Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Reviews

We have installed a physical Nutanix box and we have created the server on it. Our infra is running on that server. We have Citrix infra, so we configured our Citrix in Nutanix only.

We were facing some issues with a vendor accessing our VDI, but after we installed Nutanix, that issue was resolved.

Among the most valuable features are 

• the one-click upgrade
• that Nutanix is very easy to understand
• that it's very user-friendly.

We have been using Nutanix Prism Pro since 2018.

In terms of its stability, it is a good solution.

The scalability is also good. We have around 4,000 users across India and we are planning to increase our node in six or seven months.

Currently, we need no more than four or five staff to operate the Nutanix infra.

We have faced some issues during operations, but when we log a case with Nutanix support, they help us to resolve them. Their technical support is very good. The support they provide is extraordinary. If we raise a P1 ticket, they will respond within 20 to 30 minutes.

Positive

We used VMware but we migrated to Nutanix.

We are not facing any problems with the solution. Nutanix is good when compared to its competitors. My advice is to go for it. We have another office in India, where they have a VMware setup, and we are going to migrate them to Nutanix there as well.

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.

We use Nutanix Prism Pro for central management. We have three clusters and we manage them with Prism Pro. We use it as a central point of managing Nutanix, it's concentrated on Prism Pro's dashboard. Our strategy is to only have one tool to manage our clusters and Prism. 

You can see the health status of the clusters in one view. There is one view of the health of your systems which helps you to have an overview any time you have a problem. You can dig into the tools that Prism Pro has to give you all the options to take on the problem. You can monitor things and manage the cluster really easily.

It's very easy to understand. The interface is very clear.

We plan to use the solution's X-play or Cross-play automation features. This is in contract. We moved to Nutanix and we have a lot to do. For now, we are more concentrated on blueprints but we plan to have a look at these features. 

We have a lot of projects so we cannot always dive deep into the material that Nutanix offers. We would like to but we have other priorities. It was a busy year. We have an external company that does things for us so we can make the process go faster. We know what we need and what we would like to achieve. I'm still on the learning curve. I think Prism Pro is very good and straightforward.

I have been using Nutanix Prism Pro for a year and a half. 

The stability is very good. I cannot say that we have had an issue with the Prism Central dashboard.

Scalability is very technical now. I think you can install a second instance. 

We are three people that work with Prism Central and they're all in service core IT. It's the people from the infrastructure.

We have an external partner that does the maintenance. We will be getting it handed over to us, but until now this external company does all of the maintenance and upgrades. They announce that there is a new upgrade, we plan when we can do it, and then we participate.

We are still in the learning curve and we need really a company that has a lot of experience because it's mission-critical. We have systems that are very mission-critical. We really should be sure that we have people that really know what to do. When we are over the learning curve, then maybe we can take it over. For now, we give all of this stuff to an external company.

We don't use Nutanix as a self-service platform. In our IT, we manage Central so it's not that we use it like many other companies. Like a company that can say "Okay. This department can create the resources that I need" themselves. Now, it all comes into the Central place and we do that. It's still in this little team. Only these core IT people have contact with the Nutanix dashboards.

We have blueprints in the Marketplace but it's not a goal that we made for other people. When a service asks for resources, they communicate to us what they need and we create it with this. When they have a project and they need some new software, they tell us, "Okay. We need this database, those application servers," and then we set up it for them.

We had some issues so we contacted their support. They're great. When you compare to other companies, their support is really great.

This is the first hyperconverged system that we have had. Before, we had XenServer. It is a virtualization framework like VMware. We also used templates. The goal of Nutanix is to have a central place to manage all the network storage. We are still using Virtualization Framework, which is good. We are still doing the migration, but for that, you must have knowledge about SAN management, like SanDisk. This infrastructure has a different discipline and different tools to manage the clusters. Nutanix has one starting point where you can manage all this stuff with one software. So it's a paradigm shift. It's easier. Sometimes SAN can be complex because you need special hardware switches for a SAN connection to the disc system.

With Nutanix, you can grow with your needs. If we need more storage or CPU, we add a node so we get both, we have the storage and the CPU power. The good thing about hyperconverged systems is that you can grow as your needs come.

The initial setup was straightforward. It's a one-click installation. You have to set up the VM  with one click. It's very easy. It's not complex to have this dashboard. It's a one-click installation. The setup took five to ten minutes. 

You click to install Prism Central and then you create a VM and start-up the VM. There is a dashboard that goes over more than one cluster. You don't need to have a background for that. It's a one-click thing.

We planned from the beginning to use Prism Central. When we started with Nutanix, we began with a multicluster system. When you have a multicluster system, you need Prism Central. Then you can manage cluster by cluster. Other than that, you have only Prism Element and that makes no sense. It was clear that we should have Prism Pro.

We see ROI because Nutanix enables us to reduce our hardware footprint. We had a lot more nodes. We don't need SAN anymore. We reduced this need to make a point to save money.

We reduced by 22 nodes. We reduced the hardware so we have cost-saving. With hardware, you need to buy it again every five years and pay for support. We had some nodes for more than five years, and today the new machine has more power. It's hard to compare sometimes.

With Nutanix, we don't really use old hardware. We buy new hardware that's fast because every year the hardware gets faster. If we move the same load to the new hardware, we don't need so much hardware anymore because the machine itself is more powerful. The fact you can reduce and grow as the need comes saves money. 

When we calculate all that we needed before, I think Nutanix is cheap. When you take into account that you need a SAN and all that stuff and you know you can grow as the needs comes in, I think you can save money. With the analytics from Prism where you can see that you have oversized or you can predict how it will grow, you can really react in a timeframe that you also have time to buy the hardware. I think you can save money when you compare to before Nutanix.

My advice would be to go for it. 

It has fulfilled our hopes. We have been doing virtualization for long enough and we see what the pitfalls are. Nutanix gives us a centralized, easier to manage platform. 

We bought a little cluster for the proof of concept and we saw really quickly that this solution is the right way to go. Now, we're focusing on a strategy to replace all the other stuff and to go with Nutanix straight ahead. We plan to use the file cluster but for now, we have a separate file cluster. We prefer to use Era. It's a database central management tool from Nutanix. 

I would rate Nutanix Prism Pro a nine out of ten. 

We use the solution in our production environment and test environment.

The product is very easy to learn. It has a very user-friendly interface. The technical features of the product are very valuable for us.

The solution should introduce more automation features.

I have been using the solution for two years.

The solution is stable. We did not face any downtime.

We were using another software with a poor interface and faced some difficulties. Switching to Nutanix Cloud Manager was very valuable because it saved us time and money. Our administrators also say that the product is very easy to use. We get all the features we need in one product.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is a lot easier to set up compared to other products.

The product is very cheap.

We are currently constructing a new building with a new data center. We plan to use Nutanix for our new infrastructure, which will be complete by 2025.

We use automation to create virtual machines for CIS Benchmarks for our servers, which is mandatory for banking systems. The product has a lot of helpful features for creating servers. The tool can handle our current automation, which has helped us.

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

We have been using this solution mainly for our high-performance computing use cases. We had a requirement of creating multiple VMs and keeping the file server in the same nearby location. The VMs will turn all the data and their inputs and outputs will happen through the file server. We wanted something that supports virtual machine files, blocks, from a storage point of view.

The most valuable features of Nutanix Prism Pro are the user interface is quite easy to understand and it provides easy management for administrators. It is reassuring that the data is secure, even if something was to happen to it, the data can be recovered with the built-in option in the tool.

Nutanix, as of today, they do not have many of the features that VMware hypervisor provides, such as the memory layer. Nutanix is not known in the virtualization world, it is known only in the file server world. Due to this, many of the software vendors who provide their virtual appliances, do not support Nutanix as a platform. Their partnering has to improve, when the software vendor does not support Nutanix, we have to deploy Windows into the projects.

The solution could improve by reducing the alarm sensitivity and have categories that show only the critical elements on the console. Not everything that triggers the alarm. I understand these alerts but if my manager was to look at them he would be concerned not understanding they are minor alerts.

Additionally, if they could make templates to allow the provision of the images from the dashboards, instead of doing multiple steps would be a good benefit.

I have been using this solution for approximately two years.

The solution has high file and server availability, it is very stable. We had an incident with our data, due to the data getting corrupted from an endpoint issue, not from an infrastructure problem. However, through a server snapshot file, we were able to recover more than 20 terabytes of data in this solutions' native features. We did not need to obtain any other recent configuration transform data, the feature was already provided. This was really helpful.

We have scaled Nutanix Prism Pro at least 300 percent after deploying it and we are still not at the bottleneck point. Our current footprint is quite large, we are not seeing any challenges. However, each cluster will have to be kept at a finite number. If the cluster size should is too big, your maintenance window will increase for a very long time. If you can keep cluster size to a minimum, then it will be easy for you. For example, if you have a hundred node cluster and have to do maintenance, then the patching will be happening on a single node layer. Patching all the servers one by one will take too much time for us. It makes sense, in the design phase, to keep those clusters to a smaller figure, approximately 20 nodes.

We have purchased Lenovo appliances. Due to this, our primary call for support has to go to Lenovo, and then they will pass us off to Nutanix. We cannot raise a call directly with Nutanix for assistance.

The initial installation was straightforward. We brought up the whole cluster in approximately two days.

We had peer support from the OEM vendors for the deployment. 

The solution is a bit high in price for what we are receiving as features. I feel they are overcharging us at approximately 25 percent. That is something that they should change.

We explored Horizon, Cisco, HP, and many others. However, Nutanix won because the file server layer of Nutanix is more mature compared to the other competitors.

Nutanix Prism Pro is a good tool but is not for every use case, there will be a few constraints that might not make it become a single layer but it can be one of your hypervisor layers in your infrastructure.

I rate Nutanix Prism Pro an eight out of ten.