Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

Nutanix Cloud Manager's biggest use case is compliance management, which includes configurations and drifts.

Cost estimation is another use case, but I don't know whether Prism moved that service because I've not used this product for cost estimation for the last eight to ten months. I've used other products for cloud health and other aspects.

The biggest generic benefit is the business value. There is no direct dollar benefit. The benefit is that the clients see MTTR reduction happening. They see low P1 or P2 calls or cases, but this decline happens over time. These are the benefits, but Nutanix Cloud Manager doesn't give you the benefits upfront. It's a journey because the system matures as you resolve low alerts. The outcome of this journey is the business value. For a small customer, it can take two months. For a mid-sized customer, it can take five to eight months. For a large enterprise, it can be twelve to eighteen months. There is no straight dollar productivity or dollar value benefit they will get. They cannot quantify those benefits. They can only say that their MTTR reduction happened, their system uptime is high, or their systems are more resilient.

In terms of the speed of the outcomes received using Nutanix Cloud Manager's low-code automation, I'm a supplier, I'm a GSI, and for me, the outcome is straightforward, which is a productivity improvement. The people who are doing day-to-day services don't need an automation engineer to automate their daily mundane tasks. With Nutanix Cloud Manager's low-code automation, I can just click and automate a task if the number of times an instance is repeated is high. It's a very simple left shift of the resources. An L1 engineer can do it for me, and I don't have to deploy highly skilled engineers. I can use their time to do more projects and provide value to the customer, so the low code in Nutanix Cloud Manager is always linked to the left shift of engineers.

The way we deliver it to our clients is that we don't tell them it's Nutanix Cloud Manager. We sell the functionality. If a customer wants to have end-to-end observability and AI ops built up for it, it's irrelevant to them whether I'm deploying NCA, or I'm deploying anything else. All that matters is the service, the functionality, and the cost for that functionality.

The most valuable feature is less or no implementation time. It should be up and running at any point in time so I don't spend time in transformation. I should spend more time in the operations cycle. The time to market is something that is very important. When it comes to operations, it should bring in the highest level of automation. I don't want teams to keep on troubleshooting in terms of whether it's a false alert or not.

I've seen that Nutanix Cloud Manager has fewer false alerts as compared to other products, such as SCCM.

Nowadays, we see systems breaking a lot. I know that the current features of Nutanix Cloud Manager help to monitor the container world and modern applications, but as more microservices are getting deployed, more micro-management of those services needs to be done. If NCL needs any improvement, it's in the microservices area because, over time, you will see more microservices getting deployed. Monitoring of those is an area that needs to be looked into.

I know this product from the time when it was launched as Prism. I have been using Prism and Beam since 2015 or 2016. Being a System Integrator, I deployed it in a lot of customer environments.

It's a highly stable product, but it's yet to be proven for very big customers.

It's good for up to mid-sized enterprises. For us, a mid-segment company has ten thousand virtual machines. They are running somewhere around 400 nodes of containers for elements. One of my big customers is running 6,600 Nutanix nodes.

There were multiple solutions that were built, integrated, and deployed. All the incident correlations used to happen in BigPanda, SolarWinds, and ServiceNow, and the automation engine used to pick up those events and triggers and then automate them. They were there, but I required resources with multiple skill sets. With Nutanix Cloud Manager's low code solution, with a single click, an L1 engineer can do a task. My life is easy, and their life is easy. There is a productivity gain.

In terms of the comparison of Nutanix Cloud Manager with other solutions, as a supplier, every product is good for me. We just need to find the best and low-cost solution that delivers the functionality, even if that functionality is delivered by a small tool.

ServiceNow CMP is a comparable solution. It does the monitoring and other functionalities, but it does not look into the niche, modern technologies that are there right now, such as the containerized environment and multi-cloud container-native architecture. ServiceNow CMP needs another automation engine to deploy it because while it connects workflows to your end-to-end playbooks, it does not run them, whereas, with Nutanix Cloud Manager, I'm getting everything in a box.

I'm a Chief Architect. Based on the customer's requirement, I do the big-picture stitching for the customer. Once our solutions team picks up the products, I can influence product usage. I'm currently handling database-as-a-service in the UK and Europe. I influence the selection of the products but not deployment.

My advice would be to go for it without asking. As a mid-segment enterprise, you get everything in the box. You don't need to spend more money. You don't need to first spend money on VMware, then on SolarWinds, and then on your automation engine. 

Prism is used a lot in terms of server and service monitoring, but it's not used for observability. It feeds into observability, but I'm trying to explore if it can be used for observability in a service model.

I'd rate it 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 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 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.

We use Nutanix for management and capacity planning.

I like the analytics and the interface. Nutanix is easy to deploy and manage. 

Nutanix is one of two stacks where you can run everything you like. It would be nice if you could run it without the Nutanix appliance. Some clients don't use Nutanix engineering server hardware, so it would be helpful to run the Nutanix software for demos and tests. 

I have been using Nutanix for about three years. My boss started looking into Nutanix in 2013 or 2014. We were one of the first Nutanix partners in the area.

Nutanix is highly stable.

I rate Nutanix 10 out of 10 for scalability. Nutanix is highly scalable on the right version with the right hardware. 

I rate Nutanix support nine out of 10. They have specialized engineers for various clients, so when you open a ticket, only one technician will be working to resolve it. 

Positive

I rate Nutanix eight out of 10 for ease of setup. Setting up Nutanix is relatively easy if you know about networking.  It's not rocket science. You need to know the type of licenses you'd like to use and what the company shares. Before the initial implementation, you need to take time to plan. After that, the implementation could take a couple of hours or up to three days. 

I rate Nutanix 10 Cloud Manager Intelligent Operations 10 out of 10. You can operate Nutanix blindfolded. It's easy. 

It is to manage all my clusters. I have nine nodes, splitting six nodes on one side and three nodes on the another side. Prism Pro is the center to manage the whole cluster.

We have a nine node clusters. All machines are NXs from Nutanix. Our environment runs new development tools, like GitLab. DevOps are running inside of Nutanix and a few other systems. We are using Nutanix for new stuff to implement and test new technologies, such as DevOps, Kubernetes, Dockers, and Hadoop (in a few of the clusters for big data).

I am using the latest version.

Prism Pro can do everything that I need to manage my machines. I can manage my storage, priorities, and higher operations.

• The update for all clusters
• The Kubernetes solution for Nutanix
• Calm is a good tool for deploying critical blueprints. 

All these tools are managed by Prism Pro. With Prism Pro, you have the scripting tool where all functions are available through the interface and 1-click centralized upgrades. Though, you can do the same things by programming.

The tool's management for clusters is amazing and simple. It's quite simple to use it daily. With 1-click centralized upgrades, I can update my entire cluster using the data tech software from a single point in an easy way. It shows me that I have an update, then I just apply it, wait a few minutes, and all of the clusters are updated. It doesn't matter if it's a software update or something like bills. Everything is done from one central point. Also, the dashboard are really good. We have some relevant formations where I can see my cluster's CPU age, memory age, virtual machines, etc. All information can be viewed in an easy way, which provides me a cloud-like experience on an on-prem solution.

The dashboards also let me see the efficiency of my virtual machines, e.g., I can set it for a reminder to show me if there are any machines that are overprovisioned or constrained, then I can adjust the machines. In addition, I can create new virtual machines on any clusters from a single point of access. It's a pretty cool tool.

The interface is nice and simple. When the guys did the implementation, they told me, "They will walk me through on the solution and explain most of the important configuration tools." After that, I learned Prism Pro by myself. I never did a training or anything else. When the techs provide a new update, I take a look and see what's new. Sometimes I watch YouTube video from Nutanix with the new features, but it is really simple.

For now, my biggest problem in our corporation is the Nutanix hypervisor (AOS) is not fully operational for some things. 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 Nutanix Era, which is the database management and disaster recovery tools. 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. 

Since 2018.

It's really stable. In two years, I never have had a problem with Prism Pro.

I do the maintenance.

It can grow with my environment. With Prism Pro, it manages your entire Nutanix cluster. If I add more clusters onto that, I can manage it from the Prism Center, I just need to redistribute the cluster, then I can manage it like it's one machine. It doesn't matter if I have two or 100 clusters, I can manage it from a single point, which is good. This saves me time because if I need to update (for example), I can update a lot of machines from 1-click. Then, it will go on each machine of the clusters and update them. I am saving at least 40 percent of my time managing multiple clusters from a single point.

I am using the solution’s machine learning algorithms for things like predictive capacity planning or other functions but I already sp;have good capacity inside of my cluster. I think if I create new machines, it is really good but I am not using it so much. I have enough capacity at the moment. For the tools on Prism, I'm not planning to create so many machines. However, I already do use the tool and the predictions are really amazing. It is really helpful for planning in advance (e.g., six months, one year, or two years) the capacity for the cluster. I can estimate what will be the capacity of my cluster. For example, if I am a planning for one year to create 20 machines with a specific size, the machine learning algorithms can show me if I have enough capacity on the cluster to do that or if I need to expand the cluster. 

Between my colleagues from the operations team and me, there are around six people using it. I'm the owner of the contract for this company as the infrastructure architect. The other five guys are Linux and Windows administrators.

The support quality for Nutanix is unbelievable. The normal way support works from some other vendors: If I open a web ticket, then I need to wait three to four hours for a first contact from the company. Normally, this contact will ask me, "What is my problem," and try to direct me to the right person, then need to wait more. A few times, an engineer talked with me and acted on the solution. However, with Nutanix, I open a ticket, and in five minutes, I am talking with an engineer who can solve my problem. 

It is a really good experience to call Nutanix support via the phone. E.g., I explained a problem that I was having, and they told me, "I don't know so much about this problem, but my colleague at my side does know it. Just a minute." They transferred the call to the guy, whom I talked to and he help me. When they are going to end the call, they only ask for my serial number of my cluster to open a ticket. This is just to register the case. Before this, I had never seen a company where you call, get the support, and after that, they create a ticket for you. Normally, with companies, you need to call to a call center who registers the calls, then sends them to the engineer. When you call to Nutanix, you talk with the engineer.

We are still using VMware vCenter for virtualization management. Unfortunately, many systems are managed by my colleagues from Germany, and we're located in Brazil. 

We brought on Nutanix because we were looking to improve our environment and boost its speed. We were also looking for a new solution/tool. We trust Nutanix, and especially like the cloud-like solution for on-prem. We have been happy with them.

It was really simple for me. When I purchased the hardware, I also asked for an implementation. I followed the implementation with the guys. It was one to two days. When we deployed the machines we needed to do some updates, after that the configuration was quite simple and fast.

For deployment, we needed to install the hardware, do the start up, connect all the cables, and build the network, then install the Prism Pro and all the software. This took two days for us to unpack and put in the rack.

Our implementation strategy was to install the rack and configure the system, then when it was up and running, deploy the machines. It all worked and was really amazing. 

Two guys from the vendor did the installation. I used a third-party integrator, Servex (a Brazilian reseller/partner of Nutanix), to implement Prism Pro for me because because they have some configurations hided in Nutanix. They configure every piece of the driver, etc. I preferred that a third-party company do the implementation for me and I just follow up on all the activities.

Our experience with Servex was really good. Those guys really know the product and tools. The implementation went well.

We needed to install the hardware in two data centers. We installed in one location, then went to another location for install. However, this was a fast implementation.

I haven't fully recovered my investment.

If you compare a three layer solution, server, cell network, and storage to Nutanix, the prices are quite similar. However, if you take a look at the whole environment including the management, Nutanix has a better cost when compared with other solutions, especially because it's hardware. 

Nutanix has good central management tools where one guy can manage the entire system. Looking at other systems, I need a guy to manage the servers and another guy to manage the cell network and storage. I need a bigger team for other solutions compared to Nutanix where I can use a small team and reduce my operations to manage the cluster. Sometimes what you hear with this solution is, "It is so expensive," but the cost and benefits that Nutanix has inside are really good.

When I purchased the cluster, I could use the Nutanix hardware or purchase Dell EMC hardware using Nutanix software. However, when I purchased Dell EMC hardware in the past, if I needed some support, first I would need to call to Dell EMC and they would need to see if it's a hardware or software problem. If it's a software, then the issue is for Nutanix to resolve. This is the reason that when I purchased the solution, I purchased the hardware from Nutanix. I wanted to have the full support experience from Nutanix. I have been really happy with them.

I did a small evaluation of HPE SimpliVity and Dell EMC VxBlock, but I did not like these two tools. I preferred Nutanix because the scalability is better than the other two solution. It also has a better hardware solution that is simpler to use.

While I know that VMware has some hyperconversion tools like Nutanix, the problem is the licensing cost for VMware. For a hyperconversion system, Nutanix has a better solution than VMware, especially if you take a look at the costs.

I only use the Calm automation feature where I can create machines, but only inside my clusters. Its codeless approach to automation is amazing and good. It does some automated tasks on drag and drops. It also provides you the power to adjust scripts and the code so you can do more than the basics. Specifically in Calm, admins can confidently set up automation rules. In the Prism Pro, we have the CLI tool where you can deploy a machine and administration cluster over command line. Basically, you can create your automations on your own without using a DB. This provides us with a single tool for monitoring automation.

I would rate this solution as a 10 (out of 10). I really love this solution. It is excellent.

We are currently using Calm to automate our infrastructure and platform provisioning, including going into infrastructure-as-code, standing up environments, and triggering deployment processes.

We aren't looking for it to automate application management to a single platform because we are spread across Azure Pipelines and Octopus Deploy and multiple methods of automating our application deployments. In the last year, we have standardized what we are doing with Calm in terms of infrastructure automation. We haven't stepped into application life cycle management with Calm. We are mostly focusing on leveraging Calm as our platform and infrastructure provisioning orchestrator.

It is based on-premises on our Nutanix cluster.

The Runbook automation makes it easy because we can do a lot of operational tasks in a single click. Our hope in the future is that we can tie it into our AI operation software, wherein these runbooks can be called through APIs and that it can lead us to self-healing. But it really helps us in reducing manual intervention and manual effort in operations. We've just been proving it out in certain cases and it looks very promising. We haven't set it up fully and gone to the extent of fully automating all of our operations yet.

The beauty of Calm is that although it's built into Nutanix, it is not just for automating what's in Nutanix. We've also used Calm to trigger API calls to external systems and services, to orchestrate other automation. For example, we use F5 for load balancing. Using Calm, we are able to call APIs on F5 to configure load balancing for our applications. And from Calm we are also able to trigger Octopus Deploy, which we use for deployment automation processes. Overall, we are able to configure and trigger other orchestration or automation tools from within Calm. It creates a line, nicely.

We also use Calm with Azure DevOps, which is our central orchestrator. That is where we have our CI/CD pipeline. Azure Pipelines in Azure DevOps, triggers Calm for environment provisioning and then comes back and executes test automations within Azure DevOps pipeline.

Using them together absolutely helps speed up the integration and delivery of applications in two specific ways. One, as I said, is that we were able to pull in Calm and tie it into our existing pipeline. We did not have to retrofit or build pipelines from scratch just for Calm. It naturally fit into our pipelines. The second way is that we also use Azure DevOps as our source control and repository tool. We are able to store infrastructure configurations as code inside Azure DevOps and Git repositories. When Azure DevOps triggers Calm, we are able to pull configurations from the source repository and pass it on to Calm, so that our provisioning is truly from the configurations that are stored in the source repository. We are able to really perform infrastructure as code.

As an example, we recently had to stand up an environment for a new project and we were able to do that in under two weeks, including deploy and deliver. In the past, that same project would have taken two or two and a half months. And after completing that initial end-to-end process in two weeks, we can just clone and replicate it multiple times. So there was the initial decrease in deployment time, and then, depending on how many times we replicate that environment, we are gaining more and more savings.

We also make use of the solution’s support for scripts and API. The initial hours of setting them up created additional overhead, but once that was done, because of how well it works with APIs and scripts, it definitely reduced manual effort, over time. Say we spent 10 hours setting up a script or an API call. Every single time that particular application is deployed, if that script saves us one hour, we have to deploy it only 10 times to start getting a return on investment. We deploy many of our applications many times, so our savings are exponential.

The blueprints and templates are very nice and easy to use. They are very valuable because we can configure the entirety of an environment as a template and reuse it multiple times. In our delivery process, we have multiple environments going all the way to production, including dev, test, staging, and performance environments. We have to stand up the same environment again and again, before taking it all the way to production. Having a template, which is fully configurable through parameters, is really useful. And now that we have those templates and we can stand them up fairly easily, we are also able to decommission an environment when we don't need it because we can, again, click a button and stand it up fairly easily and it becomes a standard process.

One thing that comes directly to mind is how they manage version control. I would love to see Calm create a built-in source control feature, one that we could tie into a repository and it would self-manage changes in versions. All the version control is built within Calm right now. I would love to see that integrated with an external repository and make it easy to tie it into GitHub or Git repositories.

I have been using Nutanix Calm since early 2020, which makes it a little over a year now.

We have had issues with bugs or version mismatches, more so because Calm is part of the bigger Nutanix ecosystem. If someone upgrades AOS on one side, there can be a mismatch with the version of Calm we have. Nutanix has this huge ecosystem and Calm is just a virtual layer working with Prism and AHV underneath.

This past week, we had a bug. After working with Nutanix support we figured out that we had to upgrade AOS to get rid of the bug.

Overall, Calm has been solid at what it does. We are early in the intake process. We are not fully mature with Calm. When it comes to issues and bugs, there is a solid path of escalation and we get good support. We feel comfortable where we are right now and we also feel Calm has been solid in what we have been able to achieve so far.

It's a great technology and it's part of the larger ecosystem which scales really real. Because of how it is tied into the Nutanix ecosystem, I am confident that scalability, and maintainability, will be very easy and smooth in the long term.

A lot of our technical support comes directly through our technology partner, Reliant, whose consultants are certified by Nutanix. Reliant will work with someone from Nutanix professional services, and that person from Nutanix has been working with us over the past two years during our journey.

When we have to go beyond them and raise a support ticket with Nutanix support, they have been very good as well. Their overall engagement model is good, and we have multiple ways of reaching out and getting support.

For infrastructure automation, we had no solution. In the past, one of our teams had tried vRA on top of VMware to try to achieve automation, but it wasn't quite successful. Up until Nutanix, we had no automation, other than a little bit of automation to assist a group of individuals writing a PowerShell script. We never had this level of focused, end-to-end automation.

The reason we picked Calm is that it's tied into the Nutanix ecosystem. We are leveraging everything that comes out-of-the-box from Nutanix as a solution, to take full advantage of the full capabilities of the ecosystem.

Setting up the Calm module and getting it running was pretty straightforward. We got that done in under two hours. 

But if we are talking about setting up something within Calm, like a blueprint or a runbook, if someone is completely new to Calm it takes about two to three weeks to get used to it and to set everything up. After that, it becomes very easy.

Calm has an initial learning curve to get used to the modules and how Calm ties into the rest of the Nutanix ecosystem. Once we got through that initial learning curve, it became fairly simple. We have a choice of either using PowerShell or Python to do our custom scripting and the UI itself is intuitive enough. My team of sys admins and automation specialists took about two weeks to get used to it, before they could start making good use of it. And anyone new who starts to use it takes an initial two to three weeks period to really understand the implementations. From there on, it's just organic growth and knowledge.

When we brought in Calm we were going through a full infrastructure modernization project which included bringing in Nutanix and all of its components. We had professional services from Nutanix take us through all of this, and we had a plan upfront. Calm was coming in as part of the whole Nutanix ecosystem. The Nutanix professionals helped to the point that we just had to install the modules, enable access, and we were done.

In terms of our staff involved in the deployment, the entire team was consulted and informed, but there was just one person required. Because it's on our servers, Nutanix professional services needed one person from our side in system administration to give them the necessary access and to work with them in setting it up. 

We don't maintain a lot so that doesn't require much staff time for it. There are regular updates but they aren't too frequent. It probably takes one person about half an hour in a week to maintain, which is very negligible. We are going through a huge intake process right now and that means most of the effort involved is in getting everything automated. There's very little maintenance effort.

We have five or six individuals trained and using it actively. We plan to get up to 15 individuals trained and actively developing blueprints and runbooks in Calm. When it comes to consumption, I'm hoping we can get up to 50 users using the self-service feature in the next year. From there, we'll have to see how much more we can expand.

We worked with Nutanix professional services, but we assigned this whole project to Reliant, our technology partner. Reliant, in turn, engaged Nutanix professional services. We had technology consultants from both Reliant and Nutanix helping us on this.

Reliant has been a really good partner. They've done most of the heavy lifting in getting Nutanix in and setting it up. It's a strategic partnership and it has worked really well for us.

We haven't calculated any kind of ROI number. Anecdotally, there are two spaces where we expect to be seeing ROI. One is on the provisioning side, because everything will be automated and that will result in a lot of reduction in manual efforts. There will also be a lot of reduction in the overhead costs of the ticketing process and assigning of tickets.

The other main area should be that, because we can spin up and spin down platforms and infrastructure on-the-fly, there will be a reduction in the load we have in terms of static environments, meaning things that were stood up but never decommissioned.

The pricing is fair. We got a really good price to start with. We'll have to see over the years how it turns out.

In terms of additional costs to their standard licensing fees, there's the effort involved in training and upskilling employees to be able to use Calm. That's an indirect cost. Regardless of what new technology we would bring in, we would have to pay that cost. That cost has been minimal. The Nutanix University helps a lot as it has a lot of training programs, and the software itself is intuitive enough. The cost is well worth it.

There were a couple of solutions we are looking at, and we are even evaluating some right now. In the past, we looked at vRA, because we were on VMware, but from the time we switched to Nutanix, we focused heavily on Calm, especially because it comes out-of-the-box from Nutanix.

vRA and Calm are apples and oranges because they have different underlying technologies and different ways of handling automation. I don't think it would be a fair comparison. We didn't really put any effort into trying to compare them.

Anyone who is looking to implement Calm has to sit down and put forward a vision. If they're just blindly thinking, "Here's an automation solution. We'll bring it in and it will magically solve all our problems," that is not true. It requires some amount of initial design thinking. We actually went through a workshop. We specifically sat down and said, "Here's what Calm is offering us and here's how we will fit it into the existing pipelines in our ecosystem. We were very clear, in those initial few months, about what we were trying to achieve. That really helped us in the long run.

There are two things we have learned in this entire process. One is to look at the software and figure out what gap it fills, rather than trying to make one tool solve all of our problems. We were very cognizant of that from the beginning and it has worked out nicely. The second thing is that while we have focused heavily on one particular use case to make it production-ready, we have not invested enough time in exploring more of what Calm does. We know blueprints and automation, and we know runbooks, but we haven't fully explored everything that's available. We'll have to put more effort into exploring it further.

We are currently using the solution's one-click self-service feature in a proof of concept. We are looking to create marketplace items to start using it more. We expect it will help simplify our operations. Once we give that one-click to our end users, they won't have to create a service desk ticket, and that ticket won't have to go through different processes and then reach the tech team so that it can stand something up. If the end-user needs something they will be able to click a button to get their environment and it will be done in 10 minutes. That would be in place of logging a ticket, that ticket going to the service desk, the service desk figuring out which team to assign it to, that particular team prioritizing it, and then actually doing the work. It could be that the work, even if done manually, would only take one hour, but the entire process could take a week or two weeks.

Every organization will have its own set of tools. It has been interesting to see how Calm fits into ours. I don't believe there is a single solution that will solve all of the problems, but the way we have leveraged Calm is to make good use of its abilities to fill gaps inside of our automation ecosystem. It required an initial vision and design for how we were going to fit Calm into our pipeline. It did a really nice job of fitting into our ecosystem. We did not have to go out of our way to redo or reinvent the wheel to get Calm to work in our environment. It nicely fit into our existing pipeline where there were gaps. That is where I rate Calm highly because it's very flexible enough to fit into an existing ecosystem. 

If we had no existing tools—if we did not have Azure DevOps and Octopus Deploy or anything else—and we just had Calm, I don't think that Calm would be able to solve all of the problems. We would have to look for additional tools to fill gaps. In our case, it worked well because we had tools that were already doing a good job, but there were gaps. Calm came in and filled all those gaps. It has acted as a single orchestrator and it is able to orchestrate multiple other orchestrators. It has tied everything together.

We leverage virtualization most of all. Prior to this, we had 5 virtual hosts using 4 SANs and dedicated network resources. Our back up solution for this was also a bit clunky as we had to back everything up daily so we had a disaster recovery in the event that we lost a SAN due to hardware failure. Our hardware had aged us and was in need of replacing. Having 4 nodes in our cluster allows us to have replication and if 1 node fails that is no data loss but in an entire san fails that falls into disaster territory

Prism Pro has given us a central administration of our entire virtual environment. Everything can be managed and updated through Prism. Being able to turn features on and off with one slide of the mouse is such a great feature. It allows us to manage storage and containers as well as the actual machines through one pane of glass. No need for any additional software. Pulse is in my opinion is one of the best features. Having the cluster monitor itself and notify support of any issues is a plus plus. 

Customizable Dashboard allows each admin to have things the way they like. Admins can just add the features they use most and remove the ones they don't. Alerts and tasks are easy to see and access.

Capacity Runway which shows us behavior trends. We can analyze trends from the past and predict future growth. It can also address potential capacity issues in the future based on past growth. This also includes the VM behavioral learning engine which allows us to plan for future growth at the single VM level. This is helpful in preventing over or under-provisioned VM's

I would like to see a P2V feature like Move or Xtract. The interface for migrating from one VM infrastructure to another is one of the best but going from a physical machine to a Nutanix VM is a bit too challenging. Especially if you are migrating a busy SQL server to Nutanix. No matter how you convert this you will lose transactions done during the actual migration. This can also be a bit challenging when trying to upload the disk images after converting the disks P2V. Uploading is primarily done via a browser. Most browsers cannot upload files in the TB area. There are ways but nothing straight forward. This really needs to be addressed in the future. 

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

We used a different product but the annual was adding up and our equipment was due for replacement. Nutanix was a little expensive for the initial outlay but when added up over a few years in made financial sense.

The only advice I give people is to make sure you understand your support contract with your vender. If you buy direct from Nutanix then you deal direct with Nutanix support. If you buy from a vender such as Dell you must go through Dell support. Then Dell support contacts Nutanix support and it gets a bit messy in my opinion

We were a VMware environment and looked at HyperV.