Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

We use the solution to automate the business processes for our customers.

For our customers, the solution is an added value to their environment. It helps them automate critical processes instead of doing them manually.

The solution provides the best automation features.

They should include more use cases for automation in administering the environment.

We have been using the solution for two years.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

The support team’s response time is good. Although, it depends on the criticality of the issue.

Positive

We have used PowerShell and Orchestrator before. In comparison, NCM provides better integration.

The solution's initial setup is straightforward. There is a lot of documentation and webinars on Nutanix's portal to learn the implementation process.

The solution generates a return on investment. There is no need to appoint a resource as it automates the processes.

The solution is expensive.

NCM provides faster automation than manual operations. Its maintenance is less time-consuming due to the high availability of its infrastructure. In addition, it saves a lot of time as there is no need to generate reports and alerts. We can just read the insights data on the dashboard. It helps our executives to concentrate more on projects instead of operations.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I work at a distributor. We use it for partner-facing demos, and it has been really great. My mission is to help partners see the light with Nutanix, and that's where I use Nutanix Cloud Manager the most.

It's highly capable. In an organization, you can make it easy to use, but you still have advanced features. You're not simplifying or dumbing it down. You're still enabling an advanced user to design solutions and leverage the full product suite. It's highly capable, so you have that great ability to be successful for a lot of different users. You can have a very low-level, simplified user experience and you can also go advanced. In terms of organization, that's really key. As you get into hybrid cloud IT environments where there's a lot going on, Nutanix storage is very powerful.

The speed of the outcomes received using Nutanix Cloud Manager's low-code automation is very fast. The beauty of it is that because it's low code and no code, even as a beginner, I was able to go in and walk myself through it. I didn't need a lot of coaching or instruction to get there. It was fantastic.

In terms of the importance of these outcomes, it's not just about delivering an outcome. Anybody can deliver an outcome if you offer enough time, but delivering that outcome more reliably and faster enables that business to benefit a lot sooner. They then see the cost get lower. They see efficiency go up, and they start to really benefit from technology as opposed to seeing technology and IT in general as a cost center and as a liability.

It's awesome for helping teams address their current automation needs while planning for future expansion. That's because of the way that it enables a broad variety of users to accomplish what they want in a very efficient and simple way. It brings an iPhone user experience to IT, and that's a really powerful story right now.

The best part of it is that when you use the product, there's no secret proprietary magic that you experience as a user. The real genius is under the covers, so it makes the user experience very straightforward and easy. It's a wonderful solution to teach partners about. The ease of use is something a lot of suppliers talk about, but Nutanix does it better than anyone else.

Nutanix has room for improvement around the partner tools and making them approachable and easier to learn.

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

It's highly stable. I haven't had any issues. It's very easy to run, and it keeps running. I don't have to do much with it. That's the beauty of it.

The details around scaling, like Prism Central and scaling the resources, are highly technical and get highly specific per use case, but it's always scalable. You can always find the documentation very easily, and it's very straightforward to do so.

Their support is terrific and world-class. Nutanix always talks about their NPS scores, their success, and their commitment to customer service, but I've seen its boots on the ground level. People try to help me even if it's outside of their role. Ever since I stepped into this role, it's been a really wonderful surprise to see Nutanix try so hard to help us. I'd rate their support a ten out of ten.

Positive

I supported other suppliers in different roles. In my IT career, I worked with a number of different suppliers, typically more on legacy three-tier work, such as fiber channel attachment and the like. All those suppliers struggled to evolve to support modern workloads, and that's where I feel that Nutanix has always been ahead of the game. I chose this role to support Nutanix on purpose. It wasn't by accident that I ended up here.

I can't say that I had this same level of experience with the competitors. We are an HPE shop. We have a huge HPE presence, which is great, and I have experienced a few other hyper-converged providers. I've done some VMware training over the years, but I haven't really gotten my hands on them in the administrative sense. It's not as deep as with Nutanix.

Simplicity is a key function for helping a customer really benefit from technology. You can have technology for technology's sake, but suppliers are really stuck in a world that's proprietary. Even to navigate an administrative tool, you see a lot of proprietary terms, whereas a generalist can sit down and run Nutanix very quickly.

In my role, I didn't really decide on Cloud Manager myself, but in talking to partners and end users, it's a very strong consideration. There are a lot of competitors in the space that Nutanix plays in, so the value that Nutanix brings has to be superior in order for them to be effective, and, of course, they are. That goes back to simplicity and the efficiency that comes with it.

I was involved in its setup for our lab. It was very straightforward. We had some help from Nutanix. Nutanix is always falling all over themselves to help us, which is wonderful. It only took a little while. We just did it via a remote session, and it worked out great. I'm located in Minnesota. My lab is in Georgia. The help from Nutanix was in another place, and we had no issues at all. It was very smooth.

It's not necessarily from leveraging NCM or NCI itself just because of the way that it works for us, but our ROI is tied to our partners and to customers in a way. Their success is our success, and that's why we're gaining a lot of momentum with new partners. We're reactivating dormant partners and trying to broaden the Nutanix message. There are a few core partners that do it really well, and that's great, but we try to broaden things, and we have success with it.

For customers, the ROI is primarily around efficiency and simplicity. So as an example, Life Cycle Manager isn't just a great tool for updates and upgrades, it's a way to have happier staff. It's a way to give your staff weekends back, which is great for the staff. They're happy, but it also means you don't pay overtime. There's a win-win there. There's a great symbiosis if that happens when people adopt the technology.

I've never heard a customer ask for a higher price. Everyone says everything is expensive, and that's true. Nutanix is really smart to understand that the most important fact is the value to the customer, not the price tag. 

While you do get some sticker shock sometimes, as soon as you show this and you prove the value, all of a sudden, it looks exceptionally affordable. We've had wonderful success when we get a buying decision in front of an economic buyer, like a financial leader. They start to see the TCO benefits of Nutanix very, very quickly.

Sometimes it's about the little things. It's about what your experience is like and how much time you spend trying to learn how to use the product. It's about how much time and money is it going to cost you to understand their proprietary terms for things as opposed to having a generalist sit down and be off to the races. That can save a lot of hassle and frustration but also time and money. With these projects, it is important to get outcomes, get that workload deployed, and enable a business or a customer to focus on what keeps their lights on, which is probably not managing infrastructure. That's how I see it. 

I'd rate it a nine out of ten. There's always room to improve, but as far as what's on the market today, it's a unique value add.

We primarily use the solution for cloud management. We use it as a private cloud for internal client infrastructure. 

The most valuable feature of the solution is its simplicity. We have one panel from where we can see and manage all operations. This is very different from other vendors. The customer finds it very easy to work with.

They have a big community. 

It's stable and reliable.

The solution expands easily.

Support is extremely fast. 

I cannot recall any specific features that need improvement. 

Nutanix likely has a big backlog of requested features from their clients. 

We'd like the demos to be longer - maybe two to three months. Some clients need much more time for a POC. 

I've been using the solution for two years. 

The stability is excellent. We don't have any issues with the software. I'd rate the stability ten out of ten. The only issue we ever had was with an HP adaptor, not with this solution. It was a simple hardware problem. 

The solution is very scalable and very easy to scale. I'd rate the ease of expansion ten out of ten. We don't need a physical installation. The cloud makes it very simple. 

We work mostly with enterprise-level organizations. 

The technical support is very fast and easy to work with. They are helpful and responsive. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. I'd rate the ease of setup nine out of ten. It's very easy. We did need to do some specific configuration, and users do need some experience with web-based applications as they must be deployed via the web. 

The setup is very different from other vendors that tend to separate hardware, software, storage parts, et cetera. In Nutanix, everything is available in one window. 

We deployed the first time two clusters with ten others, and it took about one week. We did have a network team working with various solutions at once. 

The second time, we deployed with 11 nodes, and we managed to deploy in five to seven days. 

There were two people, engineers, that were managing the deployment process. 

Its pricing is okay. I'd rate the pricing six out of ten. We can make local payments in our country and avoid customs fees. If you have to buy hardware, you have to pay customs for the devices, and that can be up to 30% of the price. However, with Nutanix being on the cloud, you don't have to worry about that.

We are a solution partner and have existing customers. 

I'd rate the solution to others. They should buy it. It's very simple for modern infrastructure needs.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. 

I use the VM efficiency to figure out what services are over-provisioned. I've also been experimenting with the reports. In addition, I've been using it as a way of collecting all the data from all the different clusters into one portal.

One of the most valuable features is the hardware and how they have set it up to be pretty redundant. If something goes down, you can just swap it out and you're back online. If a drive or even a whole node goes down, it's pretty easy to get it back up and running.

Also, you don't have to actually mess around with external storage. Everything is in one complete package. The fact that the solution is sold as one product with multiple tiers is a seven out of 10 to me, on the important scale. If you get everything from one vendor, you have one place to turn if you have problems or if you need replacement parts. The whole "one-vendor" thing is pretty neat. Regarding the hardware, when you have everything in one package, everything is good to go. We haven't needed to purchase any other solutions for the type of automation this solution is intended for.

I've used the capacity planning and Runway analytics to help forecast storage and compute needs a few times, but just to check that we are a couple of years away from even having to think about it. It has been pretty good for helping our team address current needs while planning for future expansion.

I would like to see a desktop application for administration of the solution. That's the thing I missed the most. Other solutions have a client that you can install on your computer. You can actually connect to and do the administration from an application instead of using a web portal, which is what Nutanix provides.

We have been using Nutanix Prism Pro for a year and continued using it as Nutanix Cloud Manager Starter for the past several months.

I would rate NCM's stability at five out of 10. We started having problems with our nodes about two or three months after we started using Nutanix. We were getting errors. The IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) stopped functioning. After a long period of troubleshooting, we ended up having to send one of the nodes back for a deep root analysis. They had to send a replacement and try to figure out what the problem was.

I'm sure that kind of scenario isn't very prevalent among their other customers, but that has been our experience with it. We manage 10 nodes with the solution, and something like seven of them have had this problem.

The scalability of the solution is way better than anything else. Everything is plug-and-play. That part is pretty awesome.

Their tech support is pretty good overall. It depends on who you end up with. In about 30 percent of my cases, I've been lucky to get a person who speaks English very well and is awesome in every way, knowing absolutely everything. Every time that I get one of those guys, I instantly go into the survey they send, when they close the case, and praise them in the highest way.

If the English of the support person is worse than mine, or their vocabulary, pronunciation, or even the quality of audio is worse than what I have, it's pretty hard to get my meaning across. That has happened in about 20 percent of my cases. The person doesn't understand what I'm saying and I've been forced to escalate the case to get someone who has more knowledge and better English.

And in 50 percent of my cases, they have been totally fine.

Positive

We swapped out Hyper-V with products from Nutanix to try something else. It was time to upgrade and then Nutanix seemed like a good alternative.

When we ordered the solution, we had a pretty good understanding that we would get something where we could just plug in the network and power cables, turn it on, and it would be already set up in almost every way. We thought we were only going to need to do a bit of tweaking, providing IP addresses and the like. But what we got was pretty bare. There was nothing on them. We had to go through the whole setup with Phoenix.

We had to do it twice. The first time, one of our guys did everything and it seemed to be okay. But then the guys from Nutanix called and said, "No, we have to do this together because we want it to be set up the way it's intended to be." That's pretty fair. But the guys from Nutanix actually managed to mess things up in a huge way. So we had to set it up again. And that speaks to how complicated the setup is when you compare it to the other solutions.

I set up fully-functioning VMware and Hyper-V solutions a good number of years ago when I was young and didn't have as much experience, and both were no problem. But Nutanix is a step up regarding how complex it is.

You should get a hold of someone who is crazy good and then never ever lose their contact info. I have one guy now that I email every time there is something complex that needs to be done. If we are digging into config files that are deep within the OS, I always contact him because I know that he knows everything.

I have used Hyper-V with SCVMM. Part of that has some features that are similar to NCM, but they are different products with different features. I've also used vSphere from VMware, which has some of the same features, like the overall control over your VMs, data collection, and reporting.

Nutanix is pretty different from the others because it collects everything and displays it in a very nice way. To summarize the difference, you get the feeling that Prism Pro is new and more modern. The user experience and the user interface are more modern, and it's certainly easier to use.

The other side of that coin is that sometimes it fails. It's something like Mac and PC: If something fails on Mac, which doesn't happen very much, it's harder to figure out why. You might have to contact support and get them to fix it. A PC is harder to use, but if it crashes, it's easier to find out why. Prism Pro would be "Mac" and the others would be "PC."

Nutanix isn't as easy if you want to try to troubleshoot, at least not for me, because it's all based on CentOS. It's Linux-based. With Linux, it's easier to do things, but it's way easier to royally mess everything up if you make mistakes. You have to be pretty sure of your skills with Linux-based systems to try to troubleshoot things yourself. I've been using Nutanix a lot for a year now, and I'm just barely starting to get the hang of it.

The setup of Nutanix is harder than both VMware and Hyper-V, but Nutanix is the easiest to use among the three. However, the learning curve for Nutanix is pretty steep. The interface itself is pretty good and easy to use, but if you start working with the CLI, which you have to do somewhat frequently, it suddenly becomes way harder to figure things out.

Have we experienced increased uptime since we went to Nutanix? No, we haven't. It's pretty much the same with Nutanix as it was with Hyper-V regarding uptime. What has improved is the ease of use. And there is less cabling and fewer points of weakness.

We went big on the specs for the servers so when you have what feels like unlimited resources, you don't need to set up the whole automation part of it.

We use Calm as an automation engine for deployment of the cluster software over our network. We are also using it to deploy standardized workloads on the Nutanix clusters.

We also use it to create a "self-service shop," where we can select to deploy standardized workloads and choose a certain profile for a particular server, and the Calm engine will integrate with other solutions like our IP database and CDB. Everything is fully automated.

In addition to standardized workloads, we also can say, "Give us a generic virtual machine."

It really drives up our speed tremendously for getting workloads to the customer as soon as possible. Previously, it took a few weeks to get a virtual machine in place, including deploying the virtual machine and getting the administrative parts in order for it. That process takes a matter of minutes now, if the prerequisites are in place on the networking layer. Our delivery time is incomparably faster than what it was. We're mainly providing platforms to other application teams, and it greatly helps those teams to have a virtual machine in place. Indirectly, it will ultimately help us develop and deploy applications faster.

Calm has also enabled us to react faster to the changing needs of our business, with the significant decrease in the delivery time of certain machines.

I really like the Nutanix Marketplace a lot. We publish standard workloads there and that, in combination with the Projects, allows for self-service, which is the most powerful feature of Calm.

Also, the ease of use when building new applications and offering them in the marketplace is the most elegant feature of Calm.

It also works very well when it comes to optimizing capacity and performance. It allows you to have a framework where it is very easy to automate in a standardized way and provides you the boundaries for standardizing automation. It really helps to unify the way a team works. Calm's abilities when it comes to team collaboration are great. All the workloads are deployed in a standardized manner, and administered that way as well. This is the first time we have been able to do workloads for the machines in a standardized manner. Currently, we are expanding a lot, with a lot of new virtual machines. So if we don't focus on standardization, it will become really hard to manage with a small team. Standardization and automation are very important for enabling us to keep up with the growing infrastructure.

We also use Nutanix Prism Pro and it provides us with insights into application-related infrastructure to a certain extent. But in reality, we haven't done a lot with it yet. The dashboarding is certainly elegant, but we're not utilizing the clusters a lot yet, so it hasn't been very necessary to work with it. Second-day operations are something that we're working on. The deployment is not done and transitioning to operations is in progress.

There is room for improvement in the remote script execution. The way logs are shown in Calm, it's not always keeping up properly. It's really the interface that needs attention there. I believe it is something being worked on at the moment by Nutanix.

Also, the integrated scripting language, which is a very limited form of Python, should be improved. It should be made into a more modern version of Python, and maybe other languages as well. 

I would also like to see an improved ability to integrate with APIs.

I have been using Nutanix Calm for about a year.

It has great stability. We haven't experienced issues with stability with the product.

In terms of scalability, it just works. It has high availability, and we haven't run into any issues where we have needed to scale up.

We have Nutanix clusters located in at least half of our Vopak locations. This year we rolled out the Nutanix platform to 30 locations and, in the next year, 30 additional locations will follow. Currently, the six users of the solution are involved in infrastructure development on the DevOps team. Those are the people who are building on top of Calm.

In general, Nutanix support is great. They're responsive and skillful. We're really pleased with them.

Positive

We did not have a previous solution. Calm was a brand-new implementation for us.

The initial setup of Calm was straightforward. It was just a matter of enabling the product, and that process is very well worked out by Nutanix. Our deployment was done within an hour. It was very fast.

You will see great value from it if you utilize the self-service part of Calm. The price you pay for it will only give you equal value if you use the self-service part to enable other teams. If you only use it as a deployment mechanism, I think it's rather expensive.

We did not really look at other solutions. We chose the hypervisor platform, and Calm came with it. We also looked at VMware as a hypervisor platform, but we chose Nutanix and therefore we went for Calm as well.

Nutanix excels in making something that is very complex into something that is very simple. It's really easy to work with, and the time it takes to get familiar with the product, for an engineer, is way less than with the competitor's platform.

It's very important to think ahead about what your automation strategy will look like. You should really think about creating reusable components and also have good source control and a CI/CD strategy. If you start building without thinking about these things, you will have to do a lot of rework and re-engineering to be able to scale up.

In terms of Calm unifying container and virtual machine automation and orchestration in a single orchestration platform, we're not doing containers yet, only tenants. But in the future, I expect it will do so because our next step we'll be looking into container workloads. But that's not where we are for now at Vopak. Similarly, we haven't used Calm’s AIOps and automation capabilities.

We use the solution for virtualization purposes.

The solution saves around 15% of standard time for our organization.

The solution is easy to use and has a very supportive team. It helps me with essential knowledge and planning for projects.

The solution's virtualization could be even better. They should improve the upgrade and patch engine features.

I have been using the solution for two years.

It is a stable solution. Although, one of its nodes might break if you don't follow the proper upgrading and patching steps.

It is a scalable solution. Our enterprise has three clusters dedicated to it.

The solution's technical support is good. However, it is complicated to communicate with the customer service team for the contract renewal process.

Positive

We switched to Nutanix because of its flexible pricing model compared to other vendors.

The solution generates a high return on investment.

The solution's price is reasonable.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We have multiple projects and multiple groups of developers that need an isolated space to deploy VMs and do testing against code, so we use the automated deployment of applications and VMs to spin up their unique environments.

It made it a lot easier to spin up these tenant environments with little to no administrative overhead.

It's super fast. It does what you tell it to do quickly.

I would like to see it be able to apply a category to a project, and then have that category applied to all the VMs that are deployed within a project. I've been asking for that for about three years.

I've been using this solution for about three years.

It has a rock-solid foundation. The only issue that I've ever seen is the software code not being fully vetted before it was deployed.

It's as scalable as the overall infrastructure. It's great.

Their support is excellent. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

We are using both this solution and Ansible. There are different components within Nutanix Cloud Manager. I've used a part of it but not all of it.

I was involved in its deployment. It's straightforward and built-in.

In the government space, we don't look at returns.

We have the ultimate license, so I don't know what it would cost individually.

If you're going to pick an automation platform, pick one and stick with it instead of having everybody look in different directions.

I would rate it a ten out of ten.

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.