Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

One goal was to automate things. We had a lot of tools, but we needed a centralized tool. Calm helps us to centralize the deployments of our VMs. 

We have a subsystem installed on Nutanix and we have blueprints for setting up this subsystem very easily. Also, for Kubernetes clusters, we use now CaaS from SUSE and we also create Kubernetes clusters with Calm. Our strategy is to make blueprints for all the virtual machines environments. It's an ongoing process.

Our first project was to create subsystems. This was really an accelerator because we have three environments and over 50 machines. Once we had a sub-template, it was very easy to migrate to Nutanix, to set up a system. Before Nutanix it took days and now it's maybe one or two hours. It's really fast when you use these templates. It creates all the preconditions for an installation. And with that, we were really able to move the system very quickly to this new platform.

The solution automates application management to a single platform, but we're still working on it. 

Our goal is the standardization which Calm makes possible. It's important, from a strategic point of view. We would ultimately like to achieve "infrastructure-as-code" so that we can always create an environment as it initially was. It would be like Kubernetes or container-based where you can destroy something and build it again and it's like it was before. When you have a platform where you can automatically create things, you are sure that nobody will manually change something in it. It's all managed with this framework, and you are sure that when when you need to create the same system it will work, because it is all scripted. The whole "cookbook" for making that machine is there. This is also a requirement: that nobody goes on a virtual machine and installs something manually. It must be scripted with Calm. That gives you insurance that you can build the same system again. For us, that's really the future: infrastructure-as-code. 

This is also a good way for creating the same machine on the cloud, or wherever you want, and to be assured it will run because the building of the machine is in the script.

Also, the solution’s support for scripts, API, and domain specific language has reduced the IT man-hours to deploy and support applications. It's hard to estimate how much time it has saved us, but I would say around 60 percent. We are new on the Nutanix platform and we have not created a lot of the blueprints ourselves. Another company helped us to accelerate that. We went into production with it last year and we see the capabilities that Calm gives us.

Before Calm, we didn't have a specific tool for orchestration. We had some templating things, but they were spread out over various technologies. Now, we have one, centralized solution to manage all the VMs that we have. This is the strength of Nutanix, that you have one starting point where you can do everything. You have all the tools in one platform. Before, we had one tool for this process and another tool for that process. It's helping us a lot.

Calm has also enabled us to react faster to the changing needs of our business. That brings me back to the subsystem I mentioned earlier. We were thinking we would need more time to migrate it, or that we might need to create a sandbox system for testing. But with the subsystem, it was very quick. Calm helped us a lot to make it happen. 

Also, when it comes to cluster systems, we work with the open source version of Couchbase. It's very easy to create a Couchbase cluster. Similarly with Jenkins, we have blueprints for DevOps. If they need a Jenkins environment, we can easily scale out for our Jenkins workers. It really makes life easier because we have a GUI and can scale out. We can say, "Okay, we need two more slaves," and it happens. It really accelerates things.

The scripting, where you can use libraries, is a valuable feature. We don't really make the blueprints, as we have a third-party company that makes them for us. But it enables calling APIs in the blueprints. When we create a machine, we use IPAM from Infoblox and we can get an IP address. It's one platform to script and we can then use all the APIs to complete the scripts. It gives us a central management tool from which we can do a lot of things automatically.

Also, it's easy to use, overall. I'm a Linux guy, so a lot of it is familiar to me. I feel comfortable when I use it. It's not really hard or complex.

And when you have applications that can run on more than one machine, you can easily use blueprints to scale out the infrastructure. You can start with two web front-ends, a web service and then you say, "Okay, I need a third one and a fourth one." This is very easy. It's one click and you can scale it, but you must also script it. It only gives you the framework to do that. So for performance, you can use Calm to scale out and scale in.

But the Nutanix platform also helps you find out if you have some performance problems or oversized machines. But to resize it, it's more that you would use playbooks in Nutanix for that, and not Calm.

It's also a very good tool for team collaboration, but in our use case we don't use Calm for that. We are not that big. We create the machines or the application; it's not that we deploy services so that another service can deploy their machines. We are still centralized, in that sense. With Calm, you can do this: With the templates, the services that need new VMs can make their own VMs, but we do not have this requirement for now. It's only used by the IT team here, which consists of 30 people.

As I mentioned, we use now CaaS from SUSE; it's SUSE's Kubernetes. But it's now changing. They have bought Rancher and I think that CaaS will be replaced by Rancher. So currently, to manage a Kubernetes cluster we have SUSE. But with Karbon we can manage Kubernetes with Calm. But I don't don't know how much we can do with Calm there. There could be room for improvement, although I'm not entirely sure. It's on our agenda to look into Karbon in relation to Calm and what we can do with them together. I don't know how deeply they are integrated. It's not necessarily something that is wrong.

Karbon is a new product. It's been around for about two years. The integration is growing. Last year is when it started working with Calm. It's more a concept still. My wish is that it will really be supported, but I cannot say for sure.

Again, I'm not saying something is wrong here. I think it's a very good platform, but there is always room of improvement.

I have been using Nutanix Calm since last year. We started in 2018 with a proof of concept to go to a hyper-converged platform, and then we chose Nutanix.

The stability of Calm is very good. We have not had problems. We are enhancing our clusters now a lot because we did a proof of concept for two years and last year we went into production. We are really happy with the platform and we are really accelerating and enhancing it.

We are a company with 700 employees. In Nutanix's world, we are not a big player. I don't think that we are ever going to push the boundaries.

We are also using Nutanix Files cluster. We are also planning to go with Era, which is a SQL management platform on Nutanix. It's really that Nutanix is providing a platform strategy for us. We are replacing all the other virtualization infrastructure that we have with Nutanix.

Nutanix technical support is great. It's very fast. In the beginning we had an issue and they were very quick. The support team from Nutanix, compared to others, is amazing. They provide help really quickly. Support is really one of Nutanix's strengths.

We had some templates in XenServer, but they were more a type of predefined image so that when you installed it helped start the machine. We also had Salt scripting, but we didn't have tools to manage them. We are not a big company. We had something like 500 virtual machines and we had templating tools and a lot of manual tasks. So things were semi-automated. We had images for certain applications, but when setting up the machine, we had to manually finish the setup.

One of the drivers for us to go to a hyper-converged system was that we had a 3PAR SAN which went out-of-support. So we had to make a decision about whether to buy a new SAN or to go with hyper-converged where you can grow with the need. And this became one of our preconditions. We wanted a system that does not use traditional SAN. We liked the idea of hyper-converged.

We bought a little machine and did a PoC to see how Nutanix works. We already knew it was a good platform because we had heard good things about it. When we tested it, it was very good and very fast and fulfilled all our needs. That made the decision for us, that it was the right platform. It became a part of our company strategy. 

It was a good decision for us because now we can also replicate the whole cluster to the big cloud providers. You can have a Nutanix environment on all the three of the big ones. That means that we can buy a Nutanix cluster on Azure or Amazon cloud, for example. Then we replicate our cluster to that cluster in the cloud, and then we can switch over. With Nutanix, we can easily deploy a virtual machine in the cloud, but then we are using the cloud provider's functionality. But now Amazon, Google, and Azure make it possible to rent a Nutanix cluster. So if we replicate, and an airplane crashes into our building, we can switch over to the cloud. For us, that was also a statement that we were really going with a good platform. In Switzerland, a lot of big companies are using Nutanix now, well-known companies that are going hyper-converged.

For me, the initial setup of Calm was straightforward. It comes with Prism Central and Prism Central is a one-click installation, and then you have Calm. It's really easy. The whole Nutanix platform is really easy to manage and to update. When you have Prism Central, you have Calm already. You must buy the license for the blueprints, but it comes with Prism Central.

If you need cluster management, if you have more than one Nutanix cluster, you need Nutanix Prism Central and with Prism Central you have Calm.

Our deployment strategy is "one-at-a-time." We touch one system and make blueprints and then we go on to the next system. We migrate machines to Nutanix without a blueprint, but the goal is that—even though we have a lot of virtual machines and use cases, and this is an ongoing process—all the new projects, as well as when we touch an old project, will go over to a Calm blueprint, to make life easier. You cannot make that shift in one day.

Our overall strategy is to have Calm as a central tool to deploy virtual machines, with a requirement that nobody manually create virtual machines. There should be a blueprint first. 

There are times when it might not make sense, if you need just one machine for a particular use. It could be more work to make the blueprint. But I think it's worth making even these little machines as a blueprint, so that you can always create this machine everywhere, including the cloud, without documentation. And that's another point. As you know, when you write documentation, as soon as you're finished it's already old because things are changing.

We are still building our infrastructure, so it's early for us to look at return on investment. But there will be a return on our investment because we are not buying another SAN. We have saved a lot of money, because the SAN system is very expensive and also requires very expensive switches. So we are definitely ahead there.

Also, we had a lot of XenServers on hosts, and going with Nutanix allowed us to reduce the number of hosts. The new system is very performant and we don't need as much hardware to get the same performance.

In addition, although it has nothing to do with Calm, Nutanix helps by giving us a good overview of what is oversized or undersized. We can look at it and see, "Oh, this machine may be underused or overused," and we can free up resources. This is also an ongoing process. We see that a lot of machines are oversized and we can make them smaller. We save resources for other machines that way. But that part is Nutanix itself, through Prism Central.

Calm comes with Prism Central but you enable features by buying the license for them. You buy by the blueprint, how many blueprints you need to manage.

We also looked at HPE. We compared Nutanix with that solution. We decided then to go for Nutanix and do a proof of concept. The HPE solution was more limited in the nodes it could handle.

We work really closely with HPE. All our servers are from HPE. So HPE proposed a solution to us, But when we compared it by doing a SWOT analysis, part of our consideration was that Nutanix is a newer platform. It empowers a lot of things. It's a different technology.

My advice is "use it." To use Calm, the precondition is that you have Nutanix. To me it doesn't make sense to have Nutanix on-premise and then not use Calm. Then you would have to use SaltStack or Chef or whatever other management software exists for managing virtual machines or physical machines. If you go with Nutanix, it makes really sense to use Calm.

SaltStack and Ansible are also good, but it doesn't make sense to use them when you have Calm. With Nutanix you have one platform where you can manage everything. Calm gives you a lot of possibilities because you can script and easily integrate and control the whole Nutanix cluster with APIs. And you can easily integrate other services because you have the ability to call Python scripts very easily.

For us, it was very easy because we didn't have a lot of existing scripts. Other companies that have a lot of Salt scripts or a lot of Ansible scripts have to recreate them in some way. So we were in a good situation.

We now have 14 blueprint templates, and still growing. We are coming from the Citrix XenServer platform. We are not automatically creating a blueprint. It's ongoing. We had a lot of virtual machines on the Xen platform, and we have moved them over, but we don't automatically have a blueprint when we do. You must create the blueprints. We do them one-by-one. When we touch a system again, we create the blueprint for it. That way we can scale out, scale in, and make test systems.

There is a template for creating a machine, and then you manage that machine with this template. But when you have machines from another platform, like the XenServer virtualization platform, you can move it over, because Nutanix is also a virtualization platform for running VMs. But then you don't automatically have a blueprint, so you have to start a new project to make these blueprints. The strategy is that we will have all the code for our infrastructure so that we can build all our system out of blueprints.

I cannot say Calm is providing centralized control of all our applications because we have some legacy systems. We have IBM iSeries, which is another technology. But with Calm we can centralize all our x86 machines.

It's still early time and there is room for improvement. I give Calm a nine out of 10. I cannot give it a 10 because other platforms are also really good. Ansible and SaltStack are also powerful. It's more an issue of strategy and the fact that it is very easy to use. It's not a complex tool. They make it easy to use. Other frameworks are more complex to use, but may also be more powerful. But for our purposes, it fits exactly what we need. We haven't been blocked from doing anything we need to do with Calm. We haven't had any showstoppers.

Compared with other tools, Calm is newer and the scope of what you can do with it is still growing. They improve things. They make it easier to handle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are two kinds of Prism. 

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

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

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

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

We have been using it for almost a year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There were two factors for moving from VMware to Nutanix. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

Prism Pro lets us manage multiple Nutanix Clusters through a single interface. I can view all the alerts or health of each Cluster from one website instead of going to each one individually. 

When I started with the company, we did not have Nutanix. Within the first six months, we installed Nutanix software and Prism Pro. In the very beginning of the first six months, I was working a lot of overtime, having to fix a lot of things. I don't have a lot of overtime anymore. I don't have the nights and weekends that I used to because of all the time savings the solution has given me.

We use the solution’s machine learning algorithms for things like predictive capacity planning or other functions. This shows us what our capacity is, where it's going, and what trend it has been on. Thus, we can decide whether we need to purchase it next year.

The Pro license gives us Capacity Behavior Analytics. This feature lets you see what your capacity is and what you're using in your Cluster. It predicts what it's going to look like in a few months. You can forecast if you need more infrastructure. It sees how much your environment's growing and helps with the sizing of VMs to meet your workload growth.

The 1-Click Centralized Upgrades are really nice. When you go in and want to upgrade your Cluster, you just click a button and everything will upgrade. You don't have to go to each individual server to do the upgrades.

These features save time. They give us insight into what our data is doing and what we need to do to ensure it's running properly.

It is very intuitive and easy to use. It just makes sense. You don't have to look around for a lot of things. The things that you will be using are just there. Everything is on one screen. You can click through to go where you want to go, but there are not a million buttons that you have to figure out (where to go for what).

We use the solution’s X-Play automation feature. The anomaly detection is nice, as it give us insight into things that are anomalies. We can then take corrective actions on them. Its codeless approach to automation is good because I don't like to code. It's point and click, which is nice. It sets up your automation without having to do any coding. 

X-Play has a page that provide us with a single tool for monitoring automation. This page is where I go if I need to set up automation or check if something needs to be done.

Pricing could be worked on a bit. I feel that when I talk to people about it who have looked into Nutanix, they say, "Well, it's pretty expensive compared to the other thing I was looking at." I tell them it's worth it. 

I would also recommend getting the word out. I still talk to a lot of people about the solution in the industry. They are not aware of it, and say, "What is that?"

About five years.

The stability is great. I haven't had it go down on me, so I haven't really had any issues with Prism Pro. We've had some hardware issues, but the way that Nutanix has their software setup, it doesn't have downtime to the end user and the VMs don't go down. Everything just keeps working.

I do the deployment and maintenance for this solution.

We have been adding a server per year. We have gotten to the point where we will be taking out a server and adding a server, so we're in the sweet spot right now. It's been great. It's not like other solutions where you buy it all upfront, then by the time you need more, you have to replace the whole thing. With this solution, I can easily just add some capacity or CPU by adding another node.

We have 150 VMs across four Clusters with 18 nodes. We are utilizing the solution at 100 percent. 

We are not a huge company so we probably have two users: a system administrator (me) and my networking guy. The help desk doesn't even need to get in it, so they don't use it.

It is the best support that I have ever dealt with. They're knowledgeable and have always been great, easy, and accommodating to work with, e.g., in the first couple of months of deploying Nutanix, we had an issue with certain nodes that were rebooting automatically. Nothing went down, but it was concerning. Within a week of having the problem, we had a dedicated support person who worked with us for about a month and a half while they found the bug and developed a new patch for it. We tested it for them, then once it was working, everything was good. About a month later, the head of the support team down in North Carolina came out to visit us just to make sure everything was okay. 

We had IBM and Dell EMC storage before, but both of them have their own interfaces, so there were two or three things that I had to look at. With this solution, since we have Nutanix, it's just one. That makes it a lot easier.

At my previous job, I used Cisco UCS and NetApp storage.

The initial setup was very easy. You just click a button, and it will set up your Prism Pro VM that runs. Installing the Nutanix platform from the beginning was amazingly easy. At my old job, we just installed new hardware, and that took about a month. Nutanix took four hours, so it was a huge difference.

We talked the implementation over with the vendor when we were ordering. A couple guys came onsite to help us. It was very simple. The Nutanix guys were great. Any little problem that we would run into was fixed in a minute, then we just rolled through it. That's why the implementation was so quick. 

We have seen ROI with Nutanix. We have more reliability than what we had before. We used to have outages all the time where I would be working overtime, and that costs money.

Some people say that Nutanix is a bit more expensive. However, when we were looking at Nutanix versus Cisco and NetApp before deploying this solution, the prices were very similar. Being a government entity, we got a bit more of a discount on Nutanix so it was a bit cheaper. The time savings after the fact has been really worth it.

Prism Pro is a license that we have on all of our products for Nutanix. It gives us a bunch of different new features.

Prism Pro is a bit more upfront. It costs a bit more for some of the features that you get. We have four Clusters, and two of them don't have Prism Pro because they weren't even available with what we bought. Those two Clusters also run well, but they don't have all the features.

When I started, we were looking at Nutanix, but also at NetApp and Cisco, which is what I had just come from and done a new installation. I was pushing for that. However, when I saw the presentation from Nutanix, I was like, "Well, this is how it just should work. Let's give it a try." It's not easy running the whole thing by myself in a normal situation, but with Nutanix, it lets me do that because I don't have to worry about all the little bits and pieces. It's just one interface which is easy to manage.

From my previous experience, I worked with Cisco and NetApp, where Cisco was the servers and NetApp was the storage. I transitioned into just doing storage and did storage all day, every day at my old job. I moved things around trying to make space for this, that, or someone wanting to put something where we didn't have space. I would have to move all types of stuff. It was a big pain. When I came to my new job, and we started Nutanix, you don't have to do any of that. There isn't anything I almost ever do with storage unless I'm adding a new node. It's all shared in one giant pool of storage. This saves so much time. It's like, "Why was the other company doing it that way?" It doesn't make any sense and was a pain.

You have to at least look at this solution. Once you do, you will buy it. All my old colleagues that have moved onto different jobs too, and I always tell them about it.

They are always expanding what they have and what they are offering.

It can do a bunch of other things that we don't use yet, but are thinking about.

Biggest lesson learnt: IT doesn't have to be super complicated.

I would rate Prism Pro as a 10 (out of 10).

We use the solution for virtualization purposes.

The solution saves around 15% of standard time for our organization.

The solution is easy to use and has a very supportive team. It helps me with essential knowledge and planning for projects.

The solution's virtualization could be even better. They should improve the upgrade and patch engine features.

I have been using the solution for two years.

It is a stable solution. Although, one of its nodes might break if you don't follow the proper upgrading and patching steps.

It is a scalable solution. Our enterprise has three clusters dedicated to it.

The solution's technical support is good. However, it is complicated to communicate with the customer service team for the contract renewal process.

Positive

We switched to Nutanix because of its flexible pricing model compared to other vendors.

The solution generates a high return on investment.

The solution's price is reasonable.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We have multiple projects and multiple groups of developers that need an isolated space to deploy VMs and do testing against code, so we use the automated deployment of applications and VMs to spin up their unique environments.

It made it a lot easier to spin up these tenant environments with little to no administrative overhead.

It's super fast. It does what you tell it to do quickly.

I would like to see it be able to apply a category to a project, and then have that category applied to all the VMs that are deployed within a project. I've been asking for that for about three years.

I've been using this solution for about three years.

It has a rock-solid foundation. The only issue that I've ever seen is the software code not being fully vetted before it was deployed.

It's as scalable as the overall infrastructure. It's great.

Their support is excellent. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

We are using both this solution and Ansible. There are different components within Nutanix Cloud Manager. I've used a part of it but not all of it.

I was involved in its deployment. It's straightforward and built-in.

In the government space, we don't look at returns.

We have the ultimate license, so I don't know what it would cost individually.

If you're going to pick an automation platform, pick one and stick with it instead of having everybody look in different directions.

I would rate it a ten out of ten.

We use Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) mainly for the centralized management of multiple clusters. We're running two clusters under the solution right now, and we'll be expanding to three probably within the next couple of months.

Using Nutanix Cloud Manager gives me another engineer on my team. The solution allows us to have constant eyes on the environment, and we're exploring some of its additional features for automation for management.

Nutanix Cloud Manager's runway features are a big help in predicting strategy for optimization. They help us so that we don't find ourselves in a patch, and we have time to budget with senior management for additional acquisition if required.

If you're still running tiered architecture for the storage, it would be good to give stats on the amount of data that is warehoused in the cold tier versus the hot tier. Additionally, it would be helpful to get some visual appreciation of the dataset and identify which VMs are harnessing the bulk of it. You could see an element of this feature in Prism Element that wasn't available in the Prism Pro or NCM.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for around two to three years.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is a completely stable solution, and I haven't had any issues. We always read the release notes before running upgrades.

I would expect Nutanix Cloud Manager to scale. Since our shop is pretty small, we would not plan to scale the solution, but based on what I've read, it is a scalable solution.

Nutanix Cloud Manager's customer support is fantastic. Most of the time, it's a one-call resolution. Fortunately, I don't have to call them very often. I've never had anybody that was difficult to work with, and they always seemed eager to help and follow up.

Positive

Nutanix Cloud Manager's initial setup was relatively straightforward. We worked with our SE when it was being deployed.

We have seen a return on investment with Nutanix Cloud Manager. It makes centralized management and viewing much easier without needing to bounce into different systems constantly.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is an expensive solution. However, its value is worth the cost versus trying to aggregate it across multiple other solutions.

We did evaluate other options before choosing Nutanix Cloud Manager. We looked at standard three-two-one solutions, but Nutanix Cloud Manager stood out because of its simplified management nature.

I advise users know their goals for utilizing the product ahead of time. Doing this will ensure that when they are deploying and want to create the playbooks, they will get the most value out of the implementation.

Overall, I rate Nutanix Cloud Manager an eight out of ten.

We use Calm as an automation engine for deployment of the cluster software over our network. We are also using it to deploy standardized workloads on the Nutanix clusters.

We also use it to create a "self-service shop," where we can select to deploy standardized workloads and choose a certain profile for a particular server, and the Calm engine will integrate with other solutions like our IP database and CDB. Everything is fully automated.

In addition to standardized workloads, we also can say, "Give us a generic virtual machine."

It really drives up our speed tremendously for getting workloads to the customer as soon as possible. Previously, it took a few weeks to get a virtual machine in place, including deploying the virtual machine and getting the administrative parts in order for it. That process takes a matter of minutes now, if the prerequisites are in place on the networking layer. Our delivery time is incomparably faster than what it was. We're mainly providing platforms to other application teams, and it greatly helps those teams to have a virtual machine in place. Indirectly, it will ultimately help us develop and deploy applications faster.

Calm has also enabled us to react faster to the changing needs of our business, with the significant decrease in the delivery time of certain machines.

I really like the Nutanix Marketplace a lot. We publish standard workloads there and that, in combination with the Projects, allows for self-service, which is the most powerful feature of Calm.

Also, the ease of use when building new applications and offering them in the marketplace is the most elegant feature of Calm.

It also works very well when it comes to optimizing capacity and performance. It allows you to have a framework where it is very easy to automate in a standardized way and provides you the boundaries for standardizing automation. It really helps to unify the way a team works. Calm's abilities when it comes to team collaboration are great. All the workloads are deployed in a standardized manner, and administered that way as well. This is the first time we have been able to do workloads for the machines in a standardized manner. Currently, we are expanding a lot, with a lot of new virtual machines. So if we don't focus on standardization, it will become really hard to manage with a small team. Standardization and automation are very important for enabling us to keep up with the growing infrastructure.

We also use Nutanix Prism Pro and it provides us with insights into application-related infrastructure to a certain extent. But in reality, we haven't done a lot with it yet. The dashboarding is certainly elegant, but we're not utilizing the clusters a lot yet, so it hasn't been very necessary to work with it. Second-day operations are something that we're working on. The deployment is not done and transitioning to operations is in progress.

There is room for improvement in the remote script execution. The way logs are shown in Calm, it's not always keeping up properly. It's really the interface that needs attention there. I believe it is something being worked on at the moment by Nutanix.

Also, the integrated scripting language, which is a very limited form of Python, should be improved. It should be made into a more modern version of Python, and maybe other languages as well. 

I would also like to see an improved ability to integrate with APIs.

I have been using Nutanix Calm for about a year.

It has great stability. We haven't experienced issues with stability with the product.

In terms of scalability, it just works. It has high availability, and we haven't run into any issues where we have needed to scale up.

We have Nutanix clusters located in at least half of our Vopak locations. This year we rolled out the Nutanix platform to 30 locations and, in the next year, 30 additional locations will follow. Currently, the six users of the solution are involved in infrastructure development on the DevOps team. Those are the people who are building on top of Calm.

In general, Nutanix support is great. They're responsive and skillful. We're really pleased with them.

Positive

We did not have a previous solution. Calm was a brand-new implementation for us.

The initial setup of Calm was straightforward. It was just a matter of enabling the product, and that process is very well worked out by Nutanix. Our deployment was done within an hour. It was very fast.

You will see great value from it if you utilize the self-service part of Calm. The price you pay for it will only give you equal value if you use the self-service part to enable other teams. If you only use it as a deployment mechanism, I think it's rather expensive.

We did not really look at other solutions. We chose the hypervisor platform, and Calm came with it. We also looked at VMware as a hypervisor platform, but we chose Nutanix and therefore we went for Calm as well.

Nutanix excels in making something that is very complex into something that is very simple. It's really easy to work with, and the time it takes to get familiar with the product, for an engineer, is way less than with the competitor's platform.

It's very important to think ahead about what your automation strategy will look like. You should really think about creating reusable components and also have good source control and a CI/CD strategy. If you start building without thinking about these things, you will have to do a lot of rework and re-engineering to be able to scale up.

In terms of Calm unifying container and virtual machine automation and orchestration in a single orchestration platform, we're not doing containers yet, only tenants. But in the future, I expect it will do so because our next step we'll be looking into container workloads. But that's not where we are for now at Vopak. Similarly, we haven't used Calm’s AIOps and automation capabilities.

We are currently running a pair of production at both our home office and our DR center as well as a dev cluster. Between our prod/dev/fileshare we are now running around 32ish total nodes, and we have only had one drive failure in 4-5 years of running. The level of support that Nutanix provides and the timely response is another great attribute of Nutanix. We now are sitting right where we need to in regards to sizing, function, and design to fit our organization. We will continue to evolve and build with Nutanix.

It has allowed us to easily manage multiple clusters in multiple locations through Prism. We have multiple sites that we use to manage and run VMware at which could be a bit cumbersome with Vsphere. Since we made the migration to Nutanix we now only have active servers at three locations, and we can manage them through Prism Central with ease. If you can't see information in one spot you are going to overlook something that might fail, but with Prism we don't have that issue.                                 

The one-click upgrades and single-window management through Prism are the two greatest advantages for us.                                                                                                                

I can't think of any improvements at this time, but the support is top-notch. We have had our fair share of issues while upgrading early on, but the process now is working flawlessly. Between the initial POC to rolling it into production, everything has been smooth, and we have also added ABS & AFS to our infrastructure as well.                                                        

We have been running Nutanix Prism Pro for about four years now.

Stability is not going to be matched by anything else on the market.

Extremely easy to add nodes to the clusters.

We wanted away from the licensing cost from VMware.

Be prepared to have time on your hands after deployment.

Just a POC with Nutanix.

None at this time.