Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

Whenever we face any challenges related to the movement of virtual machines from one cluster to another, we are using Prism Pro. It makes our life easy because with the help of the Prism Pro, we can manage the movement of virtual machines between clusters. We can validate and do complete health checks of physical hosts and logical hosts, as well as of the complete compute storage and other components. All those are converged and are a part of a single solution. With the help of Prism Pro, we are able to simplify our operations and administrative tasks.

It is deployed in an on-premises data center. Both data centers have a couple of pairs of clusters, and the clusters are interconnected, just like the data centers are connected. Both clusters are replicated between themselves to have their data synchronized and updated so that in the event of a failure in one of the data centers, the other data center can take over.

Its top benefits include:

• Time savings
• Simplification of operations
• Environment stability
• Application accessibility

We can assess the performance and the capabilities of the host. We can initiate sessions, and we can evaluate those sessions with the help of the Prism Pro dashboard, which helps with capacity planning. We can forecast our capacity planning, and we have complete infrastructure visibility through the dashboard to get an understanding of how to utilize our hardware and applications in a better way to gain maximum performance. It helps with ROI and achieving long-term goals. It also increases employee productivity and workforce satisfaction. 

It saves cost. After using this solution, we have clear-cut savings of more than 40%. It also saves time.  We were able to see the results within 45 days from the time of its deployment.

It simplifies the administration and reduces human errors. It simplifies operation by providing a single dashboard. It also encourages the use of more automation.

Its integration with third-party tools is very easy. We have complete visibility. We can very nicely use the solution in our ITSM model. We are using third-party tools from different vendors for more insights, and with the help of automation, we are able to do application optimization, alert optimization, etc.

We are using it to manage VMware and Nutanix. The important part is that we don't have to depend on a multi-vendor management prototype. We can extend support to third-party vendors as well.

It reduces our overall power consumption. We follow the go-green environmental approach. We like to utilize the resources in a more efficient way. With this solution, we are able to save power.

The fact that NCM is sold as one product with multiple tiers is very important for us. A single-vendor solution is easy to manage. A heterogeneous type of environment is very difficult to manage because we require different types of skill sets, and managing the solution becomes more complex.

We are using Prism Pro, and the features related to the reporting capabilities, health checks, and automated alerts to Nutanix call-home are very important. We are using it as a management and reporting tool, and we are able to get a complete overview or summarized form of clusters that we are using in the production.

It has been helpful for forecasting and planning. It has also been helpful for analytics. With the help of this solution, we can have a better understanding of how much storage we are utilizing and how many processes are currently in use. Based on this information, we get a better understanding of how much expansion we need going forward, which is very important because ultimately it saves cost. It simplifies operations and helps with more revenue and productivity. It brings stability to our production environment. With the help of forecasting and capacity planning, we can achieve all of our long-term organizational goals. 

It is more cost-centric as compared to other solutions. It provides us with a holistic view of all the applications that we are using, and the most important point is that everything is converged. It is a one-box solution. It fits well with our requirements, and we are happy to have this type of solution in our production environment.

For Nutanix, there are options to go with different types of hardware vendors for using the AOS operating system. We can deploy it on Dell, Lenovo, or IBM servers. If Nutanix had its own server, it would be good.

We have been using this solution for the last two years. We have been using the Nutanix Cloud Manager version for the past several months.

There have been no issues related to its stability. We haven't faced any challenges in our deployed solution. On a periodic basis, we receive notifications from Nutanix about any vulnerabilities. Whenever a vulnerability is identified, we immediately get a notification to apply a patch and fix it. The system is up to date, and there are no vulnerabilities. It is stable, and we haven't faced any challenges in accessing applications. The overall performance related to the CPU memory, IO processes, and storage is at an optimal level, and we don't have any challenges. We are good.

In terms of scalability, it is very flexible. There are no challenges. It is a highly scalable solution, and expansion and migration are very easy. Everything is good.

Their technical support is excellent. If we need any support, they have 24/7/365 support. There are multiple ways to reach the support, and we get immediate assistance. In case of any criticality, they are able to manage the issue. They were able to resolve small, moderate, and high-level issues in a quick manner. We didn't face any issues related to escalations or unavailability with them.

Their knowledge is wonderful. Their technical teams are well-equipped in terms of skills. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

Before this deployment, we were not using any similar solution.

It was straightforward because there was no migration or extension involved. We were using the solution as a first-time solution. So, everything had to be put in place new, and everything went well. We didn't face any challenges in terms of setup, deployment, and support. The deployment went well in a simplified case-to-case manner, and the operations have been very smooth. It didn't take more than 60 days.

Apart from the post-sales training where our resources got trained by Nutanix, our technical team members are also getting trained on a regular basis. We have regular schedules for technical training of our teams.

Its acquisition and support cost is nominal. It is not too high, and it is not too low. It is within the budget, and there are no issues on that part.

We looked at solutions from Cisco, Dell, and Nutanix. That's all. We chose Nutanix because of the cost and also because of the complete package. It included a multi-year support contract, and it is an all-in-one-box type of solution.

It is easy to migrate and expand. Most of the things are web-based. So, it is easy for anyone to understand and stabilize the operations. Our applications ran very well on the platform during the PoC. They are running well now too. These were the factors for using this solution.

This solution is very unique for our office. No other vendor has this type of solution in place, even though they are claiming to have a converged solution. As per our understanding and observation, Nutanix has a unique and excellent solution in place.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10 because everything is stable, and we are able to achieve all of our objectives. We are happy customers.

It is to manage all my clusters. I have nine nodes, splitting six nodes on one side and three nodes on the another side. Prism Pro is the center to manage the whole cluster.

We have a nine node clusters. All machines are NXs from Nutanix. Our environment runs new development tools, like GitLab. DevOps are running inside of Nutanix and a few other systems. We are using Nutanix for new stuff to implement and test new technologies, such as DevOps, Kubernetes, Dockers, and Hadoop (in a few of the clusters for big data).

I am using the latest version.

Prism Pro can do everything that I need to manage my machines. I can manage my storage, priorities, and higher operations.

• The update for all clusters
• The Kubernetes solution for Nutanix
• Calm is a good tool for deploying critical blueprints. 

All these tools are managed by Prism Pro. With Prism Pro, you have the scripting tool where all functions are available through the interface and 1-click centralized upgrades. Though, you can do the same things by programming.

The tool's management for clusters is amazing and simple. It's quite simple to use it daily. With 1-click centralized upgrades, I can update my entire cluster using the data tech software from a single point in an easy way. It shows me that I have an update, then I just apply it, wait a few minutes, and all of the clusters are updated. It doesn't matter if it's a software update or something like bills. Everything is done from one central point. Also, the dashboard are really good. We have some relevant formations where I can see my cluster's CPU age, memory age, virtual machines, etc. All information can be viewed in an easy way, which provides me a cloud-like experience on an on-prem solution.

The dashboards also let me see the efficiency of my virtual machines, e.g., I can set it for a reminder to show me if there are any machines that are overprovisioned or constrained, then I can adjust the machines. In addition, I can create new virtual machines on any clusters from a single point of access. It's a pretty cool tool.

The interface is nice and simple. When the guys did the implementation, they told me, "They will walk me through on the solution and explain most of the important configuration tools." After that, I learned Prism Pro by myself. I never did a training or anything else. When the techs provide a new update, I take a look and see what's new. Sometimes I watch YouTube video from Nutanix with the new features, but it is really simple.

For now, my biggest problem in our corporation is the Nutanix hypervisor (AOS) is not fully operational for some things. We are only allowed to use VMware, but I use AOS. I think the Prism Center needs to include more functions. I know that they're including Nutanix Era, which is the database management and disaster recovery tools. I think that Era should include everything on a single tool where you can manage everything you need inside your organization.

It could maybe have better documentation. Nutanix does have really good documentation, but it could have more details in the future. 

Since 2018.

It's really stable. In two years, I never have had a problem with Prism Pro.

I do the maintenance.

It can grow with my environment. With Prism Pro, it manages your entire Nutanix cluster. If I add more clusters onto that, I can manage it from the Prism Center, I just need to redistribute the cluster, then I can manage it like it's one machine. It doesn't matter if I have two or 100 clusters, I can manage it from a single point, which is good. This saves me time because if I need to update (for example), I can update a lot of machines from 1-click. Then, it will go on each machine of the clusters and update them. I am saving at least 40 percent of my time managing multiple clusters from a single point.

I am using the solution’s machine learning algorithms for things like predictive capacity planning or other functions but I already sp;have good capacity inside of my cluster. I think if I create new machines, it is really good but I am not using it so much. I have enough capacity at the moment. For the tools on Prism, I'm not planning to create so many machines. However, I already do use the tool and the predictions are really amazing. It is really helpful for planning in advance (e.g., six months, one year, or two years) the capacity for the cluster. I can estimate what will be the capacity of my cluster. For example, if I am a planning for one year to create 20 machines with a specific size, the machine learning algorithms can show me if I have enough capacity on the cluster to do that or if I need to expand the cluster. 

Between my colleagues from the operations team and me, there are around six people using it. I'm the owner of the contract for this company as the infrastructure architect. The other five guys are Linux and Windows administrators.

The support quality for Nutanix is unbelievable. The normal way support works from some other vendors: If I open a web ticket, then I need to wait three to four hours for a first contact from the company. Normally, this contact will ask me, "What is my problem," and try to direct me to the right person, then need to wait more. A few times, an engineer talked with me and acted on the solution. However, with Nutanix, I open a ticket, and in five minutes, I am talking with an engineer who can solve my problem. 

It is a really good experience to call Nutanix support via the phone. E.g., I explained a problem that I was having, and they told me, "I don't know so much about this problem, but my colleague at my side does know it. Just a minute." They transferred the call to the guy, whom I talked to and he help me. When they are going to end the call, they only ask for my serial number of my cluster to open a ticket. This is just to register the case. Before this, I had never seen a company where you call, get the support, and after that, they create a ticket for you. Normally, with companies, you need to call to a call center who registers the calls, then sends them to the engineer. When you call to Nutanix, you talk with the engineer.

We are still using VMware vCenter for virtualization management. Unfortunately, many systems are managed by my colleagues from Germany, and we're located in Brazil. 

We brought on Nutanix because we were looking to improve our environment and boost its speed. We were also looking for a new solution/tool. We trust Nutanix, and especially like the cloud-like solution for on-prem. We have been happy with them.

It was really simple for me. When I purchased the hardware, I also asked for an implementation. I followed the implementation with the guys. It was one to two days. When we deployed the machines we needed to do some updates, after that the configuration was quite simple and fast.

For deployment, we needed to install the hardware, do the start up, connect all the cables, and build the network, then install the Prism Pro and all the software. This took two days for us to unpack and put in the rack.

Our implementation strategy was to install the rack and configure the system, then when it was up and running, deploy the machines. It all worked and was really amazing. 

Two guys from the vendor did the installation. I used a third-party integrator, Servex (a Brazilian reseller/partner of Nutanix), to implement Prism Pro for me because because they have some configurations hided in Nutanix. They configure every piece of the driver, etc. I preferred that a third-party company do the implementation for me and I just follow up on all the activities.

Our experience with Servex was really good. Those guys really know the product and tools. The implementation went well.

We needed to install the hardware in two data centers. We installed in one location, then went to another location for install. However, this was a fast implementation.

I haven't fully recovered my investment.

If you compare a three layer solution, server, cell network, and storage to Nutanix, the prices are quite similar. However, if you take a look at the whole environment including the management, Nutanix has a better cost when compared with other solutions, especially because it's hardware. 

Nutanix has good central management tools where one guy can manage the entire system. Looking at other systems, I need a guy to manage the servers and another guy to manage the cell network and storage. I need a bigger team for other solutions compared to Nutanix where I can use a small team and reduce my operations to manage the cluster. Sometimes what you hear with this solution is, "It is so expensive," but the cost and benefits that Nutanix has inside are really good.

When I purchased the cluster, I could use the Nutanix hardware or purchase Dell EMC hardware using Nutanix software. However, when I purchased Dell EMC hardware in the past, if I needed some support, first I would need to call to Dell EMC and they would need to see if it's a hardware or software problem. If it's a software, then the issue is for Nutanix to resolve. This is the reason that when I purchased the solution, I purchased the hardware from Nutanix. I wanted to have the full support experience from Nutanix. I have been really happy with them.

I did a small evaluation of HPE SimpliVity and Dell EMC VxBlock, but I did not like these two tools. I preferred Nutanix because the scalability is better than the other two solution. It also has a better hardware solution that is simpler to use.

While I know that VMware has some hyperconversion tools like Nutanix, the problem is the licensing cost for VMware. For a hyperconversion system, Nutanix has a better solution than VMware, especially if you take a look at the costs.

I only use the Calm automation feature where I can create machines, but only inside my clusters. Its codeless approach to automation is amazing and good. It does some automated tasks on drag and drops. It also provides you the power to adjust scripts and the code so you can do more than the basics. Specifically in Calm, admins can confidently set up automation rules. In the Prism Pro, we have the CLI tool where you can deploy a machine and administration cluster over command line. Basically, you can create your automations on your own without using a DB. This provides us with a single tool for monitoring automation.

I would rate this solution as a 10 (out of 10). I really love this solution. It is excellent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We leverage virtualization most of all. Prior to this, we had 5 virtual hosts using 4 SANs and dedicated network resources. Our back up solution for this was also a bit clunky as we had to back everything up daily so we had a disaster recovery in the event that we lost a SAN due to hardware failure. Our hardware had aged us and was in need of replacing. Having 4 nodes in our cluster allows us to have replication and if 1 node fails that is no data loss but in an entire san fails that falls into disaster territory

Prism Pro has given us a central administration of our entire virtual environment. Everything can be managed and updated through Prism. Being able to turn features on and off with one slide of the mouse is such a great feature. It allows us to manage storage and containers as well as the actual machines through one pane of glass. No need for any additional software. Pulse is in my opinion is one of the best features. Having the cluster monitor itself and notify support of any issues is a plus plus. 

Customizable Dashboard allows each admin to have things the way they like. Admins can just add the features they use most and remove the ones they don't. Alerts and tasks are easy to see and access.

Capacity Runway which shows us behavior trends. We can analyze trends from the past and predict future growth. It can also address potential capacity issues in the future based on past growth. This also includes the VM behavioral learning engine which allows us to plan for future growth at the single VM level. This is helpful in preventing over or under-provisioned VM's

I would like to see a P2V feature like Move or Xtract. The interface for migrating from one VM infrastructure to another is one of the best but going from a physical machine to a Nutanix VM is a bit too challenging. Especially if you are migrating a busy SQL server to Nutanix. No matter how you convert this you will lose transactions done during the actual migration. This can also be a bit challenging when trying to upload the disk images after converting the disks P2V. Uploading is primarily done via a browser. Most browsers cannot upload files in the TB area. There are ways but nothing straight forward. This really needs to be addressed in the future. 

I have been using Nutanix Prism Pro for almost three years.

We used a different product but the annual was adding up and our equipment was due for replacement. Nutanix was a little expensive for the initial outlay but when added up over a few years in made financial sense.

The only advice I give people is to make sure you understand your support contract with your vender. If you buy direct from Nutanix then you deal direct with Nutanix support. If you buy from a vender such as Dell you must go through Dell support. Then Dell support contacts Nutanix support and it gets a bit messy in my opinion

We were a VMware environment and looked at HyperV.

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.

I work at a distributor. We use it for partner-facing demos, and it has been really great. My mission is to help partners see the light with Nutanix, and that's where I use Nutanix Cloud Manager the most.

It's highly capable. In an organization, you can make it easy to use, but you still have advanced features. You're not simplifying or dumbing it down. You're still enabling an advanced user to design solutions and leverage the full product suite. It's highly capable, so you have that great ability to be successful for a lot of different users. You can have a very low-level, simplified user experience and you can also go advanced. In terms of organization, that's really key. As you get into hybrid cloud IT environments where there's a lot going on, Nutanix storage is very powerful.

The speed of the outcomes received using Nutanix Cloud Manager's low-code automation is very fast. The beauty of it is that because it's low code and no code, even as a beginner, I was able to go in and walk myself through it. I didn't need a lot of coaching or instruction to get there. It was fantastic.

In terms of the importance of these outcomes, it's not just about delivering an outcome. Anybody can deliver an outcome if you offer enough time, but delivering that outcome more reliably and faster enables that business to benefit a lot sooner. They then see the cost get lower. They see efficiency go up, and they start to really benefit from technology as opposed to seeing technology and IT in general as a cost center and as a liability.

It's awesome for helping teams address their current automation needs while planning for future expansion. That's because of the way that it enables a broad variety of users to accomplish what they want in a very efficient and simple way. It brings an iPhone user experience to IT, and that's a really powerful story right now.

The best part of it is that when you use the product, there's no secret proprietary magic that you experience as a user. The real genius is under the covers, so it makes the user experience very straightforward and easy. It's a wonderful solution to teach partners about. The ease of use is something a lot of suppliers talk about, but Nutanix does it better than anyone else.

Nutanix has room for improvement around the partner tools and making them approachable and easier to learn.

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

It's highly stable. I haven't had any issues. It's very easy to run, and it keeps running. I don't have to do much with it. That's the beauty of it.

The details around scaling, like Prism Central and scaling the resources, are highly technical and get highly specific per use case, but it's always scalable. You can always find the documentation very easily, and it's very straightforward to do so.

Their support is terrific and world-class. Nutanix always talks about their NPS scores, their success, and their commitment to customer service, but I've seen its boots on the ground level. People try to help me even if it's outside of their role. Ever since I stepped into this role, it's been a really wonderful surprise to see Nutanix try so hard to help us. I'd rate their support a ten out of ten.

Positive

I supported other suppliers in different roles. In my IT career, I worked with a number of different suppliers, typically more on legacy three-tier work, such as fiber channel attachment and the like. All those suppliers struggled to evolve to support modern workloads, and that's where I feel that Nutanix has always been ahead of the game. I chose this role to support Nutanix on purpose. It wasn't by accident that I ended up here.

I can't say that I had this same level of experience with the competitors. We are an HPE shop. We have a huge HPE presence, which is great, and I have experienced a few other hyper-converged providers. I've done some VMware training over the years, but I haven't really gotten my hands on them in the administrative sense. It's not as deep as with Nutanix.

Simplicity is a key function for helping a customer really benefit from technology. You can have technology for technology's sake, but suppliers are really stuck in a world that's proprietary. Even to navigate an administrative tool, you see a lot of proprietary terms, whereas a generalist can sit down and run Nutanix very quickly.

In my role, I didn't really decide on Cloud Manager myself, but in talking to partners and end users, it's a very strong consideration. There are a lot of competitors in the space that Nutanix plays in, so the value that Nutanix brings has to be superior in order for them to be effective, and, of course, they are. That goes back to simplicity and the efficiency that comes with it.

I was involved in its setup for our lab. It was very straightforward. We had some help from Nutanix. Nutanix is always falling all over themselves to help us, which is wonderful. It only took a little while. We just did it via a remote session, and it worked out great. I'm located in Minnesota. My lab is in Georgia. The help from Nutanix was in another place, and we had no issues at all. It was very smooth.

It's not necessarily from leveraging NCM or NCI itself just because of the way that it works for us, but our ROI is tied to our partners and to customers in a way. Their success is our success, and that's why we're gaining a lot of momentum with new partners. We're reactivating dormant partners and trying to broaden the Nutanix message. There are a few core partners that do it really well, and that's great, but we try to broaden things, and we have success with it.

For customers, the ROI is primarily around efficiency and simplicity. So as an example, Life Cycle Manager isn't just a great tool for updates and upgrades, it's a way to have happier staff. It's a way to give your staff weekends back, which is great for the staff. They're happy, but it also means you don't pay overtime. There's a win-win there. There's a great symbiosis if that happens when people adopt the technology.

I've never heard a customer ask for a higher price. Everyone says everything is expensive, and that's true. Nutanix is really smart to understand that the most important fact is the value to the customer, not the price tag. 

While you do get some sticker shock sometimes, as soon as you show this and you prove the value, all of a sudden, it looks exceptionally affordable. We've had wonderful success when we get a buying decision in front of an economic buyer, like a financial leader. They start to see the TCO benefits of Nutanix very, very quickly.

Sometimes it's about the little things. It's about what your experience is like and how much time you spend trying to learn how to use the product. It's about how much time and money is it going to cost you to understand their proprietary terms for things as opposed to having a generalist sit down and be off to the races. That can save a lot of hassle and frustration but also time and money. With these projects, it is important to get outcomes, get that workload deployed, and enable a business or a customer to focus on what keeps their lights on, which is probably not managing infrastructure. That's how I see it. 

I'd rate it a nine out of ten. There's always room to improve, but as far as what's on the market today, it's a unique value add.

We primarily use the solution for cloud management. We use it as a private cloud for internal client infrastructure. 

The most valuable feature of the solution is its simplicity. We have one panel from where we can see and manage all operations. This is very different from other vendors. The customer finds it very easy to work with.

They have a big community. 

It's stable and reliable.

The solution expands easily.

Support is extremely fast. 

I cannot recall any specific features that need improvement. 

Nutanix likely has a big backlog of requested features from their clients. 

We'd like the demos to be longer - maybe two to three months. Some clients need much more time for a POC. 

I've been using the solution for two years. 

The stability is excellent. We don't have any issues with the software. I'd rate the stability ten out of ten. The only issue we ever had was with an HP adaptor, not with this solution. It was a simple hardware problem. 

The solution is very scalable and very easy to scale. I'd rate the ease of expansion ten out of ten. We don't need a physical installation. The cloud makes it very simple. 

We work mostly with enterprise-level organizations. 

The technical support is very fast and easy to work with. They are helpful and responsive. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. I'd rate the ease of setup nine out of ten. It's very easy. We did need to do some specific configuration, and users do need some experience with web-based applications as they must be deployed via the web. 

The setup is very different from other vendors that tend to separate hardware, software, storage parts, et cetera. In Nutanix, everything is available in one window. 

We deployed the first time two clusters with ten others, and it took about one week. We did have a network team working with various solutions at once. 

The second time, we deployed with 11 nodes, and we managed to deploy in five to seven days. 

There were two people, engineers, that were managing the deployment process. 

Its pricing is okay. I'd rate the pricing six out of ten. We can make local payments in our country and avoid customs fees. If you have to buy hardware, you have to pay customs for the devices, and that can be up to 30% of the price. However, with Nutanix being on the cloud, you don't have to worry about that.

We are a solution partner and have existing customers. 

I'd rate the solution to others. They should buy it. It's very simple for modern infrastructure needs.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. 

I use the VM efficiency to figure out what services are over-provisioned. I've also been experimenting with the reports. In addition, I've been using it as a way of collecting all the data from all the different clusters into one portal.

One of the most valuable features is the hardware and how they have set it up to be pretty redundant. If something goes down, you can just swap it out and you're back online. If a drive or even a whole node goes down, it's pretty easy to get it back up and running.

Also, you don't have to actually mess around with external storage. Everything is in one complete package. The fact that the solution is sold as one product with multiple tiers is a seven out of 10 to me, on the important scale. If you get everything from one vendor, you have one place to turn if you have problems or if you need replacement parts. The whole "one-vendor" thing is pretty neat. Regarding the hardware, when you have everything in one package, everything is good to go. We haven't needed to purchase any other solutions for the type of automation this solution is intended for.

I've used the capacity planning and Runway analytics to help forecast storage and compute needs a few times, but just to check that we are a couple of years away from even having to think about it. It has been pretty good for helping our team address current needs while planning for future expansion.

I would like to see a desktop application for administration of the solution. That's the thing I missed the most. Other solutions have a client that you can install on your computer. You can actually connect to and do the administration from an application instead of using a web portal, which is what Nutanix provides.

We have been using Nutanix Prism Pro for a year and continued using it as Nutanix Cloud Manager Starter for the past several months.

I would rate NCM's stability at five out of 10. We started having problems with our nodes about two or three months after we started using Nutanix. We were getting errors. The IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) stopped functioning. After a long period of troubleshooting, we ended up having to send one of the nodes back for a deep root analysis. They had to send a replacement and try to figure out what the problem was.

I'm sure that kind of scenario isn't very prevalent among their other customers, but that has been our experience with it. We manage 10 nodes with the solution, and something like seven of them have had this problem.

The scalability of the solution is way better than anything else. Everything is plug-and-play. That part is pretty awesome.

Their tech support is pretty good overall. It depends on who you end up with. In about 30 percent of my cases, I've been lucky to get a person who speaks English very well and is awesome in every way, knowing absolutely everything. Every time that I get one of those guys, I instantly go into the survey they send, when they close the case, and praise them in the highest way.

If the English of the support person is worse than mine, or their vocabulary, pronunciation, or even the quality of audio is worse than what I have, it's pretty hard to get my meaning across. That has happened in about 20 percent of my cases. The person doesn't understand what I'm saying and I've been forced to escalate the case to get someone who has more knowledge and better English.

And in 50 percent of my cases, they have been totally fine.

Positive

We swapped out Hyper-V with products from Nutanix to try something else. It was time to upgrade and then Nutanix seemed like a good alternative.

When we ordered the solution, we had a pretty good understanding that we would get something where we could just plug in the network and power cables, turn it on, and it would be already set up in almost every way. We thought we were only going to need to do a bit of tweaking, providing IP addresses and the like. But what we got was pretty bare. There was nothing on them. We had to go through the whole setup with Phoenix.

We had to do it twice. The first time, one of our guys did everything and it seemed to be okay. But then the guys from Nutanix called and said, "No, we have to do this together because we want it to be set up the way it's intended to be." That's pretty fair. But the guys from Nutanix actually managed to mess things up in a huge way. So we had to set it up again. And that speaks to how complicated the setup is when you compare it to the other solutions.

I set up fully-functioning VMware and Hyper-V solutions a good number of years ago when I was young and didn't have as much experience, and both were no problem. But Nutanix is a step up regarding how complex it is.

You should get a hold of someone who is crazy good and then never ever lose their contact info. I have one guy now that I email every time there is something complex that needs to be done. If we are digging into config files that are deep within the OS, I always contact him because I know that he knows everything.

I have used Hyper-V with SCVMM. Part of that has some features that are similar to NCM, but they are different products with different features. I've also used vSphere from VMware, which has some of the same features, like the overall control over your VMs, data collection, and reporting.

Nutanix is pretty different from the others because it collects everything and displays it in a very nice way. To summarize the difference, you get the feeling that Prism Pro is new and more modern. The user experience and the user interface are more modern, and it's certainly easier to use.

The other side of that coin is that sometimes it fails. It's something like Mac and PC: If something fails on Mac, which doesn't happen very much, it's harder to figure out why. You might have to contact support and get them to fix it. A PC is harder to use, but if it crashes, it's easier to find out why. Prism Pro would be "Mac" and the others would be "PC."

Nutanix isn't as easy if you want to try to troubleshoot, at least not for me, because it's all based on CentOS. It's Linux-based. With Linux, it's easier to do things, but it's way easier to royally mess everything up if you make mistakes. You have to be pretty sure of your skills with Linux-based systems to try to troubleshoot things yourself. I've been using Nutanix a lot for a year now, and I'm just barely starting to get the hang of it.

The setup of Nutanix is harder than both VMware and Hyper-V, but Nutanix is the easiest to use among the three. However, the learning curve for Nutanix is pretty steep. The interface itself is pretty good and easy to use, but if you start working with the CLI, which you have to do somewhat frequently, it suddenly becomes way harder to figure things out.

Have we experienced increased uptime since we went to Nutanix? No, we haven't. It's pretty much the same with Nutanix as it was with Hyper-V regarding uptime. What has improved is the ease of use. And there is less cabling and fewer points of weakness.

We went big on the specs for the servers so when you have what feels like unlimited resources, you don't need to set up the whole automation part of it.