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Dev-ops Engineer at Inetum
Real User
Top 20
Provides the ability to allocate resources from anywhere and saves time
Pros and Cons
  • "The convergence between the network and the storage is valuable."
  • "The time between the solution's production and delivery is too short. We see several bugs. Many tests are not done before delivery. They need to test it more and for a longer time."

What is our primary use case?

My client is a French company for train travel. They had several servers. They had about 10,000 servers on the VMware infrastructure. The target of the company was to migrate to the new architecture, Nutanix Hyperconverged, because of the costs of VMware. My principal work was to automate the migration from VMware to Nutanix.

We have a private cloud with Azure and AWS. We will also have GCP over time.

How has it helped my organization?

There are many benefits. The main benefit is to be able to allocate resources anywhere we are.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is my first low-code solution. For me, it is very user-friendly.

Nutanix Cloud Manager saves time. My client's goal is to automate maximum things. With Nutanix, it is simple to automate.

Nutanix Cloud Manager saves us time. It has saved about 40% of our time. Time is money, so there are money savings.

What is most valuable?

The convergence between the network and the storage is valuable.

What needs improvement?

The time between the solution's production and delivery is too short. We see several bugs. Many tests are not done before delivery. They need to test it more and for a longer time.

Buyer's Guide
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
January 2025
Learn what your peers think about Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2025.
831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager for the past two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I had an issue two days ago with stability. We had an image in one cluster, but it could not be replicated in the second cluster. Our both clusters went down and no action was possible on the VM. The team had a blackout. No action was possible. The only option was to reboot the system. It is fixed now.

How are customer service and support?

Their customer support is very good. They are very efficient, but it is sometimes complicated to have someone available during work hours in France. Their support is usually in the USA.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

The client was using VMware. They moved to Nutanix because of the costs and support. It was the client's choice. I had no hand in this, but if I had a choice, I would have also gone for Nutanix.

The advantage of Nutanix over other solutions is the GUI. It is more user-friendly than other vendors, such as VMware.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Its licensing is cheaper than VMware. However, the price for certain licenses or use cases is not clearly indicated. For example, replication of the cluster to switch from one VM to another when one is down is not included in the standard price. It requires an additional license, but it is not clearly indicated. My client chose Nutanix because it is cheaper than VMware. They thought that this feature was included in the standard price, but it was not.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a nine out of ten based on our use case. 

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
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Datacenter manager at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
Real User
Top 20
Offers a single point of view to users for managing their infrastructure
Pros and Cons
  • "The product has helped my company to have a single point of view for managing the infrastructure, our environment, and virtualization."
  • "In our company, even though not directly in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), we saw that tool has many layers in it. An integration between Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) and Nutanix Kubernetes Platform would be a great deal."

What is our primary use case?

I use the company solution to manage all Nutanix clusters. We have three clusters, including one for VDI, one for the production server, and another for disaster recovery. The tool helps us manage everything in one view.

How has it helped my organization?

The product has helped my company to have a single point of view for managing the infrastructure, our environment, and virtualization. We use the tool for something important, which is the structuring of the code.

What is most valuable?

The solution's most valuable features stem from its ease of management of our infrastructure and virtualization hypervisor. I think the tool is better than the others on the market.

The speed of outcomes I have received using the tool's low-code automation is fast and has helped us a lot. We are a company that has the intention to want IaC to come first. We are changing how we manage things to facilitate the day's activities.

With faster outcomes, we can reduce the daily management needed to maintain the systems.

Considering how the tool has helped our company's team address the current automation needs while planning for future expansion, I would say that we have seen how it works after Nutanix launched Nutanix v4 API. It is important because we think it will be the most compatible with the other solutions in the market.

Compared to other cloud management solutions, Nutanix is the best solution, especially Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) since it has helped our company a lot. The tool's support is amazing, and I think it is the best. It is easy to work with the solution.

What needs improvement?

In our company, even though not directly in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), we saw that the tool has many layers in it. An integration between Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) and Nutanix Kubernetes Platform would be a great deal.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for a year, but my company has been using it even before I joined. The tool has been in the company for four years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is an okay and stable solution. Our company has not had problems with it.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

For scalability, it is an amazing tool. Last year, we needed to scale our cluster, and it was easy. We had to just plug in and install the tool and nodes while including the cluster, and it is ready to go.

At the moment, there are no plans to increase the tool's usage, but we may plan to do so next year.

How are customer service and support?

The tool's support is amazing. During the day, our team will need to solve the problems associated with the tool. I think it's the best company we have had business with, and its partners are okay with it. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Previously, I used to use VMware and Dell VxRail. I switched to Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) from other products, considering its price, which is an important aspect. Another advantage is that when you use Nutanix, the cloud infrastructure is better, in my opinion.

How was the initial setup?

The product's initial setup phase was simple.

The solution was deployed before I joined my company.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model. A little bit of our environment is in the cloud, but we have not yet integrated it with Nutanix. I use the cloud services from Azure.

What about the implementation team?

During the product's installation phase, the consultant and a partner from Brazil greatly helped our company.

My company has not sought help from any implementors with implementing the cloud product yet, but we plan to do so in the future.

What was our ROI?

Recently, my company studied the movement to go to the cloud, and we concluded that it is better to stay in our solution quickly and use Nutanix's integration with the cloud, while not forgetting our infrastructure and going to the cloud.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing model offered by Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is better than the ones offered by the other solutions in the market.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

My company evaluated Dell VxRail and VMware against Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). We evaluated Dell VxRail because it was an integrated and unified solution.

What other advice do I have?

I can't remember whether the tool's built-in playbooks freed up time for our IT team.

I rate the overall tool a ten 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.
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Buyer's Guide
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
January 2025
Learn what your peers think about Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2025.
831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.
reviewer2183850 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Infrastructure Engineer at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 20
Cost-effective, easy to use, and supports Layer 2 stretching across data centers
Pros and Cons
  • "The ability to do Layer 2 stretching across data centers is valuable. The migration of VMs from one location to the other is also valuable."
  • "There should be more APIs to integrate with different vendors and to integrate with the existing solutions that we use on-prem."

What is our primary use case?

Our first use case is for ransomware. We have two more use cases that we identified. The second one is going to be for DR, and the third one is going to be for capacity.

Currently, we do ransomware on-prem. We use a shared cluster in our disaster recovery site. With Nutanix Cloud Manager, we hope to use the NC2 clusters in Azure and move all the ransomware activities from on-prem to the cloud.

How has it helped my organization?

We are an insurance company. Data security is our top priority. We take ransomware very seriously. We always want to be careful and make sure that our data is secure, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. We go through ransom activities at least once a month on-prem, and that's what we hope to do with Nutanix Cloud Manager as well. We hope to continue to provide data security to our business and to our customers.

We use Nutanix Cloud Manager's built-in playbooks. They absolutely freed up our team's time to focus on other tasks or projects. We were looking to use these playbooks for a while. From an automation perspective and from a day-to-day management perspective, creating these playbooks definitely freed up our engineers to focus on more strategic tasks and more solutions than day-to-day activities. They saved about 40% of their time. As we move forward and use more playbooks, we see more and more time freed up. It freed up at least six to seven percent of our engineers' time.

What is most valuable?

The ability to do Layer 2 stretching across data centers is valuable. The migration of VMs from one location to the other is also valuable.

What needs improvement?

There should be more APIs to integrate with different vendors and to integrate with the existing solutions that we use on-prem.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using this solution for about a year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We had some hiccups with Nutanix Cloud Manager, our on-prem networking solutions, and all that, but as we went on, we overcame all those issues. There has been no showstopper whatsoever. All the issues that we came across were just small things that we had to work through. Nutanix's support has been very helpful. They worked with us all the way to help us overcome all these issues, and so far, it has been great.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We are looking forward to it. We only have a small NCM platform built, but as we move forward, we look forward to using it for other use cases. We definitely want to explore expanding our NCM presence in Azure or in AWS.

How are customer service and support?

Their support was excellent. I'd rate them a nine out of ten.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We used Azure's cloud-native management. We still use it to some point to manage our Azure entities in the public cloud. Other than that, we haven't used any solution.

How was the initial setup?

The setup was easy. We had help from Nutanix support, which was excellent. We got wonderful support from people who gave us a hand along the way. It wasn't very difficult, and within two or three days, we were fully functional to some extent. As far as the ease of use goes, our engineers love it. They use it every single day. I've not heard any complaints from our users. The user experience that we always look for has been great so far.

Learning is wonderful. There's so much available on Nutanix's portal in terms of the KB articles, knowledge base, user guides, and admin guides for Nutanix Cloud Manager. To have all that available to our engineers online is a great help.

What was our ROI?

I'm sure we will see an ROI. We've only been doing it for a year. It takes time, but I'm very confident that as we grow and mature, we will definitely see some positive returns.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

https://www.peerspot.com/produ...When we started to look at Nutanix Cloud Manager, the cost was a major factor. Management comes into play. Hosting on-prem is getting expensive. We did find a lot of cost benefits to using the NCM and NC2 clusters in Azure. Being a Microsoft partner, we always get a big discount. When we use Nutanix Cloud Manager in Azure or AWS, there is an ease of management. We have a single pane of glass to look through and manage our on-prem entities and Nutanix Cloud Manager. It becomes very easy.

The pricing was very good. We were very pleased with what we were offered by our account manager. Because of that, we expanded Nutanix Cloud Manager, and we hope to expand even more. Right now, we are in Azure, and as we build up more and more within the NCM platform, we hope to expand into AWS as well.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We chose Nutanix Cloud Manager because of the pricing. Also, the features and the capabilities that it offers within the Nutanix ecosystem were very attractive. We've been using Nutanix on-prem for almost six years, and to be able to extend them on the cloud was a no-brainer.

We use Calm for on-prem automation, and we are looking to use Calm for our cloud automation as well. We have PoC flow for Microsec on-prem, and we hope to extend that out to the cloud as well as we segregate the traffic between on-prem and cloud entities.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is very easy to use. Our users and engineers have become very knowledgeable in a very short time, and as far as the cost goes, it has been very effective.

What other advice do I have?

We only started using it about a year ago, and there's a lot more we need to use Nutanix Cloud Manager for. We haven't fully explored all its capabilities from an automation, AI, or machine learning perspective. We hope to use all the built-in features within Nutanix Cloud Manager.

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

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
SRE - Site Reliability Engineer - Infrastructure Engineer at Betclic Group
Real User
Lightening fast solution that has reduced our bottlenecks
Pros and Cons
  • "The design is very intuitive; it's easy to find information in the different menus and things like that. The user experience is much better compared to other products."
  • "In the gambling industry, you have a lot of regulation from different countries. One of those regulations states that you have to be able to send all the logs of your Prism to a separate server, what we call the syslog server. On Prism Central, this doesn't work. We have opened a case for it, since this is a basic feature nowadays. We spoke to Nutanix, and they said that it will be in future updates. We did an update, following their support, but once we did the update, it wasn't fixed."

What is our primary use case?

70 to 90 percent of the use that we have for the solution is to get virtual machines running. We are also starting to use different aspects of Prism. For example, we just started to deploy their file storage solution. We weren't able to so far (within the last year), because there hasn't been much time to deploy projects on new technologies.

How has it helped my organization?

We do use the capacity planning. If we were to speak about the algorithm side of Nutanix, we use the compression algorithm for the compression that's in the storage and the storage deduplication algorithm. We find them really powerful. The capacity planning is a good algorithm, but it's a pretty simple one. It's just a projection of the expected growth of your cluster, so you can forecast if you need to buy more storage, compute, etc. 

The true power of the Nutanix algorithm lies within the storage algorithm: the deduplication, erasure coding, and compression. They are really powerful. We were actually quite surprised, because the experience we had before was only with storage arrays. Basically, when you buy a device that is purely dedicated to storage, you expect it to really perform in that area. That is pretty normal. 

When you buy a device, like Nutanix's hyper-converged solution, and it sells you on the fact that it has a really powerful algorithm for storage, you say, "Alright, it's like when you buy something that can do everything, but it's not really doing everything well. It's doing it okay." When we actually started pushing data on the Nutanix service, we saw that the compression was very good. We didn't expect it to be that good. Therefore, the algorithm for the storage side is well-thought-out and works really well.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature for us is the way we can use it with virtual machine to spin them. It is lightning fast compared to what we had before. The day-to-day tasks on a virtual machine are really fast. We have the economy of not having too much complexity in the menu and design of the solution, and information is accessible pretty quick. The best feature is really how simple it is to interact with virtual machines. 

The Prism features on the backup side have made it so much easier. Now, when we want to backup our VMs and do a cross data center backup, we utilize two clusters located in two data centers in Paris. For each virtual machine that is running, we have what they call a protection domain, which takes a snapshot of the VM and sends it to the other cluster. In the event of a cluster failure on one of the data centers, we can just press one button in another data center on another cluster in Prism. This will spin the VMs that have been backed up from the primary data center to the secondary one and make them run. It is a one-button recovery plan, which is pretty amazing.

What needs improvement?

There are a lot of features that could be added or, at least, made better.

There are two kinds of Prism. 

  1. Prism Element: Which is what's installed on each cluster and running each cluster individually.
  2. Prism Central: Which you use to connect to all your Prism Elements, meaning all the clusters. Then, it centralizes your view of your infrastructure. We have found a lot of bugs in the interface. Sometimes, when you do an action, it says to you that it's 100% done. However, in the background, the action is still ongoing, and you have no visual update on how long will it take. 

Just this morning, we took an image from Prism Central. That image was installed on one of the clusters. In Prism Central, you have one feature that enables you to place the image on multiple clusters. You just have to select them, and say, "I want my image of my virtual machine to be on all my clusters." So, when I want to spin a VM on an individual cluster, I will find the image. What is happening is that when you use the feature of image placement on Prism Central, you select the clusters on which you want to push the image, then you validate. Once you validate, it says, "Alright, the image update has been done successfully," but in the background, it's actually placing the image. Therefore, you have absolutely nothing visually that tells you whether it will finish soon or last a lot longer. You're just there, sitting and waiting for an update that you have to visually see on the interface by refreshing the interface. 

Imagine if you were to copy a file from one directory to another directory, but you have nothing to tell you whether it's ongoing or will take five minutes, ten minutes, or an hour. You just have to wait in the other directory for the file to appear and see that it's copied. This is not down to the functionality. It's down to the design of the user interface.

If you want to convert a virtual machine to an image, you have to do it via command line. Why is there not a button on the Nutanix interface that does this? 

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using it for almost a year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability of the Prism solution is another thing that we have found to be a bit of work. For example, the Prism Central and the appliances use 97 percent of the CPU and RAM of the virtual machine. We don't know why. There is a memory leak somewhere that makes it overuse the memory. Nutanix is aware of this. It has been ongoing for a year, and they still haven't fixed it. I just don't get it.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scaling is easy, rapid, and pretty straightforward. Now, we have two clusters consisting of 16 nodes on each cluster. If we were to extend the cluster, we would just order a new node, rack it, and image it to have the same version of the operating system off the Nutanix cluster. Adding it to the cluster is really straightforward. Then, Nutanix takes care of everything, because it's going to use the node to deduplicate blocks of storage. It's going to use the node to store VMs on the node. The automated services on Nutanix are really good.

There are mainly 20 users utilizing it, with a maximum of 30 users. We have a SysOps team, which does like Level 1 administration, who uses Prism for their day-to-day tasks, e.g. renaming the server, creating a new server, moving a server from one node to another node, or augmenting the capacity of the server to extend the disks, CPU, or RAM. There is also the SRE team, which is the engineering team, and we do the much more complex tasks. For example, when we work on the design of a new solution, we will present storage directly on the VMs. We do tasks that are a little more complicated than the other users.

How are customer service and technical support?

I have been in touch with Nutanix support. They have been really fantastic. The only thing that is an issue is that we are in Europe, and when we open a ticket in European time, we get a response off-hours from India. If you are in Europe and you open a ticket during European business hours, you should probably get someone from Nutanix in Amsterdam who responds. Sometimes, we open a ticket up at ten o'clock in the morning and get a response on our ticket at five o'clock in the evening from India. How come it wasn't seen by the European teams first? It's a European company with a European headquarters. You have to specifically request for your tickets to be handled in your time zone for someone from Europe to contact you. 

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We are the classical customer. Before, we were using a normal three-tier hosting solution, which consisted of having a stack of storage, a stack of network, and a stack of hypervisors for the compute and memory. We thought it was a burden to maintain, because every time when we had to do updates or security patches, we had three stacks to maintain. Whereas, when we switched to Prism, we benefited from its hyper-converged solution. This meant our time maintaining and keeping the solution up-to-date was divided by a great factor. That brought us to Nutanix.

We originally came from VMware. We also had some Hyper-V also, but we were originally a pure VMware customer for our virtual machines. I have used VMware for far longer than I've been in the IT industry. Nutanix was my first experience other than VMware. It is day and night for me. I would much rather use the Nutanix product line than the VMware one.

There were two factors for moving from VMware to Nutanix. 

  1. We had to renew our infrastructure. It was getting a bit old, so we needed more power in order to also forecast the growth of the company. 
  2. The simplicity of hyper-converged makes it a leader. For example, it's a bit like when you cook in your kitchen and have all the ingredients, then you have to assemble them and cook them. I compare Nutanix to those new machines that came out where you put all your ingredients together and you just press a button, then it cooks it for you. It is really a little bit like that. It is like everything is hyper-converged, so in one block you have your storage, compute, memory, etc. When you want to expand your cluster, e.g., if you want to add more VMs or more storage, then you just buy one block, plug it in, and link it to your cluster. That's it. You don't have anything else to do because it's all automated, where it was a burden before when we were under VMware.

This solution seems like going from a complex, cross-embedded solution to something which is a Next Generation website. The design is very intuitive; it's easy to find information in the different menus and things like that. The user experience is much better compared to other products.

In the gambling industry, you have a lot of regulation from different countries. One of those regulations states that you have to be able to send all the logs of your Prism to a separate server, what we call the syslog server. On Prism Central, this doesn't work. We have opened a case for it, since this is a basic feature nowadays. We spoke to Nutanix, and they said that it will be in future updates. We did an update, following their support, but once we did the update, it wasn't fixed. 

Nutanix suffers tiny glitches, when you put them one behind another, make the experience just a pain. However, the main features work well. There is no doubt of that.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was straightforward: You receive the servers, you pick up the servers, and you rank them. Once you rank them, you plug them into your network. After that, you plug in your computer, you image the cluster, and deploy the appliances. It was a two-man, two-day job to deploy 32 nodes.

We did a high-level design, a low-level design, and a network design, respectively, then we opened the deployment project. It was pretty classical straightforward. Nutanix was pretty easy. The hardest part of the work was in thinking the design of what you wanted, e.g., how many nodes and clusters. We studied the capacity used by our old VMware infrastructure and forecasted the future growth of the company to integrate in how much Nutanix we were going to buy, how many nodes, and how much compute power. Deploying the actual physical hardware and cluster mechanics was easy. It was really a piece of cake.

When you deploy the cluster, make sure you set up the networking. This is really important. If you don't do it right, you will have to come back to it later, and that could be a pain.

Do the testing extensively before you go to production. We spent two days deploying and one full day just testing that the deployment was correct.

What about the implementation team?

I was involved in the deployment of the clusters. I was in the data center to deploy the servers. I was there when we deployed the Prism appliance. I was involved every step of the way (from A to Z), even in the migration from VMware to Nutanix. 

What was our ROI?

The adoption rate is 90 percent. We also have some cloud and SaaS/PaaS services. Otherwise, the whole company sits on Nutanix. Right now, we have nine million users using our application and placing bets. At the highest peak, we can have a rate of thousands of logins a minute on our infrastructure. When there is big games, e.g., Champions League Games.

Imagine that we have a lot of people placing bets or surfing the website for the offer. Our infrastructure has to respond really quickly. For example, if a customer places a bet and the game finishes, we have to pay that bet quickly so the customer is able to replace a new bet for the following game, the day after, or something else. The stability of the infrastructure, its resiliency, and capacity to take in load is really important. 

Since we switched to Nutanix, we have had fewer bottlenecks and issues during the big game nights. We are using Nutanix and our infrastructure and rely on it for our business.

We have felt the ROI. We don't spend so much time on administration as we did before Nutanix. Before, it was fastidious to update all our VMware, clusters etc. We had to do that every three months. Right now, in Nutanix, it takes us half a day. It is one person who presses a button and goes onto some other business. Nutanix takes care of the update.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

We're not using the Prism Pro solution; we are using Prism Ultimate. We have the highest level of license.

Be careful when you buy Nutanix. You get to choose if you're going with Dell, HPE, or Lenovo. Make sure you choose the right one for your company. The vendor is a critical step. 

Don't unlicense your Prism licensing. Pro is the strict minimum for real infrastructure. Go with at least Pro and not with the starter. Ultimate was the best choice for me. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did an evaluation with HyperFlex, which is the Cisco solution. It wasn't good at all. Whereas, Nutanix is sending you a hyper-converged infrastructure, and what you see is, what you get. With HyperFlex, they're selling you the same idea, but once you get is not exactly what you expect. It's blocks that you have to assemble yourself in order to make it a hyperconverged solution, while Nutanix is truly a hyper-converged solution. Nutanix gives you the appliance and server, which you just rack and off you go. 

We tried using Nutanix Calm and Karbon for the Kubernetes cluster, but we didn't find them to be as easy to use as we expected. When we heard about Calm, we almost thought that we could do automation at a level that would be similar to Puppet, Chef, or SaltStack. When we looked at the features inside, it wasn't exactly like that. Since what we have to do is pretty complex, doing it under Puppet for the orchestration and things like that, this seemed to us much easier than doing it under Calm.

I think this was because communication was off from the Nutanix side and our understanding was off from our company side. We expected it to be a product that it was not, so we haven't been able to use it. We did try to have a look into Calm, but we haven't found a use case for the product. The use case that we have in the company requires us to direct to another product, which we decided would be Puppet.

What other advice do I have?

We are heading towards a DevOps culture. What will happen is that we're going to head more and more towards hybid datacenters. We might increase our usage of Nutanix.

I would rate it an eight 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.
PeerSpot user
System Administrator at Agence Pour Le Developpement Agricole
Real User
Top 20
Easy to use and monitor while also being affordable compared to competitors
Pros and Cons
  • "The tool is easy to use."
  • "The solution's dashboard is fine. In the product, the possibility of changing some of the icons in the dashboard configuration would be good since it is an area where the tool has shortcomings."

What is our primary use case?

I use the solution in my company for all of the created VMs. We have all of our systems in Nutanix. My company migrated from Veeam to VMware and then to Nutanix. In my company, we have Nutanix for all of our servers.

My company chose the tool since it is a very simple and good product. When I checked the comparison between VMware and Nutanix, I found the latter to be better, especially since it is very easy to monitor.

What is most valuable?

The tool is easy to use. My company learned how to use Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) in about six months.

What needs improvement?

For me, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is a very good tool. The solution's dashboard is fine. The possibility of changing some of the icons in the dashboard configuration would be good since it is an area where the tool has shortcomings. If I want to change the LAN connection or a configuration, it is difficult since I have to keep clicking and clicking the options in the solution. I want to have a one-click button for the network. With one click, I should be able to download three or more VMs with the help of the tool.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) since 2019, so it has been almost six years. I am an end-user of the tool.

How are customer service and support?

The technical support for the solution has been very, very good. With the support team, once you create a use case, you can automatically call and get access to the technical team in fifteen minutes. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The solution can be deployed in a period of two months. As per the contract, I know that my company had to migrate from VMware to Nutanix in two months.

What was our ROI?

With VMware, which we had for one year in our company, we paid 20,00,000 United Arab Emirates Dirhams. With Nutanix, in five years, our company has paid 83,000 United Arab Emirates Dirhams, which is very good and not as expensive as VMware. Time for creating VMs is very easy in Nutanix, compared to VMware, as it can be done in two to three minutes since all the templates are great. With VMware, the time required to create VMs is about ten minutes. In terms of time, Nutanix helps save 20 percent when compared to VMware.

What other advice do I have?

I don't use the automation options offered by Nutanix.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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reviewer2183811 - PeerSpot reviewer
Service Delivery Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 20
Is easy to set up, but the interface could be improved to allow the use of other tools
Pros and Cons
  • "The ease of use is a valuable feature. For us, it's a consistent interface. It's very easy to train our employees on it, and it's a newer generation interface. It's homogeneous, and every product and subset tie together, giving a very similar look to everything."
  • "In some ways, Nutanix Cloud Manager abstracts out certain items in a simplified manner, which makes it good for training. At other times, to get to the next technical level, we want to actually dive in, and Nutanix Cloud Manager sometimes restricts us from actually diving into the deeper technical pieces. There's no advance button that lets us do more advanced things without having to drop out to the CLI to do the command line piece."

What is our primary use case?

We use Nutanix Cloud Manager to manage all of our Nutanix infrastructure. We have six data centers throughout the world, and we use it to manage all that infrastructure for VMware. We're currently moving to AHV and are managing those as well.

How has it helped my organization?

From a resiliency of the infrastructure standpoint, we don't chase outages and major problems like we used to on other arrays such as CMC storage or Dell storage. Our folks have a lot more free time handle to the normal workload instead of troubleshooting.

What is most valuable?

The ease of use is a valuable feature. For us, it's a consistent interface. It's very easy to train our employees on it, and it's a newer generation interface. It's homogeneous, and every product and subset tie together, giving a very similar look to everything.

We do implement Nutanix Cloud Manager's built-in playbooks. Currently, the biggest one we use that's been very helpful is cleaning up snapshots. As users do snapshots of their virtual machines, it then goes back and cleans those out. We don't have a mess lingering out there.

Because Nutanix Cloud Manager's eScripts are based on Python, it allows me to bring developers in who are Python-centric. They are able to get up to speed quickly and develop the automation pieces we need for our own private cloud and build servers and applications on-premises.

What needs improvement?

In some ways, Nutanix Cloud Manager abstracts out certain items in a simplified manner, which makes it good for training. At other times, to get to the next technical level, we want to actually dive in, and Nutanix Cloud Manager sometimes restricts us from actually diving into the deeper technical pieces. There's no advance button that lets us do more advanced things without having to drop out to the CLI to do the command line piece.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've worked with Nutanix Cloud Manager for more than five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

So far, we've been very impressed with the stability. In the Nutanix ecosystem, everything is clustered, highly available, and fails over. It takes care of itself.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have very few users who are using Nutanix Cloud Manager at present, but we do have all of our infrastructure running Nutanix on the storage side. From that scale, we're handling thousands of servers with no issues there. In about three months, we will be switching over all of our VMware folks to Nutanix Cloud Manager via ServiceNow. Then, we'll be able to see the full impact of our users using Nutanix Cloud Manager.

How are customer service and support?

I would give a ten out of ten to Nutanix's technical support. We've had excellent support. They always know two or three other people they can call on to help with certain portions of an issue. There's very good networking within the company.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We're a VMware shop and have vRA, which we used for all the automation on the VMware side. We also used vRealize Orchestrator. Initially, we chose Nutanix over standard disc arrays because we came out of the storage market. As Nutanix has added products, we've seen value in them and went in that direction.

When we bought the storage system and disc encryption, they came with other licenses. Nutanix Cloud Manager was an add-on. When we looked at the cost of other solutions and the opportunities that Nutanix Cloud Manager gives us to tie directly into Nutanix, it just seemed to be the right fit.

What was our ROI?

It might be too early to tell as we just started using Nutanix Cloud Manager for our private cloud about four months ago. Once we get fully off of VMware, we should definitely see an ROI.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The price is probably right where it should be. It's not vastly expensive, and it's not too cheap. We get very good value for the price with what we're being offered with it.

What other advice do I have?

Nutanix Cloud Manager is a walled garden, and you have to do all of your editing within the interface. Our developers become frustrated with not being able to use other tools such as Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and CSE pipelines. These are outside of the Nutanix Cloud Manager interface, and the developers would prefer to use them instead of using the NCM interface. In this sense, Nutanix Cloud Manager has been a struggle to use. The NCM interface could be improved.

The setup is fantastic because you can click a button and deploy it. It's already part of the existing piece, and it's like adding a module. Compared to the setup of other cloud management solutions, Nutanix Cloud Manager's setup is much easier. We just spent about four months upgrading a VMware product, and there were bugs. It was a nightmare. With Nutanix Cloud Manager, it's click-and-play, and we haven't had any issues at all.

The learning curve is a lot easier because it is based on Python, and we have developers who already know it. We don't have to retool. Many of my developers have been up to speed in under a week.

If you're considering Nutanix Cloud Manager, my advice would be to go through the entire POC in-depth to see the value in it. Initially, it may look very simplistic, but when you dive into the code, you will see the depth of the product.

Overall, I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a six because the automation tools are still in the early stages. There are things that need to be fleshed out in the private cloud as well as the public cloud. I don't see anything badly wrong with it, but I think there's a lot of room for improvement as an industry in general.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Senior Systems Engineer at a retailer with 11-50 employees
Real User
Top 10
I like the analytics and the interface
Pros and Cons
  • "I like the analytics and the interface. Nutanix is easy to deploy and manage."
  • "Nutanix is one of two stacks where you can run everything you like. It would be nice if you could run it without the Nutanix appliance. Some clients don't use Nutanix engineering server hardware, so it would be helpful to run the Nutanix software for demos and tests."

What is our primary use case?

We use Nutanix for management and capacity planning.

What is most valuable?

I like the analytics and the interface. Nutanix is easy to deploy and manage. 

What needs improvement?

Nutanix is one of two stacks where you can run everything you like. It would be nice if you could run it without the Nutanix appliance. Some clients don't use Nutanix engineering server hardware, so it would be helpful to run the Nutanix software for demos and tests. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Nutanix for about three years. My boss started looking into Nutanix in 2013 or 2014. We were one of the first Nutanix partners in the area.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Nutanix is highly stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I rate Nutanix 10 out of 10 for scalability. Nutanix is highly scalable on the right version with the right hardware. 

How are customer service and support?

I rate Nutanix support nine out of 10. They have specialized engineers for various clients, so when you open a ticket, only one technician will be working to resolve it. 

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

I rate Nutanix eight out of 10 for ease of setup. Setting up Nutanix is relatively easy if you know about networking.  It's not rocket science. You need to know the type of licenses you'd like to use and what the company shares. Before the initial implementation, you need to take time to plan. After that, the implementation could take a couple of hours or up to three days. 

What other advice do I have?

I rate Nutanix 10 Cloud Manager Intelligent Operations 10 out of 10. You can operate Nutanix blindfolded. It's easy. 

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: customer/partner
PeerSpot user
Moses Ramushu - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Support at a hospitality company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Makes things easier and simpler for us to troubleshoot
Pros and Cons
  • "It is easy to access. Since it is web-based, you just punch in the API and it gives you all the servers in the company. The solution has helped optimize database performances."
  • "The design could be more user-friendly. There is always room for improvement when it comes to a site being more user-friendly."

What is our primary use case?

We use it for our service, running everything through Nutanix.

How has it helped my organization?

It is easy to access. Since it is web-based, you just punch in the API and it gives you all the servers in the company. The solution has helped optimize database performances.

Nutanix helps us save on Tier 1 storage, which is very important to us. As a company, you need backup. Working with this solution is easy and fast.

As a company, backup is very important. Anything can happen to a company so you always want to have backup. The important part is that this solution is cloud-based. Therefore, if a fire happens, you still have your backup.

Since last year, we haven't really worked after hours.

Nutanix has 100% improved our team's ability to troubleshoot operational issues. This is excellent for business. It now makes things easier for us to troubleshoot, helping us know where or what the problem is. It makes things simpler.

What is most valuable?

It provides healing to the system. If there is something wrong with the system, then it gives you an alert and decides what the problem is. It tells you in detail if there is something wrong with your server.

It is not time-consuming. It makes things easier for the company, because now you know exactly what is wrong because it tells you what it is. It is easy to access.

We use it with SQL Server workloads. This solution is good and quite fast for that.

What needs improvement?

The design could be more user-friendly. There is always room for improvement when it comes to a site being more user-friendly.

For how long have I used the solution?

My company has been using it for about six months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I have been very impressed with the stability.

How are customer service and support?

Customer service has been good. So far, I can't complain. I haven't picked up anything that I might complain about since everything is running smoothly and has been simplified. 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?

This has been an improvement for me because I am used to old physical servers.

How was the initial setup?

I was not involved in the initial setup. Everything was already up and running when I started using it.

What was our ROI?

It has helped us cut deployment times.

Nutanix has decreased the time it takes to snapshot and clone databases. Because of this, the business is running smoothly. Everything happens quickly, so it is quick to do things on this platform, i.e., less time-consuming.

The increased backup frequency has helped to limit data loss.

When it comes to data management, the solution has reduced time spent on operational database workloads.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We use Veeam for the backup and restore of databases.

What other advice do I have?

This is the way to go. Technology is growing and improving. I feel like a lot of companies in my country are still stuck in the old way of using physical servers. Whereas, we now have something like this that makes things simple with a feature that sends alerts. In a way, it is running the whole infrastructure.

There is always something out there that can improve your life, simplifying your life. There is always something out there that you can learn about.

It has improved my life and the way the company is running. We use it almost every day.

There are about 10 of us using it, including support, system engineers, my assistant management, and management.

I would rate this solution as nine out of 10.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Private Cloud
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.
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Buyer's Guide
Download our free Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: January 2025
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.