I was involved in deploying Nutanix Cloud Manager and found the process very straightforward.

I was part of the initial deployment team during the early stages, but at that time, the offering was not the best. However, I am still involved and play an active role in the ongoing growth and development of the platform within the company.

The platform met our expectations and was straightforward to deploy and onboard. We experienced no issues as long as we continued to use ESXi.

We were able to observe how easy it was to handle Nutanix in comparison to Simplivity at that time. This is because we faced a lot of issues with Simplivity, but we did not face them with Nutanix.

Deploying Nutanix Cloud Manager was straightforward. The initial installation took about two or three hours, but it took around a month to migrate the virtual machines from the Hyper-V platform to the Nutanix environment. We did it in phases over the weekend. 

We had a three-person team from my company. I was the primary admin, and I have a backup. We also involved our networking and security guys for various changes in the environment. 

Our Nutanix environment is deployed at one location - our main data center - and Cloud Manager covers only one cluster that contains every virtual machine for all the departments in the company. We have virtual machines for accounting and several other areas that benefit from this. 

Six people are responsible for managing the environment, but two admins perform most of the work. However, four other people also have permission to create virtual machines, run reports, etc. It requires a little maintenance. We have to apply software and firmware updates as they come out. 

The initial setup was simple. You get a completely blank Nutanix environment. You just install your Nutanix software. You give it your IP addresses, communicate to your environment, and that is it. It is so advanced that it can take your whole Hyper-V environment and migrate it into your Nutanix environment via Move-VM. From that Move-VM, there is a communication point between Hyper-V and Nutanix so you can make a connection from your Hyper-V onto Move-VM as well as from your Nutanix onto Move-VM. So, you can pull all your VMs through with no downtime, which is amazing.

It's a SaaS deployment. You just log in and go. It would help us in the deployment of new users if there was a new user API that we could call with a program, as opposed to doing it by hand, but everything else is just web-based. So, it's very easy to deploy.

Its initial setup is very straightforward. There are only a few bits of information you have to give the system for it to go and start looking at your stuff. You need to provide some information or some permissions, and then you can go. That's great, but one caveat, which is not Nutanix's fault but Microsoft's fault for how they license, is that it could be a little arcane, although their wizards walk you through it very well. I only had to get help once on that, and then from then on, I knew what I was doing going forward. There are about six or seven screens of details that you have to put in and pull from this place, and this place, and this key, and that key, but that's the cloud. That's not Nutanix's fault. The fact that we could get it to work is great. It's hard to say standards because nobody is setting standards here, but there are some conventions that they follow which are really nice.

It doesn't require any maintenance. They do it. They take care of all the backend.

The initial setup was completed by Nutanix and it was not difficult. The deployment took around 45 days.

The setup is pretty quick, like all the clouds. The ease of use could be improved a bit more. There is pretty good documentation that helps make the learning curve smaller. My approach is to go to the documentation first before jumping in. The person I was working with provided good information, and we built our own documentation on top of that as well. 

As an application team, it was easy to implement. Maybe it was easy since we didn't get into too much complexity. The APIs are playing a good role. The configuration is pretty straightforward. 

I did not participate in the initial setup process.

Deploying Cloud Manager was extremely straightforward. You can typically finish the deployment and put it into production in a day and a half.

I was involved in the initial phase of setting up the test drive and doing the proof of concept. Also, I was part of the migration. 

We used the Nutanix tool for our migration. We had a deadline and talked with the application owners, which went smoothly. We were able to migrate the workload from our legacy platform to Nutanix. It took almost six months of time to move our workloads from our legacy platform to the Nutanix platform, but it was not that complicated.

Initial setup is simply activating it in Prism Central and configuring your target cluster which has to be connected to Prism Central as well, of course. So it is pretty straightforward. From there you can use some of the marketplace blueprints to see how it is done or just see on youtube on nutanix university calm - YouTube

I think NCM is a valuable tool and can provide evidence of its usefulness, but sometimes the decision not to use it comes down to budget constraints.

We don't handle the deployment process ourselves, but it really depends on the specific use case. For many of our customers, their use case revolves around Citrix. As a result, some customers don't require Nutanix Central, since they only run Virtual Delivery Agents (VDA) on the cluster. Therefore, the decision to use Nutanix Central or other tools really depends on the specific requirements of the customer's use case.

The default deployment is okay.

The solution was very easy to install. We had only three nodes to install since we moved from Hyper-V. The deployment process took us around four days to complete since we had to recreate the VMs on the Nutanix platform and move them over from Hyper-V. We created a VM called Nutanix Move on our Nutanix environment. Nutanix Move enables you to take a machine from the Hyper-V environment and convert it to the OS used in the Nutanix platform. I had 85 machines and downtime was an issue while deploying the solution. I had to do the switching over mostly during the night or early hours of the morning.

However, the process was quick. We recreated about 20 VMs a day which is quite impressive.

The setup was easy. We had help from Nutanix support, which was excellent. We got wonderful support from people who gave us a hand along the way. It wasn't very difficult, and within two or three days, we were fully functional to some extent. As far as the ease of use goes, our engineers love it. They use it every single day. I've not heard any complaints from our users. The user experience that we always look for has been great so far.

Learning is wonderful. There's so much available on Nutanix's portal in terms of the KB articles, knowledge base, user guides, and admin guides for Nutanix Cloud Manager. To have all that available to our engineers online is a great help.

I wasn't a part of the initial setup. I came in two years after it was implemented.

The product requires maintenance. In this case, considering the breadth of our implementation, typically it's only one man dedicated for an hour or two a week. This is just to ensure things are kicking off as expected and things have been completed as expected.

From the documents I'm reviewing, Nutanix Cloud Manager's initial setup was a straightforward process. There were no issues in the solution's implementation.

There is a level of complexity to the initial setup because it is new. However, it was not as complex as other products.

The initial setup was easy.

I was not involved in the initial setup. Everything was already up and running when I started using it.

It was straightforward because there was no migration or extension involved. We were using the solution as a first-time solution. So, everything had to be put in place new, and everything went well. We didn't face any challenges in terms of setup, deployment, and support. The deployment went well in a simplified case-to-case manner, and the operations have been very smooth. It didn't take more than 60 days.

Apart from the post-sales training where our resources got trained by Nutanix, our technical team members are also getting trained on a regular basis. We have regular schedules for technical training of our teams.

Nutanix makes the deployment easy, just like everything else that they have in their software stack. It's a very simple deployment model. It's part of the Nutanix software tool chain.

We have a combination of a uniform implementation strategy for Calm and taking different customers' requirements into account. We work with our customers to get feedback. We've started with a baseline of operating systems, primarily, because most of our customers are still in the traditional consumption model. And we're complementing that based on their feedback. We're also working with Nutanix because Nutanix has a large customer base as well. We've just really started that journey.

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

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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

Nutanix Cloud Manager's initial setup was relatively straightforward. We worked with our SE when it was being deployed.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

The solution was purchased before I came to the company, but when I arrived I realized that it hadn't been implemented in the best way. I spent a couple of years fixing the architecture so that it would follow best practices. They had inadvertently painted themselves into a corner and I took away the paintbrush and the paint and fixed things so that it would work and scale better, going forward.

The initial deployment was pretty straightforward, but the people involved just didn't have experience with Nutanix at scale. They didn't necessarily do it wrong, they just didn't do it with the end goal in mind. They had tunnel vision in which they said, "We have a task that needs to be performed and we have to get it done as quickly as possible." It was a very task-oriented implementation. What I was able to do, with my experience, was take a step back and say, "Let's look at the big picture. Where are we going to be in five years?" I was able to architect a solution that would make sure that we could get where we needed to be in five years and in 10 years.

We make sure that we follow best practices from Nutanix. When deploying the product, we make sure that our cluster size—how many physical Nutanix servers we purchase and group together—follows best practices. We make sure that we plan for the ability to perform an upgrade in the environment and we plan for potential hardware failures. We've also started purchasing specialized configurations to match our workload. All of these things are a part of how we architect and deploy the environment.

We have about 250 Nutanix servers around the world. Our application consists of four or five independent offerings and those 250 nodes are spread across those four or five offerings. There are three of us who manage the environment. I'm the architect who created and implemented the solution. I also ensure that we have enough capacity to continue to grow and to take on new projects. Another member of our team does a lot of the project work: Here are the tasks that we've been assigned. How do we get from point A to point B? And the third member of our team focuses on upgrades and hardware break-fix.

I rate this solution a 10 out of 10 for ease of deployment. Setting up the solution is straightforward because it's SaaS. You can sign up for a 14-day free trial by going to the website and registering your public account. It takes a couple of hours for Cost Governance to gather information and perform the computations. You don't need a dedicated person to deploy, manage or maintain it. Typically, each organization has someone who oversees public clouds and cost management. 

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.

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

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

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

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

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

For me, the initial setup of Calm was straightforward. It comes with Prism Central and Prism Central is a one-click installation, and then you have Calm. It's really easy. The whole Nutanix platform is really easy to manage and to update. When you have Prism Central, you have Calm already. You must buy the license for the blueprints, but it comes with Prism Central.

If you need cluster management, if you have more than one Nutanix cluster, you need Nutanix Prism Central and with Prism Central you have Calm.

Our deployment strategy is "one-at-a-time." We touch one system and make blueprints and then we go on to the next system. We migrate machines to Nutanix without a blueprint, but the goal is that—even though we have a lot of virtual machines and use cases, and this is an ongoing process—all the new projects, as well as when we touch an old project, will go over to a Calm blueprint, to make life easier. You cannot make that shift in one day.

Our overall strategy is to have Calm as a central tool to deploy virtual machines, with a requirement that nobody manually create virtual machines. There should be a blueprint first. 

There are times when it might not make sense, if you need just one machine for a particular use. It could be more work to make the blueprint. But I think it's worth making even these little machines as a blueprint, so that you can always create this machine everywhere, including the cloud, without documentation. And that's another point. As you know, when you write documentation, as soon as you're finished it's already old because things are changing.

The initial setup was straightforward: You receive the servers, you pick up the servers, and you rank them. Once you rank them, you plug them into your network. After that, you plug in your computer, you image the cluster, and deploy the appliances. It was a two-man, two-day job to deploy 32 nodes.

We did a high-level design, a low-level design, and a network design, respectively, then we opened the deployment project. It was pretty classical straightforward. Nutanix was pretty easy. The hardest part of the work was in thinking the design of what you wanted, e.g., how many nodes and clusters. We studied the capacity used by our old VMware infrastructure and forecasted the future growth of the company to integrate in how much Nutanix we were going to buy, how many nodes, and how much compute power. Deploying the actual physical hardware and cluster mechanics was easy. It was really a piece of cake.

When you deploy the cluster, make sure you set up the networking. This is really important. If you don't do it right, you will have to come back to it later, and that could be a pain.

Do the testing extensively before you go to production. We spent two days deploying and one full day just testing that the deployment was correct.

The initial setup was very easy. You just click a button, and it will set up your Prism Pro VM that runs. Installing the Nutanix platform from the beginning was amazingly easy. At my old job, we just installed new hardware, and that took about a month. Nutanix took four hours, so it was a huge difference.

It's simple and not complex to do the first setup. For deployment, around four people who were from a technical background, who knew how to operate the system, were required. For the maintenance of the product, four people are required.

Most of the time, customers need to bring in professional services as they don't have the expertise to do it themselves. It's not that intuitive as there's always something missing, which can cost more if a mistake is made.

I was not involved in the initial rollout of our first cluster sets but continued rollouts of new clusters has been straightforward.

I wasn't deeply involved with the initial setup, but I think that it was fairly simple. I do know that anytime we need to add more infrastructure, the integration with additional nodes or adding a new chassis is extremely simple and well laid-out. They excel at that.

Everything is very straightforward to set up. It's as few clicks as possible, which works very nicely.

Our deployment was done within about a day. That was two years so it would be hard to put a more specific time on it. It was also a very different product then, as compared to now.

In terms of an implementation strategy, we essentially got the solution because we wanted to help some of the areas that were complaining about our speed of delivery. We only really offered it to those areas. But we've now gone full circle and just committed to some more Calm licenses to grow our capability because of the speed of delivery it gives to our researchers. That's especially true with their being remote. They can then do it all themselves and don't have to engage with IT to help them spin things up. In the past, they just knocked on the door and got some support from the computing team. With people working remotely now, that's obviously a lot harder. It allows us to achieve remote work.

As for maintenance, It's part of the wider stack. When there's an update, we will roll that out. But it's all pretty much one click and away you go. You come back a little bit later and it's done.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

The setup is straightforward. Only the initial network setup is a little bit confusing.

The initial setup was complex initially due to the lack of the base operating system being installed on the cluster.

The initial configuration of the entire environment and its tools was practically invisible. The learning curve does not exist, literally.

The initial setup is simple. It only takes a few minutes, maximum one hour. 

The initial setup is straightforward. We didn't integrate it with anything, but we plan to integrate it with many other solutions to bring some interoperability to it. 

We started small and then started expanding. Now it's targeting only AWS, and we don't have any difficulty with cloud deployment.