Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

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.  

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 work in the public sector, which includes local governments, fire departments, and transportation. The most interesting use case is that we have set up a private cloud with two sites where they are replicated, and from the same console, we have synchronous replication using 1M Ethernet. The RPO is zero.

Our clients like its simplicity. That is a great value. We moved from a three-layer infrastructure to a private cloud infrastructure. It has resulted in a lot of simplicity which is reflected in the availability of services.

Simplicity is the biggest value that we can see. This is super important for us because the technical team is dedicated to looking at the data and how to generate value for the business instead of worrying about the technology.

Using the built-in playbooks has freed up the time for our IT team. Instead of managing storage, CPU, and memory, they can dedicate their time to thinking about the needs of the business and attending to those needs. We have had clients who reduced their operations time by 60% to 70%.

Nutanix Cloud Manager helps your team a lot to address your current automation needs while planning for future expansion. You have a forecast of how your infrastructure is being used. This allows you to have visibility of what actions you should take to avoid reaching day zero. It helps you a lot.

Its installation is relatively simple. The administration is very intuitive. You have an HTML 5 interface that you can use on any device. I have clients who manage their infrastructure from their smartphones, no matter where they are. Its being very intuitive has helped us to deliver 4-hour workshops. We had an interesting case in the sector of transportation in Quito, Ecuador. A person who provided support and was with the help desk went on to manage the data center with just a 4-hour training. He went from being help desk support to being the data center manager, all with Nutanix. That easily gives an idea about its learning curve.

Nutanix Cloud Manager’s setup, learning curve, and ease of use were definitely important when deciding on a cloud management solution. In fact, we have been growing in infrastructure, and it has been maintained precisely due to the ease of use and small learning curve. It frees up time from the daily issues of looking at technology. The customers are happy and continue to grow.

Simplicity is most valuable because, with a single click, we have visibility of the entire infrastructure. We can focus more on the availability of services instead of being aware of the CPU, memory, or hard drives. With one click, we can see the availability of our services.

The interoperability with different clouds can be better so that one can even integrate the infrastructure of different clouds. They can interoperate better with other clouds because currently, you have to buy Nutanix resources in the cloud.

It has been four years as partners and service providers for our clients.

Its stability is very good. We did not have any issues for which we had to stop our services.

It is a very important aspect of Nutanix solutions.

It is efficient and fast. It is in Spanish, which is an advantage. There is always the option for technical support in Spanish.

Positive

In Ecuador, Nutanix began to introduce itself in 2016 in such a way that the customers moved from traditional infrastructures to Nutanix right away.

We have both kinds of deployments. We have clients who have private clouds, and then we have clients who have hybrid clouds. Our clients use Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

As a company, we do the implementations autonomously. It is simple. I do not personally do it. Our technical team does it. We can do the deployment or migration of about 15 to 20 virtual machines in four hours, so investing about four hours to move an entire legacy data center solution to a Nutanix Infrastructure is more than fine. 

We have an implementation strategy. We follow the best practices. We have a trained technical team, and they follow the objectives.

If you compare it with a traditional model or with a native cloud, then definitely the best alternative is to make an investment in Nutanix solutions. The return on investment varies depending on what you compare it with. In Ecuador, in the public sector, they force them to buy a three-year licensed solution. So, if you compare it to three years with traditional or cloud-native infrastructure, the Nutanix solution is definitely a winner.

For Ecuador, this is a sensitive issue. It is a small economy, so the issue of budget is very sensitive. You find many small businesses and government clients who do not renew, for example, support or guarantees, which raises the risk level for them. We are always advising them that it is necessary to renew the services or infrastructure.

We evaluated many solutions before switching to Nutanix Cloud Manager. However, once the customers get to know Nutanix, they always prefer to stay with the solution.

Our customers choose Nutanix for the experience. Our customers have stayed with Nutanix because they did feel a change before and after. Before Nutanix, managing storage required time and working on weekends outside of business hours. Having to shut down the services to make firmware updates of different components of the data center was an issue. Now they can do this during business hours without the risk of services being unavailable.

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

We wanted to optimize our process. We were going into a cloud architecture, so we wanted to see how we could leverage the existing Nutanix framework instead of manually managing the servers. 

We currently have a physical VM set up. We had slowly wanted to migrate to the cloud. Since we are already using Nutanix, my senior architect gave me some access to play around with the solution and explore how we can deploy code as a platform as a service instead of writing our own scratch code. If we want to use it as an independent platform in the future, and as a core developer, I wanted to write code to make sure it is interoperable in any of the cloud services we might use.

The scaling is good. We now have dynamic scaling and other scaling policies set up.

In a physical server, we have to define our items upfront, and then we are stuck. With this solution, we can increase it dynamically and define the threshold, and auto-enhance the features. 

We cannot say the traffic is always the same. Over the weekends, it's slow. Over the weekdays, it's higher. They gave us some configurations so that if it is idle, we run on one part, and if there is more traffic, we can run on multiple parts.

The local automation is good. We've seen a huge improvement in our code. I personally worked with the performance teams to compare the product with old physical VM architecture versus the cloud architecture, and I see the difference. I was not able to break it. It was very scalable. While my physical VM crashed at some point in time, the cloud ran fine.

It offers high availability and consistency. We have a lot of batch jobs running and handling that data, so we need a pretty good service. Instead of horizontally scaling, they are scaling vertically. 

I like Cloud Manager from AWS more based on the handling of the UI. This solution could be more user-friendly. The UI could be better. It would be nice if it offered a simple GUI where we would have one view.

We'd like the solution to be a one-stop shop. We have a requirement of having a single GUI setup. Nutanix is like an ocean. We'd like everything tied all together. 

We've used the solution for a couple of months for running some POCs.

The solution is very scalable, and we like the configuration options. You can pick and choose. You don't just have a standard way of doing things. It's pretty dynamic. 

I have not had a chance to speak with support. Our infrastructure team manages to troubleshoot items. 

Recently, we have had one physical server managed by Nutanix that had a snapshot issue (in that the server was not taking snapshots for two months). It's a production server. They sent us a proactive email. There was pretty smooth communication in that regard. They did have pretty quick support for that issue. They are rebuilding the image and archiving the data based on the fact that there are backup issues. That said, when it comes to production servers, they should have a 24-hour turnaround and not 72 hours. Support in these cases has to happen fast. 

Positive

I previously used AWS Cloud Manager in my previous organization. Currently, based on the sensitivity of the data, we are moving to a hybrid approach. Many are still using physical VMs. In my new organization, a lot of my team is already on Nutanix. We were the first team to head into the cloud, and I was handling the project. 

The setup is pretty quick, like all the clouds. The ease of use could be improved a bit more. There is pretty good documentation that helps make the learning curve smaller. My approach is to go to the documentation first before jumping in. The person I was working with provided good information, and we built our own documentation on top of that as well. 

As an application team, it was easy to implement. Maybe it was easy since we didn't get into too much complexity. The APIs are playing a good role. The configuration is pretty straightforward. 

I did not handle the pricing or licensing aspect of the project. 

I did not evaluate other options. We are only licensed for OpenShift and Nutanix at this point. 

We use OpenShift on top of Nutanix, and all the physical servers are cloud servers, and they are all managed by our team. 

As for the built-in playbooks, I haven't done much exploration. One of my team members did more work in this area. He helped me and did all the configuration. He explained what he was doing. However, I was not involved in the playbook at all. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It needs to be easier to use. However, it is improving. The market has shifted. A lot of companies are trying to get in. Yet Nutanix is doing a great job in collaborating with so many organizations. It's going to provide us with a one-stop solution that helps us avoid running around between vendors. 

I would advise people to read the documentation. That will definitely help. It's pretty sophisticated. Reading the documentation and following up with Nutanix support will keep you from stumbling into the process blindly. Get in touch with an account manager. They can help you understand the requirements first and then look into your options. If you have an expert that can guide you, you won't be wasting too much time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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