Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

I use Nutanix with Citrix. Sometimes, I need to expand the workload.

I like being able to expand my workload with Nutanix Cloud Manager at the best cost.

Our IT team has been able to focus on best practices by using Nutanix Cloud Manager's built-in playbooks.

I've been using Nutanix Cloud Manager for approximately two years.

I have not had any issues with the stability of the solution.

I have 30 clusters and have not had any problems with scalability.

I have not had any problems with technical support. They always responded in a timely manner. Thus, I would rate technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

I previously used VMware but switched to Nutanix.

In Brazil, Nutanix Cloud Manager is not cheap. However, Nutanix offers different options such as long-term contracts.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a nine.

We have some critical and not-so-critical applications. That's how we classify them broadly. The critical applications remain on-premise for us, while we're pushing the remaining ancillary applications to the cloud. That's how we use Nutanix Cloud Management.

We don't use it to manage cloud costs per se. We already have an enterprise agreement with Azure and AWS for cloud consumption. It's primarily to drive efficiency and migrate more applications to the cloud. Within the cloud division, we have around 52 engineers, and they all use it.

Compatibility with multiple clouds and a single control would help us. We are also getting onto GCP, and there is limited compatibility with GCP in the areas we need. We are using GCP primarily for data analytics.

We started using Nutanix six months ago.

Nutanix is relatively stable.

Nutanix is scalable. 

We haven't faced any problems because Nutanix provides an outside team. We haven't had any issues requiring L3 support, and the L1 and L2 engineers are on-site.

It was pretty easy to set up Nutanix Cloud Management because we had help from a Nutanix partner and a technician from the vendor. We had no problems getting up to speed on the solution. We were up and running in about 45 days.

We paid about 140 million Indian Rupees for a three-year cost. The price is reasonable and less expensive than managing the operations yourself.

I rate Nutanix Cloud Management seven out of 10. Before implementing, I would suggest looking at the workloads you plan to use with Nutanix Cloud Management. Depending on the workload and the criticality or regulatory importance, you should decide whether to deploy.

I know very well that when I was started with my organization with VMware Hypervisor solution for virtualization but we were facing very frequent and unforeseen issues with VMware and due to this outage on hosted services and servers means end-user productivity loss and indirectly loss on the business.

Then later on time, we came to know about the Nutanix and its interesting features, and the HA features attracted to us to use the Nutanix as a hypervisor solution in our company.

Now when we are using, our lives have been easy

Nutanix Prism Pro improves the quality and efficiency of IT operations for the modern datacenter. Powered by the machine learning and task automation, Prism Pro intelligently optimizes capacity, proactively detects performance anomalies, and enables the IT team to automate operations tasks with ease and confidence.

Prism Pro includes a powerful application and VM-centric capacity forecast, planning, and optimization engine powered by Nutanix’s X-Fit and X-Play technologies. Prism Pro enables smart IT operation and automation by optimizing capacity intelligently, monitoring and resolving anomalies proactively, and automating remediation and operations tasks

Prism Pro’s X-Play links intelligent signals with automated actions. With a few clicks, the IT team can automate their day-to-day operational tasks. They can build automation and improve the productivity of the operation with ease and confidence and zero coding

Using X-Play, the IT team can create playbooks for common remediation or troubleshooting steps. Those playbooks can be triggered automatically based on the alert polices along with predictive monitoring based on behavioral analysis to generate actionable signals and provide early warnings

In our company, Nutanix Hypervisor (AOS) is not fully operational for some things just because of what products & services offered to our end customers we tested but we found that it is as of now not supported. We are only allowed to use VMware, but I use AOS. I think the Prism Center needs to include more functions. I know that they're including the Nutanix Era, which is the database management and disaster recovery tool. I think that Era should include everything on a single tool where you can manage everything you need inside your organization.

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

It has been more than four hours approximately.

We used VMware, we switched just to make our life easy and work-life balance.

Nutanix is the best product in HCI solution & cost & pricing is very less what other solutions available in the market.

Keep improving and including customer demands and make nutanix more powerful HCI solution.

Our organization is utilizing Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure for the majority of our infrastructure applications software, systems software, print processing software, and web application software as well as all of our core it infrastructure applicaitons and processes including alerting, monitoring, logging. Our only exceptions are currently our large data base implementations and our accounting edi batch processing solutions which are said to require ultra low latency and high performance network and storage.

Nutanix Prism Pro has improved the quality and efficiency of our organization's infrastructure team operations throughout our entire datacenter. Nutanix Prism Pro is powered by machine learning and task automation and it intelligently optimizes capacity, proactively detects performance anomalies, and enables our infrastructure team to automate operations tasks with ease and confidence, recapturing valuable time we can utilize elsewhere within our organization. Traditional Infrastructure Team Operations Management tools were built for traditional static infrastructure. These tools often overwhelm infrastructure teams with overly obnoxious alerts. In dynamic and scalable modern data centers with high performance and diverse workloads, infrastructure teams need simplicity and accuracy to achieve high productivity. Prism Pro automagically mines large volumes of system data to generate actionable insights and enables our infrastructure team to automate remediation of everyday tasks for performance management and capacity optimization.

ONE-CLICK UPGRADES! - Nutanix Prism Pro provides robust upgrading Nutanix clusters mechanism that has long been a delightful experience delivered via one-click upgrades. The one-click process hides a lot of complexity by using advanced automation and consumer-grade design experience. Historically, each cluster had to be upgraded one at a time. While the process itself was simple, this constraint still extended the length of time required to complete upgrades for multi-cluster environments.

Advance Search- Nutanix prism Pro offers to search Nutanix infra related entities as a content format. For example, it shows for VMs who is using memory equal to or greater than 10GB,VM memory =< 10GB. This is a very advanced feature that helps to get deeper details of Nutanix cluster entities.

The Life Cycle Manager tracks software and firmware versions of all entities in the cluster, integrated both on Prism Element and Prism Central.
LCM consists of a framework and a set of modules for inventory and update.
LCM supports software updates for all platforms that use Nutanix software.
LCM supports firmware updates for specific platforms.
From Prism Element, you can use LCM to update AHV, NCC, Foundation, BIOS, BMC, DATA Drives, HBA Controllers, SATADOMs, and M.2 Drives (G6 and later). From Prism Central, you can update Calm, Epsilon, Karbon, and Objects. When you run a firmware upgrade on multiple nodes, the LCM updates one node at a time to prevent any downtime in your cluster. Before the upgrade starts, all the VMs on that node are migrated to another host and the node enters maintenance mode. Always make sure that your cluster can tolerate a node failure by having the data resiliency status as “OK” in Prism Element.

LCM could be our second favorite feature right up there with One-Click Upgrades if it worked as smoothly but We have had a few issues with LCM but those appear to have been related to OEM hardware vendor not in sync with Nutanix software, not sure how this could be improved in the future.

We have been utilizing Nutanix for fifteen months.

We have found Nutanix solution to be very stable; we have never experienced any downtime with these solutions and aside from a few LCM hiccoughs we have never had any performance impacts utilizing this solution.

We have found Nutanix solution to be highly scalable; the Shared Nothing Distributed Architecture works well for our implementation.

Nutanix support has definitely been best in class there has been more than one occasion where we have contacted for support with an issue and tech/engineer has noted unrelated issues and insisted on resolving either during the session or at our earliest convenience.

Previously we utilized traditional hardware-software infrastructure solutions Nutanix is our first hyperconverged infrastructure solution.

I was not involved in the initial rollout of our first cluster sets but continued rollouts of new clusters has been straightforward.

Our implementation efforts have generally been a joint effort between vendor team and our in-house IT personnel the level of expertise has been quite good although there have been some communication breakdowns along the way.

Unfortunately I can not provide exact ROI calculations but we continue to invest in converting our traditional infrastructure to Nutanix HCI.

Unless your organizaiton is in a very limited niche don't pay the hypervisor tax it just isn't worth it.

I was not involved in the initial shortlisting of HCI vendor solutions.

Our organization has been pleased with the Nutanix HCI solution overall. The majority of our issues have been related to non-Nutanix hardware underlying the entire solutions so if We had it to do over again We would probably choose to go with Nutanix hardware.

I'm one of the administrators in our data centers. My title is Site Reliability Engineer, so my use case is that of a user and getting it to administer machines and monitor application performance.

The purpose for Nutanix, in general, was to reduce our footprint within our data centers, to scale down to a single point for all of our compute and storage, which it does very well. We're using Prism Pro to access all of the different clusters; we're able to get to them through one interface.

Based on information that we're able to derive from the application, we have utilized another monitoring tool, Splunk, and we're able to retrieve data on a frequent basis. We are able to find information about different VMs, or historical data regarding the process of those machines. That has been greatly beneficial for us to determine problems with our application; when machines move if there's an HA event and what those machines are; if there's a failure, what machines were involved in the problem, and where they're migrating to. It gives us a great deal of detail and it has helped improve our processes to determine where problems lie, where machines are going and what's happening with them, in near real-time. It's helped our troubleshooting process a great deal to have that information at our fingertips.

The most valuable feature for me is being able to find a machine, regardless of which cluster it's located in, as quickly as possible, and being able to work on it. A lot of times we are called upon to troubleshoot an issue. That usually means there's a problem that needs quick attention. Being able to find machines, ascertain their status, and do so in a timely manner, are processes that are very critical to our business needs.

I've used other products that are similar in nature and they can be very complex, but they have good documentation to back it up. Nutanix is no exception to that. Their documentation is quite extensive but can be challenging to read if you don't know the product firsthand. Still, it is very good at describing the features and functionality that you're looking for. But something to improve upon might be the ease of access to documentation, and helping users understand which information is going to provide the detail they need to complete their job.

The integration with Splunk is a little lacking, and this is something that we've worked on with Nutanix quite extensively in the last year or two. It didn't really have a good integration. They built some dashboards, where they were trying to kind of recreate Prism. Prism is its own utility; it works well for what it does. But it doesn't provide us quite the detail that we are looking for or the historical data that we were after. So we had to build our own custom apps for Splunk. Since doing that, we have been working with Nutanix to try and improve, to some extent, what they put out for the public. But in general, we've done some of our own customizing of our own dashboards. 

So the integration itself has not been great, but the work that we have done on our own towards Splunk has been really good. On the plus side for Nutanix is that the API calls it has that allow you to retrieve information about their product are incredible. The amount of data that you can retrieve is immense. The downside would be how to best utilize that data once you have it. That's where it's lacking, and I know that they're taking strides to improve that.

The types of data I'm referring to are CPU statistics, memory usage; when there's an HA event; where machines were located and where they're being moved to. At times, if a node fails or goes down for any reason, or there's a memory failure, it has to live-migrate those machines somewhere else. Being able to identify what those machines are, where they're going, and what impact that has to the infrastructure, is a real help to someone like me. That helps me to know what the impact is going to be to our clients and how quickly we can get the system back up to a stable and fully functional state. If we had a problem with the server, being able to look back in historical data and determine what led up to that event is another use for the data. We have roadmapping graphs that show growth in storage and CPU usage, for predicting when we need to purchase more. There's quite a lot of information there that we use to help with our job.

One thing I would really like for them to do is to correlate multiple machines together, multiple VMs, and get a bigger picture of CPU usage or memory usage. That's a real challenge in Prism Pro that we overcome utilizing Splunk. That might be something they could work on, but we found ways of utilizing the data that they provide already through REST or API calls and having access to it through a Splunk interface.

I've been wanting them to improve and mature their Prism interface. With our utilization of Splunk, I found that we tie those together pretty well. Having them revamp the entire product to try and make it better would be a real challenge.

I have been using Nutanix, in general, and subsequently Prism Pro, for the past three years.

By and large the stability of Prism Pro is very good. 

I do feel that we seem to run into a lot of problems with memory DIMMs within the Nutanix servers. Maybe they're overly cautious, but we do seem to get frequent failures for nodes that are removed for possible memory issues, or just the possibility that there could be a memory issue. If overly cautious is a downside, they're overly cautious. But if that means that our systems perform well and we don't get errors of data corruption, then it's all for the better. 

Their systems are very resilient and their uptime is very good, as they automatically live-migrate machines off to different nodes in the same cluster. They do that very well.

Having the cluster live outweighs having a single node fail, and that's the whole point of having multiple nodes. From that standpoint, the last time we had a system down because of the Nutanix was probably two years ago. And the cause was a network issue, which was something outside of their control. One cluster could not talk to another cluster and it went into a panic state and started shutting down VMs. It wasn't that Nutanix went offline. We had a network issue. They went into a protective mode to protect the data. That may be leaning towards the overly cautious, but we had zero corruption with any of our actual VMs. It did bring our application down, but everything was functional once we got the network issues worked out.

The scalability is fantastic. Anytime you need more hardware, you just throw it in and it consumes it and starts working with it. 

The only downside is the size of the clusters. As you start growing out towards 20 or more nodes, it becomes unwieldy and slows down the administrative processes. Users and administrators have to be aware that they have to scale out their clusters in addition to scaling out nodes when they have to increase capacity. That just goes along with understanding how the systems work and where their peak performance is at, and making sure that you build out correctly.

We have about 20 users of Prism Pro and they range from automation technicians to engineers to site reliability engineers, to those who actually administer the system. We have two staff for deployment and maintenance of Nutanix. Their roles are to maintain and upgrade and monitor the Nutanix infrastructure.

Our shop is 100 percent Nutanix. We do have some bare-metal servers that have functions for other applications, but all of our compute runs on Nutanix. So our use of it is rather extensive. We utilize it in all of our data centers exclusively.

Their support is second to none. Anytime you have an issue, they know what they're doing. They get the right people involved and your issues are taken care of in a very timely manner. Their support is fantastic. I hate giving people a 10 out of 10, because I think there's always room for improvement, but their support is really close to a 10. They're responsive and knowledgeable. And when they don't know the answer, they quickly get to someone who does.

Previously, we were running on Hyper-V from Microsoft. We found that it didn't suit our needs. We needed the compute, the storage, and everything under one roof, which Nutanix provides for us. Also, Nutanix's solution is more elegant than Hyper-V because you're able to bring multiple servers together into a cluster and maintain your VMs in a cluster of servers. That's as opposed to a single point of failure with one server or one array or the like.

I wasn't deeply involved with the initial setup, but I think that it was fairly simple. I do know that anytime we need to add more infrastructure, the integration with additional nodes or adding a new chassis is extremely simple and well laid-out. They excel at that.

We did work with an integrator and we had two sales engineers from Nutanix who assisted with that process. They were fantastic. Nutanix is a great team to work with.

I'm not privy to the numbers, but I think our ROI is quite high for Nutanix.

The contributing factor is, being able to have all of our infrastructure in one location. We use Nutanix not just for the software, the hypervisor, but for the entire solution. We're utilizing their chassis and their nodes. Having that all in one place, and being able to just add more hardware as we grow our infrastructure, is incredibly useful. It allows us to grow as we need and when we need. That alone allows us to dictate what drives our costs — when we need compute, how much compute we need — and allows us to stay ahead of our growing client base. 

In addition to that, their uptime allows us to have the performance and reliability that our customers demand.

It's cost-effective. It's not necessarily cheap, but it's also not inordinately expensive. It comes down to how much you use it to offset some of the costs. If you're all-in with Nutanix, and you have a lot of nodes, it drives down the cost.

I know Hyper-V was a consideration. We may have also considered VMware.

Do your homework and make sure to get some engineers involved at Nutanix who can assist you. You'll run into issues that they can help steer you around. Nutanix is willing to help if you are willing to ask. The system is not without its complexities. It has a lot of features and there are a lot of things that you can do with it. If you engage the professionals at Nutanix, they can steer you in the right direction. You should utilize them.

Prism Pro can be quite complex, if you want it to be. At its heart there are a lot of features available. If you utilize it for simple purposes, then you can get simple answers. The ease of use really depends on what level of technicality you want to have with it. But in general, the interface is well laid-out. There's a little bit of a learning curve in making sure you're going to the right location and knowing what you're trying to locate. But otherwise, I feel that the interface is well laid-out and intuitive to use.

Some other things they've done recently, like having events tied back to documentation, which is something that they are working on right now, have been great.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using the solution is that you get what you pay for. Nutanix has been a great company to work with. As I said, their support is fantastic. If you're going to use someone for your critical business needs, make sure that it's a company that's going to stand behind you and help make your job better and easier.

We wanted to find a way to start getting our academics used to paying for compute without having to actually pay, but still to do it for real in the cloud. We use the self-service portal within Nutanix for them to deposit some funds, which is a cost charge, not a credit card, and then we say, "Okay, based on that, you have bought X amount of CPUs, Y amount of memory, and Z amount of storage." They can then go in and say, "Okay, well, I know I've got a pool of 10 BCPs for a month. I want to spin up three of them to process this data, which I'll then tear down afterwards."

We use it for our neurological psychology department where they do a lot of brain scans. They want to upload them to a place where they can compute the output of those scans and then they want to tear down their compute afterwards, because they don't need to be running all the time. 

Another area uses it for looking at weather data, which is typically quite a large amount of data. They only need to process once and then they can destroy it because they don't need to look at it again, once they've done analytics on it. 

Those are our typical use cases: to allow our research areas to spin up their resources against a pricing model that they've secured funding for, and not have to engage the IT teams to provide the resources for them. It also allows them not to go beyond their budgets and stay within predefined lanes.

We have it on-premise. We built our own private cloud and we host it on there for our academics to consume and spin up their own resources. We know that we could burst up to Azure, AWS, and GCP, but we don't. We keep it all within our private cloud at the moment.

It gives the end-users control of what they need. If they have requested a VM with two VCPUs but they actually need four, they have the ability to go in and do that themselves, from the same pool of resources that they've been allocated. It gives them the complete flexibility to do it themselves. If they're working remotely and they access the cluster from, say, Australia on the opposite side of the world from us, to use an extreme example, and they want to do stuff overnight, they don't have to wait for IT to wake up eight o'clock in the morning, or even later. They can do it at whatever time is relevant to them locally.

It's helped us in terms of ease of compliance and simplicity for the researchers in governing their research grants. The grants are usually very strict regarding how money can be spent, to make sure there's no waste allowed and to get the best value out of the grants. Rather than having to spend thousands on something they may only need for very small periods in a month or a year, it allows them to do more research than they could necessarily afford to do if they had to buy the hardware. It really gives them that agility. The capital that the researchers would have had to spend on hardware, to achieve this, is now all part of a central service using hardware that we've already procured.

In addition, because it does allow the end-users to look after their compute themselves, it means that they can work on things together. They don't have to put a request into IT for them to spin up the resource for them. They can dip in, spin it up, and use it straight away, so if they're actually working very closely with somebody, they don't have to wait for IT. That means the collaboration window is going to be a lot slicker. The actual activity can be done at the time it's needed, rather than having to plan way in advance or slow it down because they need some resource and they haven't got the ability to use it. The ultimate message is that they have the power in their hands, which means the collaboration becomes more fluid because they don't need to wait on IT to give them services.

Nutanix Calm's one-click self-service feature means that we don't have to look after it. The end-users can, as I said, serve themselves so they can set the blueprint and spin up some resources. They don't need to wait for IT, which means that we, in IT, can actually focus on adding value by making sure that the clusters are healthy and by looking to help them with some of their requirements. IT doesn't have to be the "organ grinder" and turn that key to keep giving them resources that they need. Because they have that basic control, we can provide them more value.

It allows the research to happen a lot faster, for the researchers to do the work that they need to do and then tear it down. It certainly does support a much faster turnaround time. Typically, in the past, we would allocate up to a week to provide them with a complete resource, depending on what the requirements were and if we had them available or not. With this, it allows them to do it themselves within a matter of minutes. The speed at which they can do research is now a lot greater.

The solution has enabled us to react faster to the changing needs of the organization, absolutely. That's the main incentive.

One of the valuable features for us is the ability for people to reserve some resources and then use them as and when they need them, rather than us having to give them those resources as they request them. It's very much aligned things to a cloud mindset before letting them loose with an actual credit card.

The fact that these are non-technical people — they're experts in their fields but they're definitely not technical — and they can just log in to the portal and select the resource that they believe they need, and manage it themselves, speaks to the ease of use. It shows them their live costs, etc., as they're spending. The fact that they can do that without any problems, or having to engage the IT teams, is a true testament to it. There's no need for any user training at all. It wasn't overly easy back in the early days of Calm to use it. It was a bit "hacky" in terms of the way you had to build the blueprints, but now it's a lot easier to use. It's a very "light touch" IT solution for an IT service that we provide.

Even though it's a lot easier, it could be a bit slicker for the end-users. The ability to create their own blueprints could be without their having to understand the details of what they're trying to do. If they could just tick this, this, this, and this — whatever they need — and it would go spinning those up, that would be better. Now, we still guide them quite a bit.

I've been using Nutanix Calm for about two years now.

We haven't had any problems. In two years it's never gone down. Every time we patch it, it patches seamlessly. We've never had any problems with it and we've never had to do anything to try to resolve any problems.

Because it's all based at Nutanix, it's really easy to scale it out. We have increased our capacity on our platform a number of times, and it seamlessly rebalances the clusters as it needs to.

It's purely our researchers who are using it. We don't use it ourselves, as an IT department. We have capacity for 100 active VMs at any time and there are about 300 academics in the department who have access to use it.

We haven't used Nutanix technical support for this solution. We have used it for other products, but Calm looks after itself. We have not had any problems with it at all.

We didn't have a previous product. We would do it ourselves, which was part of the challenge for us because we couldn't deliver at the speed at which they wanted us to deliver. The researchers were going off and trying to do it themselves within public cloud, and therefore spending and wasting a lot of money which they could have spent in better ways.

We moved to Calm to make it more efficient for the academics. It would give them a bit more power and control, and ultimately we want to be a lot more cloud-orientated. To achieve that, there needs to be a degree of governance. If they are used to that governance in how they operate, then migrating them to a public cloud piece should be easier. They will  be used to being sensible with when their resources are turned on or not.

Everything is very straightforward to set up. It's as few clicks as possible, which works very nicely.

Our deployment was done within about a day. That was two years so it would be hard to put a more specific time on it. It was also a very different product then, as compared to now.

In terms of an implementation strategy, we essentially got the solution because we wanted to help some of the areas that were complaining about our speed of delivery. We only really offered it to those areas. But we've now gone full circle and just committed to some more Calm licenses to grow our capability because of the speed of delivery it gives to our researchers. That's especially true with their being remote. They can then do it all themselves and don't have to engage with IT to help them spin things up. In the past, they just knocked on the door and got some support from the computing team. With people working remotely now, that's obviously a lot harder. It allows us to achieve remote work.

As for maintenance, It's part of the wider stack. When there's an update, we will roll that out. But it's all pretty much one click and away you go. You come back a little bit later and it's done.

We did it ourselves, based on the guidance that they provided to us.

We have absolutely seen ROI. It doesn't cost us very much and it makes our academic flows a lot easier and we don't get complaints anymore about not being responsive to their needs.

I can't really comment on pricing because, being in the public sector, we get different pricing to what is out there in the world.

But in terms of approach, size it on what your minimum would need to be and then add additional licensing as you need it, rather than trying to go too big, too quickly. The whole point of Nutanix software is that you can grow and size the estate, rather than going instantly to a monolithic solution from day one.

We didn't look at other solutions. We already had Nutanix to provide some research compute for other things, so we went with Calm in addition to the suite that we had at the time.

The biggest lesson I've learned using this solution is how easy it is to empower users to achieve what they need to achieve. Without this, it would be very hard to build the trust up and allow our academics to do what they need to do.

In our case, Calm doesn't help us to implement standardization across our organization because the research is usually quite specific. The types of VMs that they would spin up would all be slightly different. Some might have much bigger storage requirements, some might have higher RAM requirements, and some might need to be quite low compute but for longer periods. It does tend to vary quite a lot. But on the flip side, it allows them to all work the same way so they're not going off and burning money in public cloud environments.

When we first got it, it probably would have been a five out of 10 because it wasn't the easiest to build the initial blueprints. Now, we're certainly up to an eight. There's always room for improvement with something like this.

We use it for capacity planning and we forecast with it. We use the workload reporting, which includes VM efficiencies, and we're able to provide reports that way on capacity, storage, and Runways.

One of the big benefits is that it helps us explain why we are scaling and why we need to do certain things. We can scale out or up and show them why. There's proof before any money is spent. It's had a positive impact.

I can go to management and say, "We need this many sort-only nodes before the end of the year to give you the capacity for what you need to have done. And I can say, "This is where we're going to use up what we have." Sometimes they'll say, "Oh, we won't need it," and we can come back and say, "It's been showing us this the entire time."

We're big on the capacity planning. We're fortunate that we're not restricted by a budget, but we do need to have things budgeted for planning purposes. We need to be able to say, "We're going to need 500 terabytes," or "We're going to need X amount of storage in the coming year." The capacity planning helps us really stay ahead of the curve.

There have been bugs. We've seen what looked like some storage inefficiencies in reports and, when we went in to look, we found they were false alarms. That was something they corrected on the fly.

Overall, it works.

We're using Ultimate within Nutanix Cloud Manager and we've been using the solution since 2017.

It's very stable.

It's also scalable. We use it across multiple locations and multiple teams. 

Unfortunately, we don't have any plans to increase our usage of it. I have voiced some frustrations, internally, over the years, that I have not gotten to expand and use the product the way it should be used. I wish we could have really given it a lot more play in our shop.

Nutanix Calm, is another portion piece I wanted to look at.

I would rate Nutanix in my top two or three in terms of support. I've worked with some vendors that are lacking but Nutanix is not one of them. I've opened a lot of tickets with Nutanix over the years, but I've rated every one of them when I have closed them, and every one has been a 10 out of 10.

When we had the bug with the storage, they approached it as "high severity."

Their support is on par with VMware; they're good. And with Nutanix, it doesn't take as long to get into the upper-tier support. When you get someone on the line at Nutanix, you get someone who can help you with any range of issues and, if not, they Slack somebody immediately.

Positive

We didn't really have a previous solution. Infrastructure-wise, we were three-tier, with storage, switching, and all that is in between those segments. For capacity planning we used SolarWinds, but we never did anything such as scaling out with SolarWinds.

We use Ansible and then we're looking at possibly moving towards VMware Tanzu. We're doing a PoC on it.

The initial deployment can be a little complex. You better bring your "A-game." For me, VMware is simple, the way I break it down and the way we work on it. At the infrastructure level, you can rebuild things easily, but in Nutanix, even when it comes to deploying nodes, or the storage-only nodes, it's a little more complex.

Overall, for the way we use it, it takes a day or two to deploy Nutanix Cloud Manager. There are two of us managing it, but I'm usually the person from our organization involved in deploying it.

We started seeing the benefits as soon as we got it. We started using the forecasting and their sales engineers, who were good, worked with us. They showed us the power in it.

Upgrades happen through Prism Central. Other than the updates, we haven't had to do much in terms of maintenance. It's pretty much hands-free.

Every shop needs more staff and, with our staffing numbers, we have usually had to employ a services reseller or we have worked with the Nutanix team.

Those services came in and set us up, all the way from physical, in the rack, to the NCM portions and bringing it online. They built the management pieces and appliances inside of Nutanix. OSI-wise, we started at Layer 1 and went up from there.

It has helped us forecast and do capacity planning. We haven't been caught in a spot where we needed storage and had to move systems around and make quick changes to get by until we could cut a check to get more storage. It has helped us in the long run. The capacity planning, forecasting, and Runways are worth their weight in gold. NCM has saved us time in IT, and that's money.

It's worth every dime.

The pricing has been reasonable.

Do a PoC, but be mindful that it's not going to cover everything.

Nutanix has always been good. We don't use it to the extent that we probably should, but the GUI is friendly and I can't list anything that needs to be changed. Overall, it has worked for what we need.

We consider it our "private cloud," and all of our workloads are deployed on it. Through our application, we offer secure cloud storage. Most of our customers are law firms or financial institutions and they really care about the security of their documents and they really care about document workflow. Because of that, we have to abide by government rules and regulations. For example, if you're a German law firm, you don't want to store your documents in Australia, you want to keep them in the European Union. 

Our product is set up in multiple regions, so we've deployed the solution, on-premises, in each region. We have an instance in the U.S. to service U.S. customers. We have an instance in the United Kingdom to service customers there, and We have one in Germany to take care of the European Union. We also have one in Australia, where we take care of Australia and the Asia Pacific region. In each of those regions, we have data centers that we lease space from. In each region, it's a centralized solution. Our entire application that the end-user interfaces with runs on top of Nutanix.

Nutanix Cloud Manager has allowed us to scale really quickly. For example, during the COVID pandemic, everyone was working from home and a lot of people started buying our product because it allows them to work from home. We grew really quickly and we were able to scale our infrastructure really quickly because Nutanix has invested a lot of time into that.

The most valuable feature is the ability to automate. Nutanix has made it really easy to automate everything that we do. That's important to me and our organization. We can get more done every day by automating tasks.

It's hard to think of anything that needs to be improved. One issue, though, is that you can set up DHCP but it's a little bit clunky. I wish they would streamline and centralize the management of DHCP.

I have been using this Nutanix solution for about nine years. We have been using the Nutanix Cloud Manager version for the past several months. 

NCM is super stable. We're very happy because that translates into our uptime which is pretty great. Our customers are happy with how available our application is.

It's very scalable and we're very happy with how we've seen it scale. We don't have any concerns about that.

The technical support is amazing. Nutanix invests a lot of time and money into making sure that their technical support is top-notch.

Recently they have implemented a series of solutions that make it very proactive. They analyze our environment, including the version of their software that we're running and the hardware. They analyze every little detail. If they detect an issue, they let you know. They're using artificial intelligence to aggregate all the data and to parse through it. As a result they say, "Hey, you have an issue in your environment," and then they tell you how to explain it. 

The second way that they're very proactive is, under certain circumstances, they'll automatically open a support case and automatically collect the logs from your environment. So if something happens in the middle of the night, before it becomes a problem, they'll open a case with support and collect the logs. When I wake up, someone from Nutanix has already been assigned to the case and they've already reviewed the logs, and they'll generally have a good solution.

And one of my favorite things about Nutanix support is that they're very willing to teach you. When I'm working with them I'll ask them a lot of questions about what they're doing or about the situation. They're more than happy to explain it all and to teach me so I can understand the situation better and become better at my job.

Positive

We used to use Microsoft Hyper-V, which is good, but it's difficult to manage and it's difficult to scale.

The solution was purchased before I came to the company, but when I arrived I realized that it hadn't been implemented in the best way. I spent a couple of years fixing the architecture so that it would follow best practices. They had inadvertently painted themselves into a corner and I took away the paintbrush and the paint and fixed things so that it would work and scale better, going forward.

The initial deployment was pretty straightforward, but the people involved just didn't have experience with Nutanix at scale. They didn't necessarily do it wrong, they just didn't do it with the end goal in mind. They had tunnel vision in which they said, "We have a task that needs to be performed and we have to get it done as quickly as possible." It was a very task-oriented implementation. What I was able to do, with my experience, was take a step back and say, "Let's look at the big picture. Where are we going to be in five years?" I was able to architect a solution that would make sure that we could get where we needed to be in five years and in 10 years.

We make sure that we follow best practices from Nutanix. When deploying the product, we make sure that our cluster size—how many physical Nutanix servers we purchase and group together—follows best practices. We make sure that we plan for the ability to perform an upgrade in the environment and we plan for potential hardware failures. We've also started purchasing specialized configurations to match our workload. All of these things are a part of how we architect and deploy the environment.

We have about 250 Nutanix servers around the world. Our application consists of four or five independent offerings and those 250 nodes are spread across those four or five offerings. There are three of us who manage the environment. I'm the architect who created and implemented the solution. I also ensure that we have enough capacity to continue to grow and to take on new projects. Another member of our team does a lot of the project work: Here are the tasks that we've been assigned. How do we get from point A to point B? And the third member of our team focuses on upgrades and hardware break-fix.

We've absolutely seen a return on our investment. One way is through our uptime—how much of the day, week, month, and year our application is running. Because Nutanix is scalable and it's distributed, we're able to easily perform upgrades and keep our application running. Because of the design and implementation, we've been able to make sure that we're always running the latest version of the software, which means that we have all the latest bug fixes and security fixes. In uptime, upgrades, and security fixes, we've seen a huge return on investment. 

I've worked at my current company for four years and our business has just exploded. A lot of that increased business is due to the fact that our Nutanix environment is so stable. It's very reliable and predictable for our customers, and that translates into a better user experience. As a result, another way that we've seen a return on investment is in increased sales.

We use so much of Nutanix that we decided to do a long-term licensing agreement with them. That saved us a lot of money, but it was a difficult journey to understand what we were purchasing and to convince finance and upper management that it was something we should do. Nutanix has taken our feedback and they've worked on streamlining it and making it easier to understand and communicate to non-technical people.

We looked at all the players in the market. We interviewed them and looked at their features and we felt that Nutanix had the best offering.

Nutanix's main competitor is VMware vSAN. Nutanix built their product from the ground up, and because of that, they were able to do some really innovative things to make sure that scaling and automation are taken care of. VMware wedged vSAN into its existing offerings and, because of that, it's really clunky, difficult to set up, and it doesn't perform as well.

When we first started evaluating Nutanix, our upper management had a hard time understanding what it was and what it would do for us. It's different from a lot of traditional solutions and you have to approach it differently.

As you understand that this is the next generation of infrastructure—that it's the next generation of virtualization, the next generation of private cloud—it's a little bit easier to say, "This is going to be different. This is going to be challenging in some ways, but as far as security and compliance go, and as far as performing upgrades goes, nothing could be easier. And when it comes to getting support, they have your back. Nutanix is a company that cares about your experience and your thoughts and improving things. I've never met a company that does a better job. It is different, but it's way better than what I've used in the past.

Nutanix has invested a lot of time and money to make it a really good and solid application, but there's always a little bit of room for improvement.