Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Other Advice

TH
Senior IT Engineer at Estes Express Lines

We've been happy with the speed of outcomes. We haven't had any issues. Faster outcomes are very important to our organization. We're very sensitive to how long things take and how much energy and effort our staff and end users need. Our VMware is totally separate from Nutanix.

The solution has definitely helped validate the capacity requirements that we have and make sure that we have the equipment we need. We've been able to monitor and see how our use goes up over time, plan for future purchases, and ensure we don't have any outages.

Our company has been growing. NCM’s capacity planning and Runway analytics is very important to us. It helps us proactively forecast our needs in the next six months. The management appreciates the ability to forecast instead of having a knee-jerk reaction at the last minute.

We can't standardize certain things in the organization to use playbooks. I'm hoping to get to a point where we can use them more. The tools available in the solution are very helpful. The tools help us look at past trends and determine what we will need in the future.

The setup was easy. The learning curve has been a little bit steep because there are so many individual products. We haven't taken the time yet to sit down with our sales team and the support to review our options. I feel we're not using the solution to its full potential. Compared to other products, the learning curve is very similar. It has a licensed web management tool that can be accessed almost anywhere.

It's fairly important to us that NCM is sold as one product with multiple tiers. We're more likely to use features that are included. We push the team to try new things and find better ways to do things. So if we had to evaluate every single one right at the beginning and then try to figure out which ones we'll buy, it would slow down the process.

The acquisition and support costs of NCM versus other cloud management solutions are comparable. The solution works well. I haven't had any issues where I've had to wait and be frustrated. It's definitely been very usable and quick. NCM Ultimate's deployment time is comparable to or faster than other cloud management solutions.

Anyone evaluating Nutanix should get some training and figure out what all the parts do and how they work. They should make sure to size the clusters correctly. We ran into some issues early on with nodes and clusters since we didn't buy enough from the beginning. We run the solution on our central environment.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

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JL
Network Specialist at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

My organization currently tests Nutanix AHV but mainly uses Nutanix Cloud Manager to manage the VMs.

Currently, my organization doesn't feel the need to purchase other solutions besides NCM for automation needs.

The solution is deployed on-premises.

Two people from my organization, plus one from the professional service, took care of implementing Nutanix Cloud Manager.

Nutanix only requires variable maintenance. For the most part, if there's critical maintenance, the team gets an alert, but the recommendation is for maintenance to be conducted every six months or as needed.

My rating for Nutanix Cloud Manager as a solution is nine out of ten.

My advice for others shopping around or deciding on which solution to use is to first ask for a test environment to play with, plus be able to go on a reference call with similar institutions or companies identical to current clients, and not be shy about asking for recommendations or good references.

My organization is a customer.

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Farouk AYAD - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Enterprise Architect at Capgemini

I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) a nine out of ten.

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Buyer's Guide
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Jerad Waas - PeerSpot reviewer
Nutanix Administrator at Strand Associates, Inc.

I rate Nutanix Cloud Manager nine out of 10. NCM has been an amazing addition to our company. I have a few nitpicky complaints, but when it comes to the things that matter, the solution has always delivered. 

It's good that the solution is sold as a complete package. If we had to pick and choose the individual pieces, we might miss out on some useful features. Maybe we won't use some of them, but it's an opportunity to ensure you are diving into everything that it offers, which is quite a bit. There's a lot of great stuff in here.

Before you deploy Nutanix, I recommend participating in one of the Nutanix Boot Camps. You can sit down and work with people to see how the solution works firsthand. You can test-drive the solution on their site to experience the solution without deploying anything, so you can play with the environment to see what that looks like. Once you have played around with it a little bit, you can do a proof of concept or a demo lab to get a bit more experience. 

I would also suggest using Nutanix Hypervisor AHV instead of running Hyper-V or VMware on top of the Nutanix platform. The level of integration there has been excellent. I recommend using the Nutanix hardware. If you have a support problem, there's no back-and-forth between the hardware and software vendor. It's easy to say, "Look, it's your hardware and software. There's obviously a problem here. Let's get to the bottom of it, and then you never have to worry about the finger-pointing game." 

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Kyle Naidoo - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at Tsogo

I would rate this solution as a strong nine out of 10. 

Don't look any further. Nutanix is second to none.

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Declan Fleming - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Architect at University of California, San Diego

We don't use NCM to manage Nutanix and VMWare infrastructure. We only use it for vendor clouds.

We've done a little bit of work with their query language, and that's always very fast and very useful. These faster outcomes are pretty important, but I'm not expecting huge performance from a product like this. It's not like a hospital or something like that, but they are as up-to-date as the cloud providers can provide the data to them, and that's what matters to me. If the cloud providers were real-time, I would expect Nutanix Cloud Manager to be real-time as well, but it's not. So, it's perfectly fine for us.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

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FJ
Senior Project Manager at a logistics company with 10,001+ employees

I give Nutanix Cloud Manager an eight out of ten.

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Sisir Ghosh - PeerSpot reviewer
Addiotinal manager at a recreational facilities/services company with 10,001+ employees

I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a nine out of ten.

Two of us are responsible for maintaining Nutanix Cloud Manager. We log in twice weekly to conduct a health check and ensure no new requirements, such as creating a new VM. If new requirements arise, additional work is necessary.

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HJ
Expert Offering Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We use OpenShift on top of Nutanix, and all the physical servers are cloud servers, and they are all managed by our team. 

As for the built-in playbooks, I haven't done much exploration. One of my team members did more work in this area. He helped me and did all the configuration. He explained what he was doing. However, I was not involved in the playbook at all. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It needs to be easier to use. However, it is improving. The market has shifted. A lot of companies are trying to get in. Yet Nutanix is doing a great job in collaborating with so many organizations. It's going to provide us with a one-stop solution that helps us avoid running around between vendors. 

I would advise people to read the documentation. That will definitely help. It's pretty sophisticated. Reading the documentation and following up with Nutanix support will keep you from stumbling into the process blindly. Get in touch with an account manager. They can help you understand the requirements first and then look into your options. If you have an expert that can guide you, you won't be wasting too much time.

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Ian Wayne - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud and IT services manager at Ertech Pros

I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) a ten out of ten.

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Tushar Pimple - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Solution Architect at CitiusCloud LLP

I rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a nine out of ten. 

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KK
IT Specialist at a energy/utilities company with 5,001-10,000 employees

There was a talk earlier that we will plan to use the monitoring automation, but since we have other tools that we use for automation, we don't have X-Play. However, that may change down the line because we want to add more clusters. So, we may need to think about how we can update our license to have X-Play.

We have plans to add Nutanix in our corporate infrastructure too. There, we will be using VMware in Prism Pro for our corporate environment.

Nutanix has a partnership with Red Hat. Therefore, there are some Ansible scripts that we use. Because we have Red Hat Satellite, we use that to leverage some sort of automation for our deployment servers.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10.

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Steffen Hornung - PeerSpot reviewer
Administrator at Neuberger Gebäudeautomation GmbH

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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Emmanuel Nguyen - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at Anetys

My main advice to future customers is to be cautious about the resource consumption of NCM and carefully consider where to host the NCM installations.

I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) a ten out of ten.

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Kyle Naidoo - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at Tsogo

I would give a ten out of ten for the solution. Nutanix has saved our company from doing multiple general server checks which used to take around three to four hours in our old environment. Nutanix gets the checks done within 20 mins at the most. The solution's capabilities are endless. It is a stable product that will sustain your environment. It is really good and works like magic. Apart from Nutanix's pricing aspect, our company decided to use the solution because of technological advancement.

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DD
Sr. Infrastructure Engineer at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

We only started using it about a year ago, and there's a lot more we need to use Nutanix Cloud Manager for. We haven't fully explored all its capabilities from an automation, AI, or machine learning perspective. We hope to use all the built-in features within Nutanix Cloud Manager.

Overall, I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a nine out of ten.

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DM
Service Delivery Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Nutanix Cloud Manager is a walled garden, and you have to do all of your editing within the interface. Our developers become frustrated with not being able to use other tools such as Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and CSE pipelines. These are outside of the Nutanix Cloud Manager interface, and the developers would prefer to use them instead of using the NCM interface. In this sense, Nutanix Cloud Manager has been a struggle to use. The NCM interface could be improved.

The setup is fantastic because you can click a button and deploy it. It's already part of the existing piece, and it's like adding a module. Compared to the setup of other cloud management solutions, Nutanix Cloud Manager's setup is much easier. We just spent about four months upgrading a VMware product, and there were bugs. It was a nightmare. With Nutanix Cloud Manager, it's click-and-play, and we haven't had any issues at all.

The learning curve is a lot easier because it is based on Python, and we have developers who already know it. We don't have to retool. Many of my developers have been up to speed in under a week.

If you're considering Nutanix Cloud Manager, my advice would be to go through the entire POC in-depth to see the value in it. Initially, it may look very simplistic, but when you dive into the code, you will see the depth of the product.

Overall, I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a six because the automation tools are still in the early stages. There are things that need to be fleshed out in the private cloud as well as the public cloud. I don't see anything badly wrong with it, but I think there's a lot of room for improvement as an industry in general.

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DP
Sr. Network Systems Administrator at Moda Health

I'm a customer and end-user and we're in a long-term stable release. 

There's a lot of naming in Nutanix. There's Prism Element and there's Prism Central. This depends on how wide a view you're taking. We use both here.

Prism Pro and Prism Element are different levels of feature sets in Prism. Ultimate has more features available than Pro has, however, it's the same product overall. Prism Element is tied to a cluster of Nutanix-based systems and Prism Central is a collection of those clusters. That gives a view of the entire environment. We are Prism Ultimate licensed.

We use a private cloud as our environment is all internal to our organization.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

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SA
CIO at a government with 10,001+ employees

When we approached Nutanix Cloud Manager, they presented the technology well. We chose Nutanix Cloud Manager because we found it could be sustainable for the future. Users should consider Nutanix Cloud Manager's use cases and opt for the solution depending on their type of business.

Overall, I rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a ten out of ten.

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Oladipo Oluwarohunbi - PeerSpot reviewer
Deputy Manager at Central Bank of Nigeria

We just completed the installation and deployment for the disaster recovery branch. I work for the Central Bank of Nigeria. We have three different environments in the bank. We use IBM for our core systems. We also have test and development environments where we run stress tests before deployments.

When I had to deploy about ten or twelve different servers that use the same operating systems, I deployed one and cloned it. The product’s ability to clone is by far the best thing I have seen. It took me only two to three minutes instead of 30 minutes or an hour.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

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KP
Director of Infrastructure at a non-profit with 201-500 employees

I have different products. It seems like Nutanix is headed toward making things more seamless, which really excites me. I need solutions with improved speed of creating and automating the processes and making them seamless. I need solutions to grab everything from everywhere. NCM is self-sufficient. You don't need to know everything about it. It installs itself, and it takes care of itself. We have used the older versions of the solution too.

The speed of the outcomes is great. I couldn’t be happier. I can deliver to my developers and my end customers faster. Faster outcomes are very important to my organization.

NCM’s built-in playbooks have freed up time for my IT team by 25%. I love that the product allows me to fix things that are broken now and think about the future at the same time. Compared to other products, NCM is much easier to use. I don't need highly trained people to use the solution.


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

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Moses Ramushu - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Support at a hospitality company with 10,001+ employees

This is the way to go. Technology is growing and improving. I feel like a lot of companies in my country are still stuck in the old way of using physical servers. Whereas, we now have something like this that makes things simple with a feature that sends alerts. In a way, it is running the whole infrastructure.

There is always something out there that can improve your life, simplifying your life. There is always something out there that you can learn about.

It has improved my life and the way the company is running. We use it almost every day.

There are about 10 of us using it, including support, system engineers, my assistant management, and management.

I would rate this solution as nine out of 10.

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AG
IT Operations at a engineering company with 5,001-10,000 employees

I would rate it a 10 out of 10 because everything is stable, and we are able to achieve all of our objectives. We are happy customers.

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PS
Cloud Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

My advice would be patience. It's very exciting and sometimes you want to jump in with both feet and go really fast. It's not that I'm against that, but my take is that it's such a capable platform that you should take on things that you can achieve and then achieve them. Take on activities that you can succeed with and show that incremental progress. Sometimes you want to take on too much and go big-bang. As enticing as that is, take on pieces of Calm and succeed with them, and let the platform evolve. Don't try to wholesale adopt it too fast. If you're more traditional in nature and you're doing typical project management, your windows could be big. Those steps up can be huge. So you want to make sure you show some incremental progress.

There's a plethora of automation tools out there as well as methods for how you build automation. Most of these platforms are frameworks and you have to build your own methods and use your own sets of tools. And when you're a service provider, and I think this would apply to the enterprise, cloud is an ubiquitous platform. In today's world, cloud is a ubiquitous term where companies don't necessarily look at just a cloud. They look at a cloud ubiquitously, because while you have three or four major hyperscale cloud-platform providers, they all have their different sets of software-based tools. In some cases, one cloud does certain things really well, while other clouds do other things that are better.

Limiting yourself and your business to one cloud might not be your best choice. And that has historically been the case in a lot of companies' journeys, but that situation is now evolving. Now, you don't just look at one cloud. Suppose you're a company that is heavily invested in Microsoft solutions. There are certain aspects of Microsoft, either your technology or your financial investments, which behoove you to use Microsoft Azure because it's beneficial to you. But there are certain things in the lifecycle of your software development where Amazon might be a better fit for certain aspects of what you do. In today's world, companies are evolving and they're open to the flexibility.

In that scenario, how do you decide your tool chain? How do you decide to invest in the use of tools from one platform provider or the other? Part of that assessment is cost and this is where Calm comes in because, as a lifecycle automation manager, it doesn't care which cloud you provision. You have choices. And the good news is that you control your source. So you don't have to use the tool set that Microsoft provides and then try to automate into Amazon from it, or vice-versa. You can try to develop those tools to automate by yourself, and a lot of large companies have made that significant investment in software—both in resources as well as capital. But these are platforms that consist of a lot of tools which have costs wrapped around them. The beauty of Calm is that it gives you your choice. Nutanix uses the expression "freedom of choice." That's really the conclusion we've come to, as a service provider. Part of what we want to do is give our customers choices. We want to help them along their journeys and help them make good choices, both technical and financial. And of course, those two pieces work off of each other.

Calm's support for scripts is a tale with two stories. First, it's exposing the scripts to a lot of people within the team. They can now use the same sets of scripts and augment them to do a specific function, versus starting from scratch. It may save them from having to research something. We have a library of these scripts that we're building.

Second, it's a step back before it's a step forward, because the team members have to get familiarized with this mechanism and with the delivery blueprint. We're ramping things up to get everyone slowly trained on the platform and to get them used to the platform, and that takes time. The mechanism of delivering the scripts is different from what they're familiar with. We're probably 10 percent into that journey. We've got a core team that has been working in it. Now, we're trying to extend that across other areas of the organization. Once we get everyone to participate and get a standardized library of scripts, we will see a very significant reduction in time. We'll see the agility of building applications a lot faster. 

What Calm has done for us is it's enabled the rigidity to be lifted. We're looking at a lot of different ways of changing things. It's a transformative tool. If you embrace it and adopt it properly, it opens the door to developing a life cycle process and the tools to use around Calm in terms of a repository and pipelining. Calm is also bringing us to discuss mutable and immutable infrastructure. Do we need to use tools like Puppet or Chef as a version control? Or, now that we have Calm, and we can strip out an application-ware or a middleware or something else, and start moving into a quasi microservices journey, does that infrastructure now become more mutable, where you can just destroy it and recreate it? Why try to save its configuration?

These are core topics, and they are big. It's traditional and nontraditional. This is a journey that Calm enables. If you embrace it, a lot of things become transformative with it. When you look at all those things, in many cases, you have to take a couple of steps back. But can you embrace Calm and do a lot of things right upfront? Of course you can. How quickly depends on your company size. We have a fairly large organization and we have a lot of customers, so we have to think of all those moving parts in embracing the journey. The good news with us is that we're going to be able to extend Calm to a lot of our customers. Calm will be a platform that a lot of customers will be able to use and embrace.

It's a great platform and I would rate it at eight out 10. The difference between eight and a nine is in the different things that we're asking for as a service provider. An enterprise or a commercial business might look at it slightly differently, but for me eight is a great score. It's a score I don't usually give out. Calm is a great team. They have developed a great platform and it's continuously improving. I look forward to seeing a lot of people adopt it.

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CC
IT Specialist at a manufacturing company with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

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PS
Technical Solutions Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

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.

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PT
Engener unix team at Jet Infosystems Central Asia

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. 

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Gøran Fjermedal - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT-Consultant at BYGGMA ASA

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.

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FS
Tech Lead Platform Services | Infrastructure Consultant at Vopak

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.

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MJ
System Architect at Imam University

I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

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JG
Senior Systems Engineer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

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.

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MD
Director of IT at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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RB
Chief Architect at Tata Consultancy

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

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

I'd rate it a nine out of ten.

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Marllos Reis - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at Aliansce Sonae Shopping Centers

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a nine.

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KP
Sr Systems Engineer at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Do a PoC, but be mindful that it's not going to cover everything.

Nutanix has always been good. We don't use it to the extent that we probably should, but the GUI is friendly and I can't list anything that needs to be changed. Overall, it has worked for what we need.

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ShaillenderMittal - PeerSpot reviewer
Independent Consultant at perspektis

I rate Nutanix Cloud Management seven out of 10. Before implementing, I would suggest looking at the workloads you plan to use with Nutanix Cloud Management. Depending on the workload and the criticality or regulatory importance, you should decide whether to deploy.

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JV
Senior Systems Engineer at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees

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

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AC
Infrastructure IT Analyst at Mercedes-Benz do Brasil Ltda.

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

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

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TB
Systems Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

When we first started evaluating Nutanix, our upper management had a hard time understanding what it was and what it would do for us. It's different from a lot of traditional solutions and you have to approach it differently.

As you understand that this is the next generation of infrastructure—that it's the next generation of virtualization, the next generation of private cloud—it's a little bit easier to say, "This is going to be different. This is going to be challenging in some ways, but as far as security and compliance go, and as far as performing upgrades goes, nothing could be easier. And when it comes to getting support, they have your back. Nutanix is a company that cares about your experience and your thoughts and improving things. I've never met a company that does a better job. It is different, but it's way better than what I've used in the past.

Nutanix has invested a lot of time and money to make it a really good and solid application, but there's always a little bit of room for improvement.

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Eduardo-Penedos - PeerSpot reviewer
Telcommunications expert at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees

I rate Nutanix Cost Governance a nine out of 10. I stopped short of rating it 10 because the lack of support for CSP was costing us some sales to big companies that had those types of contacts with Microsoft partners. Cost Governance's one shortcoming is a lack of support for specific environments. When I left the company, they planned to add support for those cloud environments, but I'm not sure if they've been publicly released yet. 

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SS
Leader of Environments and Automation at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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

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

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

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

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reviewer1386345 - PeerSpot reviewer
Techical Lead at Aristocrat Technologies

Keep improving and including customer demands and make nutanix more powerful HCI solution.

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SA
Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I would definitely recommend using the solution. Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. There are still many areas of improvement in the product. 

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JS
Infrastructure A at a paper AND forest products with 1,001-5,000 employees

Be sure you collect your requirements accurately and be sure to consider growth. We didn't do that at all and, about eight months after we bought the first one, we ran out of resources and had to add a second one. So carefully estimate your growth and give yourself a lot of room to grow, including space and CPU capabilities.

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YL
CEO at Orieta.tech

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using.

I would recommend the solution to others. Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten. We've been very happy with it. I'd advise potential users should first run a POC and then go for it.

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

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 integrate and control the whole Nutanix cluster with APIs. And you can easily integrate other services because you have the ability to call Python scripts very easily.

For us, it was very easy because we didn't have a lot of existing scripts. Other companies that have a lot of Salt scripts or a lot of Ansible scripts have to recreate them in some way. So we were in a good situation.

We now have 14 blueprint templates, and still growing. We are coming from the Citrix XenServer platform. We are not automatically creating a blueprint. It's ongoing. We had a lot of virtual machines on the Xen platform, and we have moved them over, but we don't automatically have a blueprint when we do. You must create the blueprints. We do them one-by-one. When we touch a system again, we create the blueprint for it. That way we can scale out, scale in, and make test systems.

There is a template for creating a machine, and then you manage that machine with this template. But when you have machines from another platform, like the XenServer virtualization platform, you can move it over, because Nutanix is also a virtualization platform for running VMs. But then you don't automatically have a blueprint, so you have to start a new project to make these blueprints. The strategy is that we will have all the code for our infrastructure so that we can build all our system out of blueprints.

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.

It's still early time and there is room for improvement. I give Calm a nine out of 10. I cannot give it a 10 because other platforms are also really good. Ansible and SaltStack are also powerful. It's more an issue of strategy and the fact that it is very easy to use. It's not a complex tool. They make it easy to use. Other frameworks are more complex to use, but may also be more powerful. But for our purposes, it fits exactly what we need. We haven't been blocked from doing anything we need to do with Calm. We haven't had any showstoppers.

Compared with other tools, Calm is newer and the scope of what you can do with it is still growing. They improve things. They make it easier to handle.

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MB
SRE - Site Reliability Engineer - Infrastructure Engineer at Betclic

We are heading towards a DevOps culture. What will happen is that we're going to head more and more towards hybid datacenters. We might increase our usage of Nutanix.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

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BB
IT Systems Technical Specialist at a government with 51-200 employees

You have to at least look at this solution. Once you do, you will buy it. All my old colleagues that have moved onto different jobs too, and I always tell them about it.

They are always expanding what they have and what they are offering.

It can do a bunch of other things that we don't use yet, but are thinking about.

Biggest lesson learnt: IT doesn't have to be super complicated.

I would rate Prism Pro as a 10 (out of 10).

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DM
Science and Technology Analyst at a government with 11-50 employees

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

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MH
Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Overall, I would rate the solution a six out of ten. 

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reviewer1386585 - PeerSpot reviewer
Implementation Manager at Ruffalo Noel Levitz

None at this time.

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DP
Sr. Network Systems Administrator at Moda Health

Our organization has been pleased with the Nutanix HCI solution overall. The majority of our issues have been related to non-Nutanix hardware underlying the entire solutions so if We had it to do over again We would probably choose to go with Nutanix hardware.

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TT
Senior Systems Engineer at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees

Do your homework and make sure to get some engineers involved at Nutanix who can assist you. You'll run into issues that they can help steer you around. Nutanix is willing to help if you are willing to ask. The system is not without its complexities. It has a lot of features and there are a lot of things that you can do with it. If you engage the professionals at Nutanix, they can steer you in the right direction. You should utilize them.

Prism Pro can be quite complex, if you want it to be. At its heart there are a lot of features available. If you utilize it for simple purposes, then you can get simple answers. The ease of use really depends on what level of technicality you want to have with it. But in general, the interface is well laid-out. There's a little bit of a learning curve in making sure you're going to the right location and knowing what you're trying to locate. But otherwise, I feel that the interface is well laid-out and intuitive to use.

Some other things they've done recently, like having events tied back to documentation, which is something that they are working on right now, have been great.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using the solution is that you get what you pay for. Nutanix has been a great company to work with. As I said, their support is fantastic. If you're going to use someone for your critical business needs, make sure that it's a company that's going to stand behind you and help make your job better and easier.

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KM
Head of Operations at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

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 periods. It does tend to vary quite a lot. But on the flip side, it allows them to all work the same way so they're not going off and burning money in public cloud environments.

When we first got it, it probably would have been a five out of 10 because it wasn't the easiest to build the initial blueprints. Now, we're certainly up to an eight. There's always room for improvement with something like this.

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

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 are three people. It's quite easy for us to communicate and to tell each other what we are doing.

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AS
System Engg at a healthcare company with 1-10 employees

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.

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JR
Analista Senior de Servidores at vocem teleservicios

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

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RA
Director of IT at RISE, Inc.

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.

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

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. 

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AG
Head of IT Infrastructure Provisioning Division at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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SA
Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user237264 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Administrator and Sr. VMware Engineer at a retailer with 501-1,000 employees

Undoubtedly a world-class solution in the administration of hyperconverged environments.

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Emmanuel Nguyen - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at Anetys

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

In the next release, I would like to see more cloud providers like Micro BH or local providers.

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SP
AVP/Technology & Consulting at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

I'll tell potential customers to explore their options because there are a number of competitors in terms of competency and pricing.

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RA
Data Center and Cloud Manager at MTDS

I do not have enough experience with this product to fully judge it, although I have seen many of the features in demonstrations. I will know a lot more once I deploy it for the first time.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

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Buyer's Guide
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.