Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

We are still working on moving workloads from the old environment to Nutanix. We are planning to use Nutanix for our mid-tier. The mid-tier consists of noncore applications like medical services.

Nutanix is customer friendly. The efficiency of Nutanix Clusters is amazing. The product communicates with the hardware far better than any other product.

I love that we can clone the server once it is deployed. The solution’s ease of use is mind-blowing.

Compared to Dell HCI, Prism’s home screen is quite mundane. When we tried to migrate an application from the old cluster, we couldn't run it on Nutanix’s native hypervisor. So we had to install a different hypervisor to run that particular application.

My organization has been using the solution for two months.

The solution has been very stable so far. We have had no issues.

So far, the product is quite scalable. It's easy to add clusters and nodes. We have about three nodes in disaster recovery and six nodes in production.

The solution’s support is one of the fastest supports we've experienced. We always get a response within an hour.

Previously we used Dell HCI, which was running on VMware ESXi. We had resource constraints in our previous environment. It wasn't as efficient as Nutanix.

There is a level of complexity to the initial setup because it is new. However, it was not as complex as other products.

The solution’s price is competitive. Compared to Dell HCI, Nutanix is a lot cheaper.

We reached out to OEM vendors in the market. We compared the offers based on price, features offered, and the cost of support for several years, and Nutanix came up at the top.

We just completed the installation and deployment for the disaster recovery branch. I work for the Central Bank of Nigeria. We have three different environments in the bank. We use IBM for our core systems. We also have test and development environments where we run stress tests before deployments.

When I had to deploy about ten or twelve different servers that use the same operating systems, I deployed one and cloned it. The product’s ability to clone is by far the best thing I have seen. It took me only two to three minutes instead of 30 minutes or an hour.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I do a lot of tasks via automation which I previously would have to hire people to do. The solution has helped me to eliminate a lot of low-skilled labor. I can put the money required for this job into other things.

Getting an update about my clusters is the most valuable feature of the product.

The support provided after office hours could use some improvement.

I have been using the solution for four years.

The product is really stable compared to everything else in my environment. I had one major problem over a five-year period.

I've had no problems with scale, and I keep growing my environment every day.

The support is good.

Positive

The initial setup was easy.

We used a combination of our employees and consultants to deploy the solution.

Since we are able to automate more, we are able to deploy faster. So customers are happier, and it leads to customer retention.

The solution’s pricing is not outrageous like other products. However, reducing the price would always be useful.

I've evaluated options across the board, and Nutanix’s structuring platform has saved me a lot of time and effort. It takes three times more people to do tasks on VMware than Nutanix.

I have different products. It seems like Nutanix is headed toward making things more seamless, which really excites me. I need solutions with improved speed of creating and automating the processes and making them seamless. I need solutions to grab everything from everywhere. NCM is self-sufficient. You don't need to know everything about it. It installs itself, and it takes care of itself. We have used the older versions of the solution too.

The speed of the outcomes is great. I couldn’t be happier. I can deliver to my developers and my end customers faster. Faster outcomes are very important to my organization.

NCM’s built-in playbooks have freed up time for my IT team by 25%. I love that the product allows me to fix things that are broken now and think about the future at the same time. Compared to other products, NCM is much easier to use. I don't need highly trained people to use the solution.

Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

We use Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for the hyperconverged platform and to be able to centralize all our workload in a resilient platform.

We have integrated NCM with our service portal to provide seamless delivery of services, from the demand portal to the deployment of virtual machines. Both the help desk and service desk can manage everything from clusters to disaster protection and protection groups using the same API. We also have integrated IBM into the system.

Regarding Calm, which I am familiar with since Nutanix acquired it, it has become a very useful feature. However, the main concern currently is the licensing issue.

The challenge with Calm lies in its licensing model. We deploy it once, but we cannot manage it afterward, and we cannot purchase more licenses than what we have. When we deploy an application, it consumes a license, which limits our ability to use Calm as intended. Despite this challenge, Calm is a great tool for managing the life cycle of an application.

We use various APIs to enable automatic project delivery and one-click upgrades for all nodes, ensuring minimal downtime during the process.

I cannot give you an exact amount of time saved, but I can say that we have been able to reduce the number of people managing the platform by more than twenty percent since we started using automation and a simplified management approach. This is the best figure that we can provide.

The first use case is the hyperconverged platform with back-end storage.

The file management feature is also useful to us. Currently, we are also using Object Store.

Although we have evaluated Calm, we have not yet implemented it as it does not seem to be a valid use case for our role as a broker of IT solutions. 

We do not manage Azure workloads or life cycles, and it seems to be more suitable for developers.

For instance, let's consider File. The benefit of using File is that you can leverage both block and file use cases on the same platform with a single admin console. This makes it a valuable tool for managing storage efficiently.

Consider Files, for instance. Its value lies in the ability to leverage both block and file use cases on a single platform with a unified administrative interface.

We are able to simplify our storage infrastructure by replacing some of the older file system platforms. By using public cloud stores, we can offer new storage capabilities on the same platform, which is beneficial. We can also link these storage capabilities to our Splunk application, making it easier to manage and analyze data.

The primary benefit of using a unified platform is to simplify the management of the platform and reduce the skills required to manage it. 

With the natural attrition of skilled workers, companies must do more with fewer resources, and the most skilled people often lead the company. 

By using a unified platform, we can complete tasks that may have required highly skilled personnel in the past. 

This does not diminish the value of skilled personnel but allows us to accomplish more with fewer resources, which is beneficial for us in terms of simplification and cost-effectiveness.

The solution is designed to be easy to onboard and learn, even for those who have never used it before. This is because it is a unified platform that encompasses multiple technologies, reducing the need for users to learn and maintain multiple systems. 

The unified platform is also very user-friendly and clickable, similar to the Windows environment, making it easier for users to navigate and maintain.

This simplicity also enables the service desk to provide level-one support, which covers basic tasks and troubleshooting, leaving more complex issues to the experts. 

Additionally, the unified platform streamlines the support process, making it easier and more efficient for the service desk to resolve user issues.

The flow and management capabilities of the platform could be improved to handle additional features and functionalities, especially since the company currently uses some other solutions from a competitor. 

With the right enhancements, NCM could be capable of handling more features than the current hypervisor and offer a more comprehensive and robust platform for the company's IT needs.

While VMware is no longer part of NCM, it would be beneficial to include additional features such as AHPs, HyperAnalyzer, and similar capabilities found in VMware's ESXi. These enhancements would add value to the platform and increase its competitiveness in the market.

To maintain a competitive edge against ESXi, it's essential to have a dual bundle strategy, which is what we are currently pursuing. Having feature parity at a comparable level is important for us to succeed in the market.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for more than five years.

The stability and resiliency of NCM are among the main factors that have kept us using it.

The operational method and process have remained the same since the beginning.

We have continued to use NCM due to its consistent operation method and process, as well as its unchanged UI look and feel over time.

The reason for our ability to scale and extend the platform is due to its scalability. With multiple data centers across different regions in North America, Europe, and APAC, we have a global platform that allows us to add a new team each year to manage it worldwide.

Scalability is another strong point of NCM. We don't have an excessively large cluster, but rather a big one that is very stable, and we can scale it as needed.

Currently, we have over two hundred nodes deployed across various countries, with the majority located in France.

We do not have a direct support agreement with Nutanix as we purchase the entire Lenovo infrastructure. However, our experience with their support has been very positive and valuable.

I have direct contact with the new Nutanix team and they are always available when we need them, providing us with valuable support.

I would rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

There is always room for improvement. 

There is some turnover in our supply chain, with changes happening once per year or once per two years. We experienced a significant shift in personnel in the last two years.

Previously, I worked with Symptivity. It was the first Hyperconverged platform.

Symptivity was a good solution, but at the time Nutanix was just emerging and VMware's VSAN was not yet available. Since then, Nutanix has continued to grow and expand its offerings, while Symptivity did not see the same level of growth.

In my opinion, Nutanix stands out from its competitors because it has invested heavily in developing its platform and expanding its offerings to cover various areas. Moreover, Nutanix has also obtained certifications from different vendors, including Red Hat, which has enabled it to be recognized and accepted in the industry. 

This was something that was lacking in the past, and it has helped Nutanix gain an edge over its competitors.

Nutanix has done an excellent job of ensuring that its platform meets the requirements and standards necessary to be used by a wide range of customers.

I was part of the initial deployment team during the early stages, but at that time, the offering was not the best. However, I am still involved and play an active role in the ongoing growth and development of the platform within the company.

The platform met our expectations and was straightforward to deploy and onboard. We experienced no issues as long as we continued to use ESXi.

We were able to observe how easy it was to handle Nutanix in comparison to Simplivity at that time. This is because we faced a lot of issues with Simplivity, but we did not face them with Nutanix.

Although we have seen a return on investment, it wasn't as high as we were expecting. This is because running ESXi on top of the new device platform incurs additional costs in terms of run operations, resiliency, and new capabilities. 

While there are already some benefits, there is still room for improvement in terms of simplifying the platform to further increase ROI.

In my opinion, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is expensive.

Based on what we have, we always aim to meet our pricing requirements and we are open to discussing and negotiating to get the best price possible. However, in my experience, I didn't find the pricing model for Calm to be satisfactory. 

As a large company with numerous instances, the pricing for Calm was not favorable for us. There is definitely room for improvement in this area.

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

We use Nutanix Cloud Manager to consolidate and manage our Azure and AWS platforms, as well as our VMware server virtualization process.

We looked for a cost and security governance solution that is self-service and does not require any coding. Nutanix Cloud Manager is that solution.

RunBook has had a positive impact on reducing manual intervention, which has been very helpful. We looked for a solution that offered a single pane of glass, ease of use, and self-service orchestration without requiring a lot of coding. I think this really helps users get the policies in place so they don't have to worry. We just need to put in the initial effort, and then we can be hands-off.

The speed of outcomes we received using NCM's low code automation is good. We implemented separate network segmentation for all functions, including our DCS, corporate, and team control.

Our organization values speed and efficiency. We want to be able to upgrade our systems and processes quickly and safely, and we need to ensure that our IT and cloud applications always run smoothly. To do this, we need to have a good understanding of the costs and risks associated with these upgrades, as well as the ability to forecast and manage incidents. We also need to make sure that our systems are compliant with all security regulations, and that our employees have the ability to self-service their IT needs.

As a senior project manager, I am responsible for monthly budgeting and forecasting. The main aspect of this is cost, but proper forecasting is also essential to keep our company running smoothly. We have a policy of accepting variances of up to ten percent, so it is important to have a good management tool that can accurately predict costs. That is why we evaluated different management tools and ultimately chose NCM. NCM helped us to improve our forecasting accuracy, which saved us money and allowed us to better manage our resources.

It is important for NCM to be able to manage both Nutanix and VMware infrastructures because it provides a single pane of glass for management. This simplifies management and reporting.

Our IT team can focus on other tasks thanks to the playbooks. Once we set up the runbooks, we can relax until there is an additional instance of configuration on AWS or Azure.

NCM saved our organization approximately 50 percent of our employees' daily time. This is due to two reasons: One, we no longer need to worry about topologies and self-service orchestration setup, as NCM handles these tasks for us. Two, NCM provides a single pane of glass for all of our data, so we no longer have to spend time searching for different dashboards. This saves time on reporting as well, as we can now find all of the information we need in one place.

We have a multi-cloud and multi-virtualization environment. In this environment, we have many instances running on different platforms, including on-premises and cloud-based platforms. To ensure accuracy, we need a tool that can provide us with ease of use on a daily basis. A single pane of glass, such as NCM, helps us address our automation needs.

Nutanix Cloud Manager's most valuable feature is its self-service capabilities. We have a large VMware footprint, and we are slowly and gradually moving to Azure and AWS. The self-service capabilities allow us to orchestrate our deployments without writing code, and they also use artificial intelligence to improve our security posture. This is a major benefit for us, as security is our top priority.

NCM's pricing structure is confusing and difficult to understand. The company frequently changes its prices, and it is not clear how the subscription-based model works. This could be improved by making the pricing structure more transparent and easier to understand.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager for just over one year.

The technical support is good. When I called, I was able to speak to a real person, not a robot. My problems were resolved quickly, within hours, not days. I am very satisfied with the support I received.

Positive

We previously used Azure Cost Management, but we switched to Nutanix Cloud Manager because it provides visibility into Nutanix, VMware, Azure, and AWS on a single dashboard. Azure Cost Management only supports Microsoft products.

We evaluated Morpheus, Azure Cost Management, Nutanix Cloud Manager, and AWS Cost Management. Our company policy is to evaluate multiple options before reaching a decision.

I give Nutanix Cloud Manager an eight out of ten.

We have Cloud Manager deployed across multiple departments, and each has an individual cluster. NCM manages all of those clusters from a single bandwidth source. About 60 people at our company use the solution.

Cloud Manager is a resilient solution with high availability and uptime. It also speeds up our rollout if we want to provision virtual machines or containers for development. It gives us visibility into Nutanix and VMware from a single pane of glass. This capability is crucial during the reporting phase.

It's also instrumental during capacity planning. Cloud Manager helps you take inventory of your existing resources so you can augment them before they run out. Capacity forecasting and reporting are some of the best features.

Cloud Manager decreased our continuous validation time by about 15 percent because many of these operations are prebuilt out of the box. The built-in playbooks come in handy during scheduled activities. We can write playbooks and execute them at a scheduled time. For example, if I want to perform an activity over the weekend when I'm not in the office, I can run the playbook to trigger it. The playbooks reduce the time spent on these tasks by 30 to 40 percent.

The Nutanix stack is hyper-converged. I don't need to buy expensive SAN storage because it's integrated into the hardware appliance. That's the best part. We get excellent latency by leveraging local storage.

NCM's analytics could be better because we're not getting an accurate analysis of our virtual machines, and we're over-provisioning some of them. 

I have used Cloud Manager for more than seven years.

Cloud Manager is a highly stable product, and clients can request custom enhancements based on their specific needs. You can ask Nutanix's engineering team to build a custom solution for a customer.

Cloud Manager scales linearly with the best performance. There's something called Controller Virtual machine available on every node. When you scale the solution, it never affects your performance.

I rate Nutanix's support a ten out of ten. Nutanix has the best support of any solution I've used.

Positive

We previously relied on VMware tools like vCenter and vROps for reporting. Now, we are 70 to 80 percent reliant on NCM. Nutanix is easier to manage and use. It has a short learning curve if you come from a VMware background. I was already well-versed in VMware, so the learning curve was short. 

Deploying Cloud Manager was extremely straightforward. You can typically finish the deployment and put it into production in a day and a half.

Cloud Manager is fairly priced. I like the pricing model, which includes multiple tiers. It all depends on the customers' use cases. Each customer might have a different opinion about the features NCM offers. We match our customers' expectations with what NCM offers. That might change from customer to customer. NCM is more appropriate for enterprises than small or medium-sized businesses.

I rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a nine out of ten. 

Our first use case is for ransomware. We have two more use cases that we identified. The second one is going to be for DR, and the third one is going to be for capacity.

Currently, we do ransomware on-prem. We use a shared cluster in our disaster recovery site. With Nutanix Cloud Manager, we hope to use the NC2 clusters in Azure and move all the ransomware activities from on-prem to the cloud.

We are an insurance company. Data security is our top priority. We take ransomware very seriously. We always want to be careful and make sure that our data is secure, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. We go through ransom activities at least once a month on-prem, and that's what we hope to do with Nutanix Cloud Manager as well. We hope to continue to provide data security to our business and to our customers.

We use Nutanix Cloud Manager's built-in playbooks. They absolutely freed up our team's time to focus on other tasks or projects. We were looking to use these playbooks for a while. From an automation perspective and from a day-to-day management perspective, creating these playbooks definitely freed up our engineers to focus on more strategic tasks and more solutions than day-to-day activities. They saved about 40% of their time. As we move forward and use more playbooks, we see more and more time freed up. It freed up at least six to seven percent of our engineers' time.

The ability to do Layer 2 stretching across data centers is valuable. The migration of VMs from one location to the other is also valuable.

There should be more APIs to integrate with different vendors and to integrate with the existing solutions that we use on-prem.

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

We had some hiccups with Nutanix Cloud Manager, our on-prem networking solutions, and all that, but as we went on, we overcame all those issues. There has been no showstopper whatsoever. All the issues that we came across were just small things that we had to work through. Nutanix's support has been very helpful. They worked with us all the way to help us overcome all these issues, and so far, it has been great.

We are looking forward to it. We only have a small NCM platform built, but as we move forward, we look forward to using it for other use cases. We definitely want to explore expanding our NCM presence in Azure or in AWS.

Their support was excellent. I'd rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We used Azure's cloud-native management. We still use it to some point to manage our Azure entities in the public cloud. Other than that, we haven't used any solution.

The setup was easy. We had help from Nutanix support, which was excellent. We got wonderful support from people who gave us a hand along the way. It wasn't very difficult, and within two or three days, we were fully functional to some extent. As far as the ease of use goes, our engineers love it. They use it every single day. I've not heard any complaints from our users. The user experience that we always look for has been great so far.

Learning is wonderful. There's so much available on Nutanix's portal in terms of the KB articles, knowledge base, user guides, and admin guides for Nutanix Cloud Manager. To have all that available to our engineers online is a great help.

I'm sure we will see an ROI. We've only been doing it for a year. It takes time, but I'm very confident that as we grow and mature, we will definitely see some positive returns.

https://www.peerspot.com/produ...When we started to look at Nutanix Cloud Manager, the cost was a major factor. Management comes into play. Hosting on-prem is getting expensive. We did find a lot of cost benefits to using the NCM and NC2 clusters in Azure. Being a Microsoft partner, we always get a big discount. When we use Nutanix Cloud Manager in Azure or AWS, there is an ease of management. We have a single pane of glass to look through and manage our on-prem entities and Nutanix Cloud Manager. It becomes very easy.

The pricing was very good. We were very pleased with what we were offered by our account manager. Because of that, we expanded Nutanix Cloud Manager, and we hope to expand even more. Right now, we are in Azure, and as we build up more and more within the NCM platform, we hope to expand into AWS as well.

We chose Nutanix Cloud Manager because of the pricing. Also, the features and the capabilities that it offers within the Nutanix ecosystem were very attractive. We've been using Nutanix on-prem for almost six years, and to be able to extend them on the cloud was a no-brainer.

We use Calm for on-prem automation, and we are looking to use Calm for our cloud automation as well. We have PoC flow for Microsec on-prem, and we hope to extend that out to the cloud as well as we segregate the traffic between on-prem and cloud entities.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is very easy to use. Our users and engineers have become very knowledgeable in a very short time, and as far as the cost goes, it has been very effective.

We only started using it about a year ago, and there's a lot more we need to use Nutanix Cloud Manager for. We haven't fully explored all its capabilities from an automation, AI, or machine learning perspective. We hope to use all the built-in features within Nutanix Cloud Manager.

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

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 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.