a plan with an entity called Fonasa. It is the National Health Fund, and it provides health financing services to practically the entire country. We make the connections between hospitals, clinics, and this National Health Fund to give online discounts at the time of care. Therefore, the uptime has to be very close to 100%, and this solution has helped us get very close to that number.

In my country, we have very good communications technology and data transmission speeds, but when we have a platform that is out of our reach, such as a regional AWS, we always have latency problems. There are speed problems. At times, there are crashes, micro outages, etc. A very good thing about Nutanix is its speed and performance. We are very eager to try the new features it has. We started with a specific project focusing on the most critical production and the budget. This year, we will be able to cover the entire platform and all the server hardware and utilize all the features of Nutanix Cloud Manager. We are going to do several things in the short term.

Faster outcomes are important taking into consideration that people are seeking medical attention, and there are many people. When the time comes to make the payment, they access our transactional services through the authentic application by using a fingerprint or making payment online. If we do not have a platform that is very fast, there is a delay and slowness in all clinical centers. When the lower layers that are not in Nutanix begin to suffer service degradation, all the health service centers automatically start calling us and telling us that the service is not working as it should, and people start to get impatient. Therefore, one of the critical pillars for what we do is that all the processing is done very fast.

Using Nutanix Cloud Manager’s built-in playbooks freed up time for our IT team to focus on other tasks or projects. One of the reasons why we decided on this solution was the amount of prior knowledge that exists. It is not only in terms of the knowledge base and the use cases of other clients but also in terms of everything that helps you. There are pre-built capabilities to make your operations much faster and spend a lot less man hours to manage. We have managed to free up resources and dedicate ourselves to more complex tasks. The playbooks also help me to be able to have a backup within the team. It is very easy for anyone to take the playbooks and apply them, and I can dedicate myself to other things.

In terms of time savings, at first, there were less time savings because we had to "oil the wheel", but now, I have been able to relieve 25% to 30% of people's burden. When we manage very old legacy platforms, we need a lot of specific knowledge and a lot of hours because what we do takes time. If I need to create a machine, I have to load a backup. It takes a long time. I lose a lot of time while the person is monitoring the process. On the other hand, with Nutanix Cloud Manager, it is very unattended. I click on it, and I can do other things because I know that the process will finish in a timely manner.

We want to grow, and we want to have more cores, more nodes, and a 100% migration at the end of this year. The truth is that everything that the solution offers helps with this roadmap and its execution. The migration is very fast and well-supported. We are very happy.

There is the ease of being able to use templates. We can create virtual machines from scratch very quickly. We can use a script or make a copy. Generating backup is very easy. Training is also available to achieve a good skill level. The learning curve is short.

We need to get more training and achieve much more consistent training. There is training, and there are courses, but in local terms, we are missing something that would allow us to have a more widespread training program. That could be an improvement area for me.

We have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager for six months.

It is as per very high standards of the industry. It is at an almost perfect level.

I have not had the need to take advantage of the scalability, but I am hopeful that there will not be any problem. I am hopeful that it will be quite smooth. The product works quite well. They have been on the market for many years. It is already a very solid product, and growth is supported.

There is a very large knowledge base. The response times and service are also very fast. We have opened very few tickets, and they were resolved quite quickly. When we opened the first ticket, we were inexperienced in the support flow. Walter helped us by making contact with a technician who called us by phone to resolve the problem online with us. Unlike other products that only offer communication via ticket, we had a phone call that helped us solve the problem very quickly. That turned out very well.

Positive

We had Rancher. We were about to use VMware, but almost our entire platform was on-premises. We had virtualization but on-premise. It was difficult to administer.

We still have a significant percentage of the platform on-premises. We have already migrated 50% to 60% to Nutanix. For the regional services that are in Ecuador, Colombia, and soon in Mexico, we have AWS.

I was there when the project started. I believe that every implementation has some moments when there is difficulty. That is why one has to have a partner who knows the product and is experienced in migrations and initial implementation. In our case, it was not so complex. The equipment was arranged, and the initial setups were made. The IT team was trained, and the provider helped us with all the migrations and environment preparation. They also trained us and helped us to learn. I did not see any problems along the way that made us say " Oh, we will have to replan.” It was quite smooth, and deadlines were met.

We used a local partner who brought me to .NEXT24. The company is called W-Systems. They are a local partner that offered us the solution and through which, we acquired Nutanix.

Their technical staff helped us throughout the implementation, and we have had very good results. Their representative, the general manager, Walter Zunkel is the one who invited me to attend .NEXT24. We have been attending sessions and talks, and we have been able to do a lot of networking, it has been very productive and very beneficial.

It allows me to lower the fixed costs that I have per data center. There is also the possibility of relocating the man hours that I have freed up to projects of much more complexity. That may not be an immediate monetary return, but it does allow me to make a better investment of my team's time.

It is an expensive solution, but one has to make the trade-off between what you want to achieve and what you are willing to pay.

There is a return on investment in a short time. When you make an investment of this magnitude, you expect a return within three years, but it is much earlier here. I measure it in terms of what payments have decreased for the data centers. I am closing one of the data centers because I no longer need to have those physical machines, so that is a saving, and it allows me to leverage the expense that it has. In terms of cost, you have to make a large initial investment, but it provides a good return on investment.

We evaluated three alternatives. We had VMware and the other two, but I was not part of the decision-making, so I do not know which other two products they considered.

I was not involved in the evaluation from the beginning, but I saw the results. When you make a comparison and choose a vendor with whom you are going to have a relationship for many years, you have to evaluate the cost. You have to evaluate technical capabilities, and you have to evaluate benefits related to the business.

I believe that one of the things that made Nutanix win by far in the proposals is its ease, short learning curve, and very natural, organic, and intuitive adoption within the team. The costs were not so high. These solutions are obviously not cheap, but one has to be prepared for that. For me, it is cheaper to pay a lot of money for a good solution than to have to explain to the government about a service that was down for several hours. Nutanix is ​​a platform that has a very short learning curve. Growth occurs in a very organic way. There are all new features. It is not necessary to educate ourselves much. The dashboards are super easy to build. The fact is that it is a world-class solution. I am very happy with it.

Nutanix Cloud Manager's setup, learning curve, and ease of use were important when deciding on a cloud management solution. The most important thing is the learning curve. I need people to start producing very quickly. The integration characteristics, the compatibility, and the backward compatibility with legacy technologies are other important things. The ease of migration and integration is also important. It is easy to take technologies that are no longer in use, make an evolution, and migrate them to Nutanix. It should also be easy to integrate components that are on other platforms or other architectures. These were several features that made us decide on Nutanix Cloud Manager.

I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a nine out of ten. There is always room for improvement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cloud Manager's data protection policies are nice. Sometimes our customers provision their own workloads. Regardless of whether they provision their workloads, we need to know that the data protection policies automatically protect their VMs locally and/or to another cluster. We don't need to have a conversation about data protection. It's already there.

GPU monitoring is crucial because we do a lot of desktop virtualization. It can tell us which desktop uses the most resources or has too many allocated resources so we can right-size them. The reporting is honest, which I find refreshing. Many vendors will tell you that you need to buy resources, whereas Cloud Manager helps us identify over-provisioning so we can get resources back.

The pre-defined reports are simple. We can very quickly get a report showing which VMs are running, the latency, resource usage, etc. It gives us that information fast. If we migrate data on Monday, we'll have a week's worth of reporting telling us how it went by Friday. We can also get end-of-the-month reporting. 

Cloud Manager's low-code automation features are excellent. We previously used vRealize Automation, which requires considerable effort to do simple things. With Cloud Manager, we can do things with one click. Currently, our workload is primarily VDI, so it doesn't fit so well, but I'd like to increase the usage. So many customers are using Cloud Manager just to manage their hypervisor environment, but the platform has much more to offer. This is a good example of where repetitive tasks can be automated. 

Humans make mistakes, and automation is a big help. It also helps when you don't need to be a rocket scientist to develop automation. You don't need to know much about coding, but it's helpful to know a little and understand what you're trying to achieve.

Our workloads are generally static, but automation is needed to make those changes safely when they change. Automation saves time if you are migrating and provisioning new workloads.

Long gone are the days when you had specialized admins who would be solely responsible for Nutanix environments. Most of us today are generalists. We have a breadth of knowledge, not depth, so filling the gaps with low-code automation is critical.  Reducing the number of clicks needed is great, but consistency is more important. We must ensure that all those workloads are built the same way, so all the expectations are the same.

I've had some challenges with the latest versions. I think the resource requirements are a little too high. The resources that Cloud Manager needs begin to account for a larger proportion of the resources the customers buy. In the announcement for the version they released today, they said there would be a lightweight version, so hopefully that has been addressed.

We have used Cloud Manager for about four years. We've been using it since before it was called cloud manager. 

I've never had any issues expanding clusters or upgrading. Nutanix is undergoing architectural changes and shifting toward microservices. That has been challenging because it's very different, but when it's up and running, it just works. 

As a VDI customer, we have 25,000 VMs, but that is not necessarily that many. We must be mindful of the limits, but we can design around those, so it isn't a problem. 

I rate Nutanix support 10 out of 10. Their support is nice because they'll often connect you with a technician you've spoken with before. I like that because if you call at the same time, you'll get someone in the same region, so you'll probably know who that person is. That's critical because relationships are important. 

Positive

We've worked with other solutions. I've always said that Nutanix is like IT for Dummies, and I'm happy to be considered a dummy. With other platforms, you need to deploy another management solution, but Nutanix provides basic management out of the box. It takes a couple of clicks to implement microsegmentation and data protection. 

The thing I like the most about Cloud Manager is that it's high availability by design. You get three nodes, so you don't have a single point of failure like you do with other vendors. When you log into it, the front page tells you whether you'll have a good day. If it's all green, you can have a cup of coffee because everything is fine, but don't pick up the phone if everything is red because it's all broken. 

I love that I don't need to work hard to find my information. NCM is a delight to set up. It takes a few clicks to deploy out of Prism Element. Anyone can use it because it's web-based and intuitive. You can monitor things at a high level with the click of a button. Generating basic scheduled reports is easy, so our C-level managers can see how their investment is performing. It's as intuitive as possible and all in one dashboard. 

Monitoring is a pillar. We need to monitor our customers' workloads for availability. If a customer doesn't use Nutanix, we'll go with something else, but NCM is the go-to solution for Nutanix. It's never a conversation about whether to use NCM or something else. 

The deployment is straightforward. You give it a few details about IP addresses, etc., press a button, and go make a cup of coffee. It's all done when you get back.

We've seen a return using Cloud Manager in the form of time saved. Time is expensive to our organization, and we've preferred to invest in tooling in recent years rather than people. We've saved a lot of time because we don't need to work as hard using Cloud Manager, which enables us to work smarter. 

It's always difficult to discuss Nutanix pricing because the cost varies wildly depending on the customer and the region. Desktop virtualization is simpler because there is a defined scope. You can tell the Nutanix salesperson how many users you have. In a more traditional environment, it's always best to have NCM for monitoring because you'd be crazy not to. 

We didn't evaluate anything else because Nutanix solutions always work better together. You may already be paying for Cloud Manager in your licensing, and the way Nutanix solutions complement each other is crucial. However, we say in the UK that you shouldn't be marking your own homework, so a third-party perspective could also be helpful. 

I rate Nutanix Cloud Manager 10 out of 10.