Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

Prism Pro is the heart of our organization. If Prism Pro dies, then our system dies.

We are in the gaming industry with approximately 85 servers. This solution increased our productivity and reduced our time performing server checks.

We also use Prism Central for our monitoring on the administrative side.

Nutanix Cloud Manager has increased our productivity higher than what it used to be. We used to spend four hours on server checking. Nutanix gave us three and a half hours back from those four hours to do normal work.

The system gives you an aggregate of how you will be using the system.

I really appreciate the Life Cycle Manager (LCM) feature, which provides upgrades to clusters. Offers a single-touch upgrade, where you just click "upgrade", then do nothing else.

The dedupe is amazing and reduces space. For example, if you have a file server with a document named April 2013, then somewhere else in your file system, there is another file called April 2013 with similar information, it will combine those two files. If there are two files that are one gig each containing the same content, then Nutanix analyzes that data and makes it into one document. Therefore, instead of using two gigs of storage, you are only using one. It can also combine multiple files from different global locations.

Recently, I have had quite a few issues with Nutanix Guest Tools (NGT). When you do a full update from LCM, your NGT doesn't automatically install on your VMs. You need to go back to Prism Central and select a list of VMs, then install NGT. You need to go to each of those VMs, then restart them to get the NGT installed. Also, there are some VMs that we have on our system that we used to run on an old environment, which was Hyper-V. Previously, we had VMware, so some of our VMs are Windows 7 32-bit and Windows 7 64-bit. However, the NGT no longer allows for installations on those.

We constantly get packet drops. We are actually looking at upgrading them in the future. While Windows 7 is not supported anymore from a Microsoft perspective, Nutanix could allow NGT to still be installed since people still use Windows 7. I have five VMs currently running on Windows 7. This is not a major issue. The VMs still work, but you get an alert in the mornings, saying, "Hey, NGT is not installed." When we go there, we try to install NGT, but it won't allow us since Windows 7 is not allowed anymore.

We have been using Prism Pro for three to four years and the Nutanix Cloud Manager version for the past few months.

Even if you forget about Nutanix for five days, Nutanix will take care of itself. This takes the strain off the business since you don't constantly need to worry about Nutanix this or Nutanix that when monitoring an environment. You get an email or a report at the end of the day, saying, "Something is not working," or, "Some system services stopped here," or, "Storage is running low here," or, "Memory is not being utilized properly."

The stability is very good. In the past three years, it has not shut down. Maintenance is not really required, as long as you do your LCM updates every two to three months. 

We can scale it.

Currently, there are about 980 users on all nine of our casino properties. 

We can go a few more years with the package that we currently have. Right now, the solution is running perfectly. We may have to look at increasing memory in the next year or so. While our CPU and space are fine, it is the memory where we need a bit more. Right now, we have about 28 terabytes but are using about seven.

I deal a lot with the Nutanix support, especially if I don't understand something, I just start a call with them. They have local support in South Africa. So, if there are any issues or problems during the upgrade, their support team can be contacted with just one email, and they respond immediately.

From a support perspective, no other solution comes close to it. If you have a support issue, Nutanix is there. Obviously, they don't come onsite, but they log into your system and do full checks. On top of that, they help you understand the problem. They don't just go and fix it, then say, "Okay, it is done." Instead, they are like, "This is not the problem. This is what caused it. You could have had a power dip (or whatever) that could have prompted this."

I would rate Nutanix technical support as 10 out of 10 because they are well-versed in the solution. I have had plenty of experiences with the support. If they don't know something, you are guaranteed within the next hour that they will learn it and get back to you. I've had plenty of experiences with them and the support is top level. 

Nutanix has a strong community called Test Drive, is a community forum for people who use Nutanix. If you have a problem, there is a whole knowledge based on everything. You just type the word and it brings up all the articles on that subject, giving you step-by-step instructions.

We previously used Microsoft Hyper-V and were on physical. With Hyper-V, if a shift was nine hours, then it took up four hours of time from the person who did server checks. This means logging onto every server, checking resources, CPU usage, space, and the events monitor. 

With Nutanix, there are no server checks anymore. You just log into your environment for ten minutes in the morning, then you get a report saying something like a VM is high on CPU usage and another VM is high on memory usage. You can then investigate those particular VMs. You don't really have to go through everything, due to the reporting on Nutanix's side. It shows you everything that you need to know about every server in your environment. 

I used to use HP 370s. If I had to do an update within HP, it would take me about five hours of work. This meant that I had to mount an ISO for set up, put my VMs in maintenance mode and then ensure afterwards that the maintenance mode has been turned back off, update my VMs, and then make sure that the software is working. Now, with LCM, we do an inventory check for available software and firmware. It updates without affecting our environment. I don't have to do anything. Nutanix does it for me, in terms of migrating VMs and switching clusters off from maintenance mode.

The initial setup was simple. You get a completely blank Nutanix environment. You just install your Nutanix software. You give it your IP addresses, communicate to your environment, and that is it. It is so advanced that it can take your whole Hyper-V environment and migrate it into your Nutanix environment via Move-VM. From that Move-VM, there is a communication point between Hyper-V and Nutanix so you can make a connection from your Hyper-V onto Move-VM as well as from your Nutanix onto Move-VM. So, you can pull all your VMs through with no downtime, which is amazing.

We bought it from a partner who supplied us with experts. 

It has saved us a lot to focus on other tasks since you can really let Nutanix run itself. Employees can focus on other projects, so productivity has increased immensely.

The pricing was quite competitive and a lot lower compared to other solutions. It wasn't cheap, but it was not as expensive.

You get many functions by just buying one solution. You don't need to continuously add in this or that, then next week you need to add more storage or space. Instead, it is always there. It is economical compared to other products. For example, HPE is all about add-ons. Whereas, Nutanix comes as a whole solution. They aren't coming up with a new monthly cost. 

If you send them an email, which says, "I would like to investigate the reporting of this tool where we monitor only the memory usage of the device." They don't come up with another story about, "Oh, that is an add-on service. You have to pay for that." It is a complete solution. You get everything at once.

There was a good pitch to move towards Nutanix. I was part of the panel. They were cost-effective compared to the other solutions that we looked at. 

We looked at Microsoft Hyper-V, Azure, and had VMware previously, but we disconnected from both those solutions. We had a 3PAR solution from HPE, so we also looked at them. However, Nutanix was the most economical solution and its functions were way above Hyper-V in terms of adding resources, monitoring VMs, reporting wise, and latency. Deduplication was the main thing that we looked at since file service plays a major role in our environment.

We did look a lot deeper into Azure. In fact, certain divisions of our business, from a head office level, started using Azure for more complex stuff, such as linking with Smartsheet. For the unit casino level, we all have Nutanix.

I have worked on Hyper-V quite extensively, but it doesn't come close to Nutanix. Nutanix has a completely informative dashboard to view your entire environment on one page. You don't need to go to a server, then pop up your resource monitor and have a look at whatever. Using Nutanix, you have a health page and homepage. Your homepage will give you your full description of the health of your environment. If you want to run a health check, then it tells you about your services, password checks, and VM utilization. That check runs for about five minutes, then it gives you the full rundown of your entire environment. From your home page, you can see everything in your environment. Whereas, with Hyper-V, you need to click on each cluster, then from each cluster, you need to look for your resources. That takes awhile. But, with Nutanix, it is quick.

I also like Azure, but Azure is a bit more complicated to use than Nutanix. From a user perspective, Nutanix helps the user. They don't complicate the user with 5,000 functions. If you get a good product, you just want to know what it does. You don't need to know where the info is from. Nutanix brings the full functionality to you, and everything works.

I would rate this solution as a strong nine out of 10. 

Don't look any further. Nutanix is second to none.

The main use case for Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is to create a hybrid cloud experience. It serves as a turnkey solution where we can add management features to get the same experience we have with an NCM Nutanix product on-premises, even if we run Nutanix in the public cloud.

I work for an IT distributor where we sell products for virtualization and data centers, with Nutanix being our main solution for this kind of business. We resell Nutanix for other companies from various industries or markets in Brazil.

The setup of Nutanix is very easy. The overall complexity of the solution is much less, and it's a solution that provides freedom of choice. We can run Nutanix on any cloud, on any hardware with any hypervisor. 

The cost governance features of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) are some of the most important features in this solution. We have features that help customers spend less on public cloud infrastructure. We have the observability of these costs, attribute quotas or chargeback policies, and with this kind of cost management, the expenditure of IT infrastructure in the public cloud could be significantly less so that the return on investment can be very relevant to companies that spend substantial money with the public cloud.

The console of the Nutanix solution has various reports that we can fulfill and use a SaaS-like solution for Nutanix that allows us to input our expenditure profiles of the public clouds and then compare that with the cost that we might have with the on-premise solutions. 

The main area that could be improved with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is the cost. This is a license that we can use as a complement for the NCI product, which is the main product of Nutanix. Here in Brazil, we have a total cost of ownership based on the NCI, and sometimes the NCM additions make the product a little higher when we compare it with the public clouds. We are much cheaper when we compare with the Broadcom vCloud solution, but not as competitive when we compare with AWS or Google when these kinds of solutions are built into the platform.

I have worked for about 10 years with the Nutanix portfolio: NCM, NCI, and NUS.

These solutions are already deployed in a high availability way with load balancing. Any problem with these machines does not compromise the structure of what we have built within. The solution has very high availability with no problems.

In terms of scalability, it is really high. The threshold is not about NCM; it's the size of your on-premises or cloud infrastructure. As long as your AWS or public cloud workloads can grow, the solution is already set up to manage it.

I would rate their customer service with Nutanix a nine out of ten. The support of the Nutanix team is great. The complexity of the matters might make it slightly lower, but even then, this is higher than the average of the market.

Positive

I have never used a similar solution in my company. I have only studied the solution from Broadcom.

The deployment of the Nutanix solution is instantaneous. These solutions are packaged in the Nutanix Prism Central that is a piece of software already deployed in the cluster. It requires only the setup of the policies that we want to have, the creation of the playbooks that we're interested in, and the setup of the cost profiles and the quotas or the project. The setup is already done when we deploy the Prism Central solution, which is a main managed solution for this kind of cluster.

Using NCM's built-in playbooks has freed up time for my IT team. We have saved more than 50% of the time. We can create the experience of scale-out and elasticity that we have in the public cloud, provide this to on-premises solutions, and it saves lots of time in micromanagement of the VM profiles.

Regarding the speed of outcomes from their low-code automation, some companies have longer cycles of deployment of applications of infrastructure, and time is money. Once we can deploy large solutions with CI/CD solutions and integrate a DevOps-like flow of production, we can reduce this time and accelerate the value of the solution for the infrastructure. Nutanix gives that with the turnkey solution. We do not have the complexity to assemble a CI/CD solution with open-source solutions or multiple products. This is a complete flow of work for DevOps, integrated even with the Kubernetes or containers infrastructures that can accelerate this kind of deployment significantly, varying with the profile of the company that utilizes it. My company is not a development company, so this does not have this kind of value since we do not develop, but I can see the value that this feature has for companies that build software in-house. 

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

We use the solution between different customers. Each has their own use case.

There's not one use case in particular. However, it does offer resiliency. The optimization and self-healing aspects are great. There are a lot of features. It offers a great infrastructure for our clients. 

The time savings is very good. It's one click to upgrade, for example. There's no interruption or impact, either. It's very simple. 

Its resilience and performance are excellent.

Using NCM's playbooks has helped free up our IT team's time to focus on other tasks. Sometimes, you can spend so much time writing your own playbooks, however, NCM has automation built-in that helps save time. Otherwise, we have to spend to save. If there are just two to five playbook executions a month, it doesn't make sense to write your own.

The learning curve is low. It's easy to learn and simple to use. It's very competitive in terms of ease of use. 

We haven't noted any features that may be missing. 

If they integrated more with GPT, that would be ideal. 

I've been using the solution for three years. 

All Nutanix platforms and products are stable. If there is an issue, it's due to the fact that someone didn't follow Nutanix best practices.

The scalability is very good. 

The customer support is amazing. It's the best support I've dealt with. When support is proactive and opens support cases on its own when it detects something wrong on your cluster, that's great. They'll email you and ask about your availability so they can fix the problem with you.  

Positive

We do not choose NCM on our own. We rely on our customers to pick the product and then we play with it, figure it out, et cetera. 

I am aware of their solutions. The Nutanix deployment, for example, is much easier in comparison. Configurations at the start are straightforward as well. It's got an easy setup. For a developer, it's easier to learn and code code blueprints. 

The setup is intuitive, and it's an easy solution to learn and use. 

Most of the time, it is deployed on-premises.

We provide our clients with the blueprints needed to ensure a successful setup. We tend to follow Nutanix best practices. 

We're a consultant. We do reselling and service. We have an expert in our company that can assist with the deployment. 

It's an affordable solution. However, it depends on the size of your infrastructure. 

We are partners, not customers. We're a dedicated Nutanix partner. We work with Nutanix based on our customer's needs. We're implementing and showing our customers how to use the product, and then we move on. We don't use Nutanix in our own day-to-day.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Positive

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.

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.

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

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

It is a part of our automation tool.

It has helped us with our automation. That is the biggest benefit of it.

It is quite easy to get started and be up and running. I would rate it highly in that aspect because you can create lots of things with a small amount of effort or in a small amount of time. These faster outcomes are important for everybody. We do not have any special needs for speed, but everybody needs speed.

Nutanix Cloud Manager’s built-in playbooks have freed up time for our IT team to focus on other tasks or projects. You set it up and then you forget about it, but it is hard to provide any metrics because we have some work to do to use it all the way. We are expecting to have about 20 hours a week of time savings when we are done. That is the expectation, and let us see if we end up there.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is a part of our automation, so it needs to be there. It is important.

I can compare it to Azure. Nutanix is way simpler to start with. It is simple to use. It is not a simple tool, but it is simple to use.

The ability to use the APIs and talk to it through APIs is the most beneficial feature for us because we have to do automation.

Its licensing can be better.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager for about two years.

It is very stable. We have been using Nutanix for 13 years. We have not had any downtime because of Nutanix.

I have not thought about it. If Nutanix Cloud Manager scales with your cluster as a whole, it is then good.

We do not have plans to increase its usage for this use case.

In general, Nutanix's customer service is good. It was better a couple of years ago, but we know that the company is growing. You can feel that as a user, but it is still good. When you get the right technician, you will always have things sorted.

We get the response on time. Sometimes, you might need to prioritize your ticket a bit, but it is working fine.

Positive

We did not use any other solution in the same way that we are using Nutanix Cloud Manager.

We are a heavy Nutanix customer, so we just ended up with it. Its ease of use was important because it made things easier.

It was easy. We did the trial and started using it.

We take care of the deployment. I am a consultant.

We have time savings, and time is money.

It is a nightmare to keep up with all the licensing. I would prefer everything to be at one price.

We evaluate a lot of things.

I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager an eight out of ten. I have not yet explored everything in it. I am not sure about everything it can do. It might be a ten, but I do not have that much experience with it to give it a ten.

We completely migrated all of our data centers from VMware to Nutanix. We were running a hyper-converged infrastructure based on HPE systems. We chose the full Nutanix stack because of the level of performance and the availability. There was the robustness of the systems, and it also looked simpler to manage than VMware.

The system is more robust now. In terms of performance, some users mentioned performance improvement for some legal applications without having to touch anything.

When it comes to faster outcomes, we are not dealing with projects that need to be delivered to the market very fast, so that is not the most important point for us. Nutanix does help us with our DevOps operations. We can support our development teams in a better way by providing them with resources faster than before. We have completely automated the provisioning of Linux systems that are used to host web applications. We are better than before.

Its ease of use is very important because the team is limited in capacity. We wanted a good partner to support us. One concern before migrating to Nutanix was that the community is less developed than VMware. Now that we have migrated, it is not a concern anymore. Nutanix was able to live up to our expectations.

There is less management for the team than before, so there is a complete gain of time. It freed up our staff's time for other work. This is something that is important for our company. We have 130 people in our company, and my IT infrastructure and operations team has six people, including two people for the service desk. We do not have many system engineers or network engineers, so the more we can gain on basic tasks, the more time we have for the projects or to improve our different solutions. We are able to save 10% to 15% of the time or at least one infrastructure engineer's time.

The web interface could be improved at some points.

We are currently facing one issue regarding management. We have two clusters supported on different sites with synchronous replication. The central point of management must be completely deployed on a Nutanix system with a witness. That is something that should be improved in the future.

The other issue that we are facing is related to integration. There is a lack of integration with our Veeam backup solution. It is not very well integrated with that, but this issue is not completely on the Nutanix side.

We migrated to Nutanix last summer. It has been almost one year.

It meets our current needs. I would rate it an eight out of ten for that. In terms of future expansion, when we migrated last year, we already planned for the resources. We are okay for the next three to four years. We may install a new cluster next year on a third site.

Their technical support is excellent. They are easy to approach, and their action time is very fast. For all the priority cases that can impact production, I can directly contact my local Nutanix team. Within 20 minutes of opening a case, we get a message.

We did not use a similar solution before, so I cannot compare it with others, but it is easier than what we were doing before.

We are using only the Azure cloud. We deployed the new infrastructure in parallel to the old one. We interconnected everything. The migration lasted two weeks. In two weeks, we migrated all of our virtual machine servers from the development environment to the production environment.

It was a very simple process from Nutanix's point of view. We also moved to new firewall technology in parallel. It took two weeks because we were retaining all the firewall policies at the same time. If we had to move only from VMware to Nutanix, we could have done the job in one night for 1,200 virtual machines.

Its price is correct.

There was a competition with VMware for the virtualization part and with different types of vendors, such as Cisco, HPE, etc.

I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager an eight out of ten. Some interfaces can be improved, but its performance is perfect.

We 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, so they can have a Nutanix cloud cluster inside one of the big hyperscalers. With NCM, 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. 

Nutanix 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." 

Nutanix 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. 

Nutanix 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 Nutanix 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. 

Nutanix Cloud Manager's low-code automation features are excellent. We previously used vRealize Automation, which requires considerable effort to do simple things. With Nutanix 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 Nutanix 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 Nutanix 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 Nutanix 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 Nutanix 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. Nutanix Cloud Manager is a delight to set up. It takes a few clicks to deploy out of Prism Central. 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 Nutanix 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 NCM, which enables us to work smarter. 

It's always difficult to discuss Nutanix Cloud Manager 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 Nutanix 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. 

The primary use case for Nutanix Cloud Manager is to distribute the workload for the infrastructure. It is used for virtualization and integrates with the front end to provide cloud features as a private cloud to the development and operations team, leading to less management overhead for the administrator team.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is a stable product compared to other vendors. It is beneficial for integrating with the front end to provide cloud features as a private cloud to development and operations teams. This reduces management overhead for the administrator team, allowing the end users to directly access features and reducing integration time.

The file server is the best feature because it supports different vendors such as Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware without locking with a specific vendor. Nutanix is a stable product with fewer limitations compared to competitors like VxRail. It is beneficial for integrating with the front end to provide cloud features as a private cloud to development and operations teams. This reduces management overhead for the administrator team.

The product could be more flexible with plugins. Quick resolution of disconnection issues and errors in plugins is crucial. Sometimes plugins are not working well, and the resolution time is too long.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager for around two years.

It is a stable product. Bugs, glitches, and downtime are minimal. I would rate the stability a nine out of ten.

Scalability is good, and I would rate it a ten.

Technical support is good. I would rate it nine out of ten.

Positive

I used VMware VCF before, but it was not as flexible compared to Nutanix.

The initial setup was moderate. It required some understanding of clustering, so while it was doable, it was not very easy for every user to undertake.

The deployment involved around ten people.

Setting up Nutanix Cloud Manager has saved a significant amount of time. Compared to VMware, the setup time was reduced by about twenty percent.

The pricing is moderate. It is not cheap or expensive.

I used VMware VCF before, but it was not as flexible as Nutanix. I also considered VxRail.

I would give Nutanix Cloud Manager a seven out of ten. The complete solution is overall good, but some improvement is required, especially with the flexibility of plugins and disconnection issues.

We use the solution to automate the business processes for our customers.

For our customers, the solution is an added value to their environment. It helps them automate critical processes instead of doing them manually.

The solution provides the best automation features.

They should include more use cases for automation in administering the environment.

We have been using the solution for two years.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

The support team’s response time is good. Although, it depends on the criticality of the issue.

Positive

We have used PowerShell and Orchestrator before. In comparison, NCM provides better integration.

The solution's initial setup is straightforward. There is a lot of documentation and webinars on Nutanix's portal to learn the implementation process.

The solution generates a return on investment. There is no need to appoint a resource as it automates the processes.

The solution is expensive.

NCM provides faster automation than manual operations. Its maintenance is less time-consuming due to the high availability of its infrastructure. In addition, it saves a lot of time as there is no need to generate reports and alerts. We can just read the insights data on the dashboard. It helps our executives to concentrate more on projects instead of operations.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We're using Nutanix Beam and Flow. They are the cloud cost governance and cloud security governance products, but they may have different names now.

We're a large university. We have hundreds of cloud accounts in all three of the vendors: Microsoft, AWS, and Google. This product allows us to look at all of them with one dashboard and do a lot of pricing and cost work across them with one dashboard for the finance side. For the flow side also, it has a lot of good tools for AWS and GCP but not as many for Azure. As a big university, we use it to protect ourselves and keep ourselves safe while we're using the cloud.

We also have this other thing called cloudbank.org. So, we have two different licenses with Nutanix. One for CloudBank, and one for the University of California, San Diego. The CloudBank one is all about researchers from all over the country. We have about 115 different researchers there doing all kinds of things.

We saved a ton of money by having awareness of how we're spending. We can see where we were spending incorrectly.

We haven't done much automation with it. We have some automated reports on a monthly basis that are very useful for billing. There are also automated security checks and flows, which have helped us stay safe a number of times. We had one instance a couple of weeks ago where somebody opened up a public S3 Amazon storage folder to the internet. They shouldn't do that, and it told us.

The way it aggregates all the accounts and lets me do math across all the accounts, even across multiple vendors or multiple cloud providers, is valuable. The other part is Chargeback. We use that to validate our bills.

Some of the UI is a little clunky. They do listen when I tell them about this, but one thing that drives me insane is that it defaults to a cumulative view of how much you've spent, as opposed to day-to-day. Even when you've selected day-to-day, you have to turn off a cumulative switch. They've done some work on fixing that in the UI, but I don't know why they're thinking that way and why they think people would want to look at it that way.

The one thing I wish it had was that it worked more closely and more cleanly with custom data inputs, which I know is a lot to ask.

It could probably have a nice warning page for all the things. Not for me, not for the big administrator, but for all my users to whom I give accounts so that they can look at their own things. It would be helpful if they had a landing page that just said, "Hey, you're losing money here. You're possibly losing here or there." It expects you to have a certain amount of knowledge of what you're doing when you first come in. It does have a dashboard, but it's very esoteric. Something just right on top that says "You're bleeding cash right here," and a graphic would be nice.

If I want to set up a new account, there's no API. It's all done by hand. It would help us in the deployment of new users if there was a new user API that we could call with a program, as opposed to doing it by hand.

We would like to be able to report how busy our machines are so that if a machine has been sitting there idle all week, we should turn it off. Sometimes, it's not just how busy the processor was, it's also about how much RAM was being taken up when that thing was running. Often, it can run low CPU and high RAM, and we still have to keep it running because of that. There is this arcane workaround to get that to work by installing something special on the individual machines one by one. Deploying that way is very arcane. I wish there was a better way of doing that. It seems it works with CloudWatch, at least on AWS, or CloudTrail, to do it, but I don't know for sure. They probably would've done it if it was easy, but it would help a lot if, in the deployment, it also was aware of memory usage, not just CPU usage by default.

We've been using it for about three years. 

Its stability is very good. In three years, we have had one actual outage, and maybe two or three data outages from something we need to do ourselves. We haven't had many problems on that end at all. They've been doing some interesting things with the user database backend, which threw us off for a little bit one time. It was to get some features done that I wanted, so I don't care.

Its scalability is great. That was the whole reason we bought it. It was the fact that it can handle so many accounts at once, all in one dashboard to get to things. It's great.

We have 40,000 students and almost the same amount of staff. The University of California is the largest employer in the State of California. We work mostly with UC San Diego itself, but we also work with CloudBank in the National Science Foundation (NFS) to give out awards for cloud usage for researchers from all over the country. It is a big academic, an R1, with about two billion a year in research and other things. 

I would rate their support a 10 out of 10. They really care, and I appreciate it.

Positive

We had spreadsheets, Perl scripts, and things like that. 

It's a SaaS deployment. You just log in and go. It would help us in the deployment of new users if there was a new user API that we could call with a program, as opposed to doing it by hand, but everything else is just web-based. So, it's very easy to deploy.

Its initial setup is very straightforward. There are only a few bits of information you have to give the system for it to go and start looking at your stuff. You need to provide some information or some permissions, and then you can go. That's great, but one caveat, which is not Nutanix's fault but Microsoft's fault for how they license, is that it could be a little arcane, although their wizards walk you through it very well. I only had to get help once on that, and then from then on, I knew what I was doing going forward. There are about six or seven screens of details that you have to put in and pull from this place, and this place, and this key, and that key, but that's the cloud. That's not Nutanix's fault. The fact that we could get it to work is great. It's hard to say standards because nobody is setting standards here, but there are some conventions that they follow which are really nice.

It doesn't require any maintenance. They do it. They take care of all the backend.

We used a reseller for the purchase but not for the implementation. We did the implementation ourselves. Nutanix was great. The reseller was great. They're both focused on what they should be focused on. One of the great things about Nutanix is that they have Slack. We've set up a Slack channel for them there. We could talk quickly about problems that were happening. They also have their India team on Slack. I can't talk to them in real-time, but with about a 10-hour lag, by the time I get up the next morning, they've answered pretty much everything I've had a problem with. In terms of responsiveness, that has been helpful.

We have certainly seen an ROI. There have been cost savings, and when people know we're watching, that also helps keep the costs down.

We've got some very good deals on it. We have very active resellers in the middle who've done a good job of keeping us at a good price. Nutanix is treating us really well because we're academics, and they want people to use the product. I do give a lot of feedback on what they've done. Before COVID, I used to do a lot of talks for them as well.

Its acquisition and support cost isn't any harder or easier than others. We have a good sales team, and I appreciate that good resales team in the middle that takes care of us and pays attention. Its cost is reasonable. The features are very good. Once in a while, I talk to my friends who use CloudCheckr to see how we're doing in comparison. It seems Nutanix reports are a lot richer, and you can drill down more to where you want to go, but I haven't spent hours and hours in CloudCheckr.

Nutanix has been hinting at it a little bit that things are changing or changes are coming in terms of multiple tiers, but I'm not thrilled because I liked what I've had to work with so far, and I don't know where that maps into the tiers. I guess tier could work if I knew there were upper-level services I just didn't need, but if they're trying to tease more money out of us by isolating a few things in an upper tier, we won't be happy with that.

We evaluated other options. CloudCheckr was a pretty good product, but we didn't think we could work as closely with them as we have with Nutanix. They have been phenomenal to get changes made for things that we need to do. Especially because we're an academic institution, as opposed to a corporate, we flow a lot of credits and a lot of research grants. It does a lot of funky things to our financial data. They worked with us very closely on that to get it all done.

CloudCheckr is a fine product. A lot of the UCs do use CloudCheckr. We talked to them, but we weren't sure they could do the custom stuff that we wanted them to do, whereas Nutanix could do that.

We also looked at CloudHealth pretty closely, which is the VMware one. They got acquired. So, it wasn't useful to look at anymore. There was also one more that was a non-player. So, we've been keeping an eye on the space to see what's going to happen here. We thought somebody would buy Nutanix, but they're so big in some other ways that it hasn't happened yet. That was it. All these products are kind of the same, but it was also about the people we would work with. The Nutanix people we've worked with have been very helpful, and we knew that talking to them. So, we picked them.

In terms of the setup and ease of use, we did some testing on the VMware product, and it was a nightmare. The cloud setup in general, especially at an enterprise level, can be a real nightmare, but Nutanix and their engineers had a lot of experience with this. So, we were able to get through a lot of it that way. When we worked with the VMware product, it was endless meetings and back and forth. They were just not understanding where we were coming from. They also wanted to span VMware and cloud at the same time. We have very thick VMware instances here, which made it a lot more complicated than just looking at the cloud itself. For the most part, getting the VMware product set up was very difficult, whereas getting Nutanix set up was not difficult at all. It was difficult only when we started customizing it and hurting ourselves. Cloud is a mess anyway. So, I wouldn't expect anything to be easy, but once it's set up, it just works. It's not that big a deal. If it was really hard, I'd have a problem with it.

We don't use NCM to manage Nutanix and VMWare infrastructure. We only use it for vendor clouds.

We've done a little bit of work with their query language, and that's always very fast and very useful. These faster outcomes are pretty important, but I'm not expecting huge performance from a product like this. It's not like a hospital or something like that, but they are as up-to-date as the cloud providers can provide the data to them, and that's what matters to me. If the cloud providers were real-time, I would expect Nutanix Cloud Manager to be real-time as well, but it's not. So, it's perfectly fine for us.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.