Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

We are using Calm to deploy a new server. We have four blueprints: the first one is to bring the network; the second one is to configure the elements; the third and the fourth ones are for deploying new servers.

We save a lot of time with Calm. It has enabled our company to develop and deploy applications faster and it has reduced the time it takes us to QA applications. In addition, the solution's support for scripts, API, and domain specific language, has reduced the man-hours it takes to deploy and support applications because we don't have to rewrite all the scripts.

It also helps us react faster to the changing needs of our business because we can deploy another server easily, with just a few clicks.

Also, all of the deployments are exactly the same. We have exactly the same clusters deployed in each of our environments. 

The time savings and uniformity are the two main advantages for us.

We use the solution's support for scripts, API, and domain specific language.

There is room for improvement in making the solution easier still. If you don't know Calm, it's not so easy to use. Blueprint repositories are not all in the same place. Sometimes they are in the Marketplace, sometimes they are on the cluster. And from start to finish, it's not so easy to create a blueprint.

I have been using Nutanix Calm since January of 2019, so well over a year.

The stability, now, is okay, but in the past it was awful, due to both our environment and the solution.

The support for Calm is really excellent.

To me, the initial setup was complex. The way we are using it, it was not easy to do what we need to do. The deployment took us about two hours.

We used an integrator, SCC, for the deployment. Our experience with them was quite good.

For standard use it is quite easy to use, but for more complex tasks it's definitely more complex to use. An example of a simple task is deploying a new server, while a complex task would be configuring a bucket or another repository. Overall, it's easy to use.

You need to have a clear idea of what you are doing before creating blueprints in Calm. It is a really good solution for doing simple tasks, but it's not a good solution for complex tasks. But it can definitely save you a lot of time.

In terms of the solution's abilities when it comes to team collaboration, our team is really small; we are three people. It's quite easy for us to communicate and to tell each other what we are doing.

Using Nutanix, we have deployed our on-premise private cloud. We run user-based workloads, corporate application-based workloads, database workloads, and general-purpose workloads.

The file server feature in Nutanix is very good. It is one solution-worthy feature, and that was one of the key features why we went with Nutanix. Because in the same cluster, if we are getting files, blocks, as well as object storage, then that will be the best option for them to be hosted in.

The main thing Nutanix could improve is to commercialize their data fiber, which they haven't done enough. This could help them gain more traction with VMware. Nutanix is SDS, not a hypervisor like ESXi, so it's not a direct comparison. I would like to have an ESXi alternative that allows me to use it with AWS only, which is equivalent to Visa, so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

The migration of VMs across clusters needs improvement, unlike what we have in VMware. I would like to see Nutanix mature its Vmotion capabilities, which are equivalent to VMware's.

I've been using this solution for four years. 

I would rate stability a nine out of ten. 

I would rate scalability a seven out of ten. 

The customer service and support team is fantastic. 

Positive

After hardware racking, stacking, and firmware upgrading, we were able to get the cluster up and running in two or three days at the most. Once all the prerequisites are met, the deployment process is generally straightforward.

We bought Nutanix/Lenovo HVAC appliances, so the Lenovo P.S. team was present during the installation. 

There are no extra charges as long as we're not scaling beyond the agreed-upon rate.

We had VMware installed within our infrastructure. We switched from VMware to Nutanix because Nutanix is pretty simple. We couldn't handle all the extra packages.

I would definitely recommend using the solution. Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. There are still many areas of improvement in the product. 

We use Prism Pro and Prism Central to centrally manage everything. It comes with a playbook and we use that to alter some procedures.

Nutanix has integrated storage which gives us a separate storage unit. That has dramatically decreased our rack space. We used to have a twofold rack on this solution.

It is an integrated solution with virtualization, storage, and network all together. We used to have each of those components from different vendors and we had to manage them separately. Now, we can centrally manage all of them. We can configure most things from a central location, and the automation enables us to accomplish a lot of things. We save a lot of time as a result.

Overall, the solution has dramatically improved the way our organization functions. We used to have IBM servers and Nimble Storage but there was no central management so we had to manage each host individually. We also had to manage the storage separately. With Nutanix, everything is built-in, the storage and the host together. We can do everything from one central location. That makes things very simple. 

The TCO is really good and the administration is very simple.

The central management aspect of Prism, as well as its playbook functionality, called X-Play, are very helpful for us.

We can use the event trigger in the playbook and then specific procedures are run automatically for us. That saves us admin time. Using X-Play is simple. In three steps you can define things and there is also a wizard to guide you. There's a lot of automation you can potentially do, but if you try to do something several times you might create some problems with your automation. The wizard is the simplest way to automate and the resulting automation saves us time.

We are quite a small environment. We only have two chassis and eight hosts, four hosts in each chassis, and we centrally manage them. The performance is quite good and responsive.

Overall, everything is simple, including the upgrade feature. Everything is built in one place with a single pane of glass for management.

We use Nutanix only for our dev and test environments. Our production environment is VMware, and that is totally separate. But we do transfer data between them. That's a challenge because we need to frequently bring the production data into our test environment and that's a big transfer. If we could do a cross-storage transfer, like a transfer from NetApp or Nimble Storage into Nutanix with automation, that would greatly help us.

I've been using the solution for a little over four years. I'm the infrastructure architect and I design the solution.

The stability of the solution really surprised me when I first started using it. It exceeded my expectations. I have been impressed.

Just think about the fact that we managed 15 hosts individually before, and we had to manage the storage separately. The maintenance of it was really difficult for us. We had two dedicated environment admins, and now we are down to one, a dedicated Nutanix admin. He is fully in charge of the solution and its maintenance. He also supports users and does troubleshooting for them. It has saved us lots of time that we can put into user support.

From my understanding, the solution can very easily be scaled up. The scalability should be really good.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is the next version of Prism Pro. If we renew Nutanix next year, we will use NCM. It is a better version of Prism Pro and I'm looking forward to that.

Technical support is quite good. We have a heartbeat sent to Nutanix, so when we open a support case, they normally respond really quickly and provide good suggestions as well.

Positive

We used IBM with Nimble. We also used Cisco UCS with NetApp. UCS provides central management for their platform, but we had to manage storage separately. We had to manage each host individually. That was a lot of duplicated work because we had more than 15 hosts.

At first, we moved our environment to Azure, but we found that it was too costly. That's the reason we ended up with the Nutanix solution, and we moved everything back in-house again. Azure is a totally different environment. It's a cloud solution, but we have really lengthy applications and Azure didn't really meet our requirements. We ended up with way more VMs than we required, and that really brought the cost up.

After a year and a half on Azure, we explored the Nutanix solution. We decided to use it and moved some 200 VMs back.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The only thing that was confusing  was configuring the IP address for the management part. After that, everything was fine and really simple. I'm still confused about the IP address part. I don't think that's related to Prism or NCM. It's just the Nutanix solution.

Maintenance is required because from time to time they release new firmware that may contain new features and bug-fixes. Prism has built-in upgrade features that make upgrades pretty simple too. It's really simple compared to UCS.

We brought in a Nutanix technician from Toronto, the first time. The second time, we hired a third-party consultant to come in. They were both okay. Their knowledge of it was really good. Both of them were still confused about the IP config. The initial problem was that we have a lot of events. Our internal network is quite complicated. That might have confused them.

On our side, there were three of us involved. I'm mainly on the infrastructure side and take care of the platform storage network. We also have a dedicated Nutanix admin, and one other. We spent almost a day with the consultant.

Compared to UCS and the NetApp storage, Nutanix is actually cheaper. It also has a lot of built-in features, most of which we are using, and we added a few extras.

We reevaluated UCS, but UCS still didn't come with storage. We thought that the built-in storage of the Nutanix solution, and the single pane glass management, would greatly help us. It would reduce our administration time a lot and allow the programmers themselves to provision VMs. That would also help us.

Be sure you collect your requirements accurately and be sure to consider growth. We didn't do that at all and, about eight months after we bought the first one, we ran out of resources and had to add a second one. So carefully estimate your growth and give yourself a lot of room to grow, including space and CPU capabilities.

The solution is a management portal for the entire solution. You can have a look at your configuration and do different kinds of configuration monitoring management. You have the infrastructure implementation workflows on top of it, so that's the portal that will manage these underlining nodes.

It's a stable solution.

The solution scales well.

Technical support is helpful.

It's easy to set up.

Licensing could be more flexible in future releases.

We've used the solution for two years. 

It's a stable solution. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution can scale as needed.

I can't speak to how many people are using the product right now.

Technical support is great. They helped during the setup and were excellent. 

The solution is very straightforward. The deployment took about five to six days. It took about a week's time.

Anyone who is comfortable with any virtual edition of a solution with five to six years of experience will be able to manage it. I can manage the entire solution myself.

The solution is easy to self-deploy. During the initial setup, we worked directly with technical support, and they were quite helpful.

I'd like them to offer a more flexible licensing model.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using.

I would recommend the solution to others. Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten. We've been very happy with it. I'd advise potential users should first run a POC and then go for it.

In our organization since we implemented Nutanix, we have focused on migrating critical business production applications and services to Nutanix due to its high performance, high availability, reliability, and 99% confidence that all applications and databases do not They will have problems. In addition to the performance that we can have with Nutanix, we have platform management tools that show us everything that happens in the environment of virtual machines with Prism that allows us to quickly and graphically monitor our environment.

We have a platform where most of the servers are physical and with a good time of use, since we acquired a Nutanix block with 4 nodes we have migrated physical to virtual servers in the same way we have consolidated database servers in a virtual server, like application servers, that is, since we implemented this solution, we have reduced the physical servers in our data center, we have reduced electricity consumption, it has made the use of air conditioning in the data center more efficient, in short, it has been a relationship win-win.

It is interesting to me how Nutanix manages hyperconvergence, the possible failures that can occur in the platform migrating machine machines to nodes without problems while solving the failed node, but without a doubt Prism is the feature that I value the most since I can manage and monitor everything in a single tool, giving me simplicity, statistics, states of equipment resources, alerts, updates in a single click, migrate equipment nodes manually or automatically. In short, Prism is my favorite among many that Nutanix has.

I think one of the points to improve is having the platform with multiple languages, for example, Spanish, seriously, one point to consider is a valid point for me, my native language is Spanish, being in Venezuela. The documentation would also be good to have in Spanish, the use of Nutanix in English is very intuitive and easy to understand, when one enters the prism the board is easy to understand but if it were in Spanish, it would help to better understand it for those who handle the English very simply.

I have been using Nutanix Prism Pro for two years and seven months.

For the organization, it has been a great leap in quality, since apart from having a large number of physical equipment, the closest thing to nutanix was an IBM BLADE WITH 5 blades sharing an IBM 3520 storage, and the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system. , with Hyper-v as hypervisor. The handling of the equipment in this infrastructure was too slow at the time of writing data to the different machines that belonged to the cluster since the disks are rotating and hardware, we can say that it already had a fairly long period of use.
The arrival of Nutanix to the organization was a quality leap from the sky to the moon, we migrated the critical production services such as databases, applications and other servers that should have better performance, and more advanced management from a prism apart it gives us a way to monitor everything that happens in the cluster.
For me it has been very beneficial, since in addition to the advantages it has given my organization, it has also allowed me to get to know a new infrastructure, which has a learning platform, the Nutanix University, where you can learn and get certified. something beyond a tool is a way of looking at technology.

It really great lets you grow and manage everything from one point Prism.

The support level is very high, and committed pure gold.

We hadn't actually worked with a hyperconvergence tool..

The biggest difficulty was due to the language since we speak Spanish, but we had someone who spoke it well and we were able to carry out the installation without a hitch.

We did the implementation with the support of the provider and Nutanix support, its level was excellent

We realized ROI in six months.

Many times when we are evaluating solutions, Nutanix is a little expensive, but when they get the cost-benefit ratio it is definitely one of the best on the market since it allows you to manage several blocks as one.

We evaluate the use of Cisco UCS

For me it has been very beneficial, since apart from the advantages it has given my organization, it has also allowed me to get to know a new infrastructure, which has a learning platform, Nutanix university where you can learn and become certified, it is something beyond a tool is a way of seeing technology

Our primary use case to date has been hosting virtual machines of public branch exchanges (PBX) and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) for our customers' Voice Over IP (VoIP) cloud-based telephone systems.

We currently focus on two PBXs that have performed quite well on Nutanix Prism Pro: Asterisk/FreePBX and 3CX. We are also in the process of implementing cloud-based security systems for our clients and expanding to also offer desktop as a service so that our clients can fully implement a bring-your-own-device policy for their offices.

Nutanix Prism Pro has improved the way that we manage our systems due to the way that the solution is built. Hyper-converged Infrastructure offers us the speed and reliability that is very much needed in our type of environment.

It has cut down our maintenance time significantly and simplified our processes for backups. 

We have had situations before where we have to restore a customers VM on the fly due to bad management of the client, where they would actually break the system and with our old solution, restoring could take upwards of two hours, whereas now, it takes a maximum of 10 seconds.

There are two specific things that stand out to me in terms of what I find most valuable in this product. Number one, how simple and effective the dashboard is at laying out everything that is needed at a glance. Whether it be checking the health of your clusters and nodes or seeing the state of all of your VMs, the information is right in front of you when logging in.

Second, the support for the product is absolutely amazing. Of all of the times that we required assistance for our Nutanix cluster, Nutanix support has been there no matter the time. So far, every support engineer has been a pleasure to work with.

I would appreciate more advanced networking features in the dashboard. There seems to be a lack of GUI functionality for creating/modifying features such as LACP and VXLAN. While these features can be configured, it can only be done via the CLI of your CVM/Cluster and it can be quite a hassle. GUI implementation for these features would really strengthen the product immensely.

I would also appreciate a dashboard that allows for more customization. I would love to be able to eliminate information that I don't consider crucial from the dashboard and/or have the ability to focus on more essential things (such as network utilization) for our use.

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

We previously used ESXi. We switched because we found that there was constant maintenance needed for our VSANs and it was quite cumbersome.

While the product may seem to be more expensive at first, it ultimately pays for itself within a short time frame due to the hours saved on maintenance.

We evaluated multiple options before choosing Nutanix. These included Citrix, Hyper-V, and Zen.

One of the use cases is that we do site-to-site replication, DR. Everything is controlled through Prism Pro: DR replication, runbooks, retention policies. We also use some of the playbooks for automated actions.

Administration of our virtual environment has been streamlined. We can go to Prism Pro and look at anything from VM performance down to our DR. We can customize dashboards to get what we want to look at on a daily basis, all in one place. We've put some of the critical things on the custom dashboard like disk latency performance. It's like a one-stop shop to manage our entire infrastructure. It has cut down on management efforts significantly. It has saved us about eight hours per week.

The most valuable feature is definitely the disaster recovery portion, which they call Xi Leap. It's included in the licensing. Before, we were on a solution that charged extra for DR software. And with Prism Pro, not only can we manage all of our other infrastructure in addition to our DR, in the same console, but we can set up recovery points. We can also set up scripts to run, so it gives us everything we need to have a solid DR plan in place.

It's very similar to Prism Element. It's very easy to use. The navigation is all on the left side and it's broken down into categories. It has a fast HTML5 interface, so you don't rely on any Java. Nutanix stays with its one-click mindset on this as well. There are very few clicks to get where you need to go. Overall, it's very easy to use and administer.

Prism Pro comes with capacity planning and runway analytics. We use those features, as well as provisioning and VM analytics that will tell us which virtual machines are using too many resources, or not enough resources, so we can right-size them appropriately. They're definitely very useful. By right-sizing the VMs we're not wasting CPU or RAM. The runway gives us an idea, for our budget year, about whether we might need to add another node to support our capacity. That is all very helpful.

The machine learning can be improved. There are a lot of false positives at times. For example, I'm actually looking at some alerts right now, that some service was restarted multiple times. It is like the same alert, spammed over and over again. But really, it turns out that that event didn't happen.

We purchased it back in 2015.

The stability has been very good. We haven't had any outages or downtime with it. Even after upgrades, it comes right back up. We haven't experienced any issues with reliability or uptime.

It's very scalable. We just have one Prism Pro VM. I know you can scale out the setup where you have multiple Prism Pro instances if you have a bigger environment. Our environment is small so we only needed one Prism Pro instance. That made it simple for us to get it up and going. If you do have multiple instances, they act like a cluster to balance out resources and manage different clusters. You can definitely scale out.

Nutanix's support is well-known and they are really good. We haven't had an issue where they haven't worked with us. We call into an entry-level support and they're very knowledgeable, unlike some other companies you run into where tier-one support can be hit or miss. We've had good luck with them. We've opened over a dozen cases too.

Back in the day, we had VMware and they had a similar Java-based interface, but that was five years ago. Our VMware licenses were coming up for renewal and we felt that VMware was too segregated. They were more of a traditional infrastructure where they separate the storage, separate the networks, and separate the hypervisors to manage. Nutanix, being hyper-converged, has everything in one portal.

The initial setup of Prism Pro was straightforward. All you do is click a button in Prism Element and go through a wizard. Give it an IP, it downloads the binaries, and deploys it for you. It's very simple. You just put in the network information for Prism Pro and, within a few clicks, it's done.

It only took about 30 minutes to deploy.

We didn't use a third-party. In our company, in addition to me there are four others who work in Prism Pro. The others include an infrastructure manager and three system administrators.

We have seen return on our investment with Prism Pro in terms of man-hours and ease of use. We've drastically reduced the time it takes to perform various functions and to handle management, especially when it comes to DRs. Our savings have mostly been in employee time.

They can be very flexible. Pricing is always negotiable. You really need to analyze if you need the features or not. Do you need Prism Pro or can you get away with the basic Prism? You can also do a test drive of the features through a Nutanix-hosted cluster. So you can try before you buy. Work with your VAR on pricing because they'll be flexible.

We looked at SimpliVity. They're now part of HPE, but they were on their own company back then. SimpliVity requires you to have VMware licensing, so you also had to buy VMware. Nutanix has its own built-in hypervisor included. SimpliVity also had a hardware card in their server that could be a single point of failure. Nutanix is mostly software, which pretty much eliminates that failure domain.

Try it for yourself. You can have a PoC where you can have a cluster on your site. There are different avenues to test it out before you move forward.

I think a lot of people get stuck in their ways with VMware or a traditional method. Don't be afraid to try something new. IT is always changing. Technology is getting better.

We're using it very extensively. We deal with all of our management from it. We check on our VM, deploy new VMs, manage reports, manage DR, manage playbooks, and we do our IT as well, for capacity planning and future runway support. We're 100 percent on it. We're completely off VMware, so everything is on Nutanix.

We have two different clusters in the environment one is an all flash cluster of 40 nodes and other one is a hybrid cluster of 4 nodes and are on the way to introduce another all flash cluster of 9 nodes in the environment. All the clusters have VMs as well as file servers hosted in them. 

Managing multiple clusters with mix of VMs and file servers by logging into multiple console will lead to additional operations overhead and also can cause delay in incident resolution as operations team will have to login to particular management console and carry out the remediation activities. 

First of all, the product is very stable. We did not see any breakages happen due to product misbehavior.

Thanks to multiple automations and self-explanatory dashboards, the overall operations load on my team has come down considerably. On top of this, since we are utilizing the Files feature also from both of our clusters, it is easing out the management overhead in that layer as well. 

Though the console is highly sensitive about any small alerts, which makes the dashboard through many alerts even for one single issue with the server, network, or connectivity, it is always better to have alerts even for small things than having no alert at all. 

One more thing to notice is the strong customer support team that Nutanix has. In the initial days when we were not familiar with this technology, we had raised many support requests and they helped us with all of them with outputting them into non-an issue buckets which we have seen many large enterprises do.

Reporting features in the console is so self-explanatory that even a non-IT person in the office can also understand it. Our finance users have access to this console and they will get the consumption details without having any dependency on us. Also, this dashboard is extended to our NOC team who will be able to interpret the alerts and decide on what to inform us whenever an alert pops up.

Moreover, the deployment process was so easy and smooth that post rack and stack and management IP configuration, it just took less than 2 days to configure the cluster of 40 nodes, upgrade the firmware, create file service and VM space and integrate with our infrastructure.

From an AHV point of view, I look for the feature of setting a limit for the memory allocation for individual VMs. This will help in providing higher memory to VMs for users who always ask or more and more memory but end us not using it causing other needy to be deprived of it. It will be better if they can extend this to non-AHV hypervisors and also non-Nutanix clusters so that people who need this feature but can not goto HCI currently can make use of this product. 

Also, I believe they should take a relook into their licensing model to adopt to the current situation.

We have been using this from last 1 year.

From my past 1 year experience I can say that the product is very stable.

I would recommend keeping the cluster to smaller number of members which will help in faster maintenance and upgradation activities.

We use VMware in 3 tier architecture deployments. This was the first HCI deployment in our department.

It took less than 2 days to setup the cluster of 40 nodes. So need not say anything separately about the ease of deployment.

We took Lenovo professional services team support for this deployment and they are good at it.

1 year is too short term to recover the ROI.

This will be a better fit in the age of hybrid cloud and with Nutanix adding more and more products in its offering, soon Nutanix will become a complete package to run IT. So it will be easy to scale and add modules as and when needed.

We evaluated Horizon, Cisco Hyperflex along with Nutanix.