Nutanix Calm Overview

Nutanix Calm is the #7 ranked solution in our list of top Cloud Management tools. It is most often compared to VMware vRealize Automation (vRA): Nutanix Calm vs VMware vRealize Automation (vRA)

What is Nutanix Calm?

Nutanix Calm allows you to seamlessly select, provision, and manage your business applications across your infrastructure for both the private and public clouds. Nutanix Calm provides App lifecycle, monitoring and remediation to manage your heterogeneous infrastructure, for example, VMs or bare-metal servers. Nutanix Calm supports multiple platforms so that you can use the single self-service and automation interface to manage all your infrastructure. Nutanix Calm provides an interactive and user friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) to manage your infrastructure.

Nutanix Calm Buyer's Guide

Download the Nutanix Calm Buyer's Guide including reviews and more. Updated: December 2020

Nutanix Calm Customers

JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, Volkswagen SAIC, Brighton and Hove City Council, Foresters Financial, Janus International Group, Cloud Comrade, Serco

Nutanix Calm Video

Nutanix Calm Reviews

Ilan Stark

Project Manager at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

Oct 11, 2020

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We are aiming for "infrastructure-as-code" so that we can always recreate an environment, without manual work

What is our primary use case?

One goal was to automate things. We had a lot of tools, but we needed a centralized tool. Calm helps us to centralize the deployments of our VMs. We have a subsystem installed on Nutanix and we have blueprints for setting up this subsystem very easily. Also, for Kubernetes clusters, we use now CaaS from SUSE and we also create Kubernetes clusters with Calm. Our strategy is to make blueprints for all the virtual machines environments. It's an ongoing process.

Pros and Cons

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

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

What other advice do I have?

My advice is "use it." To use Calm, the precondition is that you have Nutanix. To me it doesn't make sense to have Nutanix on-premise and then not use Calm. Then you would have to use SaltStack or Chef or whatever other management software exists for managing virtual machines or physical machines. If you go with Nutanix, it makes really sense to use Calm. SaltStack and Ansible are also good, but it doesn't make sense to use them when you have Calm. With Nutanix you have one platform where you can manage everything. Calm gives you a lot of possibilities because you can script and easily…

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Kevin Mortimer

Head Of Operations at University of Reading

Jul 1, 2020

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one-click self-service means users can serve themselves resources without IT; they have the power in their hands

What is our primary use case?

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

Pros and Cons

"The fact that these are non-technical people — they're experts in their fields but they're definitely not technical — and they can just log in to the portal and select the resource that they believe they need, and manage it themselves, speaks to the ease of use. It shows them their live costs, etc., as they're spending. The fact that they can do that without any problems, or having to engage the IT teams, is a true testament to it. There's no need for any user training at all."

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

What other advice do I have?

The biggest lesson I've learned using this solution is how easy it is to empower users to achieve what they need to achieve. Without this, it would be very hard to build the trust up and allow our academics to do what they need to do. In our case, Calm doesn't help us to implement standardization across our organization because the research is usually quite specific. The types of VMs that they would spin up would all be slightly different. Some might have much bigger storage requirements, some might have higher RAM requirements, and some might need to be quite low compute but for longer…

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Steffen Hornung

Administrator at Neuberger Gebäudeautomation GmbH

Dec 31, 2020

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Previously written scripts can be checked in a library and be reused for other blueprints

What is our primary use case?

We provide Test-VMs to users. Currently, we deploy only Windows-VMs from Windows 10 1803 up to 20H2 and Server 2012 R2 to Server 2019. The blueprints consist of a base Windows Image (which is used as a template for the VM to be) and several tasks you can define and use remote PowerShell to get whatever you need to get done, like install additional software, set registry keys - you name it. Each task is then executed in the defined order and results can be reviewed even during execution time. Hardware specs can be made configurable, so users can adjust the amount of RAM or CPU core count but… more »

Pros and Cons

"Previous inquiries took us almost a full day to prepare the VM to the liking of our users. Now the deployment time is below 15 minutes and users can do it on their own! That leaves us to only update the blueprints if new requirements come in or new Windows Versions are published. As we have now predefined setups the testing team can rely on common ground for their product tests. Development teams can experiment with alpha versions in a secured environment (separate VLANs) without harming production machines."

"The list of blueprints and applications could be more configurable so you see all the fields you need and not just some predefined fields which are not customizable now."

What other advice do I have?

Take a tour for yourself online: https://www.nutanix.dev/ad/at/ You shoud REALLY try this. It is just 5 minutes of your time!

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Olivier-Massoni

System Engineer at a non-tech company with 10,001+ employees

Apr 21, 2020

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Helps us react faster to changing business needs by deploying a server with just a few clicks

What is our primary use case?

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.

Pros and Cons

"The solution's support for scripts... has reduced the man-hours it takes to deploy and support applications because we don't have to rewrite all the scripts."

"There is room for improvement in making the solution easier still. If you don't know Calm, it's not so easy to use... It is a really good solution for doing simple tasks, but it's not a good solution for complex tasks."

What other advice do I have?

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…

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