We use it primarily for general workload for the virtual machines, reporting, and getting the capacity reports.
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Managing clusters effectively and forecasting resource needs with confidence
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
In terms of features, we have general availability with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), allowing me to manage my Nutanix cluster the same as I could on-premises, and the fact that I can quickly and easily stand up servers is very beneficial.
In Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), the planning feature in reporting is very useful, as you can create a particular scenario that provides potential resource consumption of your current cluster and can help interpret workloads, which is great for forecasting how long depend on the current capacity and whether you need to purchase new hardware.
We can give developers access to a self-service portal. It's very helpful. You can grant access and give people the power to manage issues themselves.
We've found we've generally saved time by using Nutanix.
Nutanix gives us access to a single pane of glass by which we're able to see everything.
What needs improvement?
It is important to mention that while Nutanix claims improvements in licensing over the past couple of years, I find it a bit annoying, as it still does not work as intended. If there are licensing errors, for example, being told I have 96 cores licensed but Nutanix Flow not licensed despite having assigned units, it complicates things unnecessarily.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for about three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I assess the stability and reliability of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) with a few issues where downtime occurred; once it was related to power when the whole console went down.
We had two instances where a network outage caused cluster reboots, which I would prefer to see handled differently as the VMs rebooted to ensure data consistency.
This behavior differs from VMware where VMs would not necessarily restart, and I am unsure if there is an option to configure the network to prevent this.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scaling with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is not as straightforward as they claim, largely due to the assumption that you have IPv6 enabled on your switches, which we did not. We encountered challenges while adding extra servers to existing clusters; however, we sorted it out with the expertise of the support staff, even though it was beyond my knowledge and experience.
How are customer service and support?
I would say my experience with customer service is a nine out of ten, as I never give a ten. I do not know what a ten is. There is always room for improvement, and they are definitely high quality. There is a feature that allows you to escalate the call. Since 2019, I've only had to escalate twice.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We had used VMware. If I had to deploy the same and used VMware or Nutanix, I would choose Nutanix at the same cost due to the number of features.
How was the initial setup?
For the first deployment of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), we had a third-party help us with setup, while for the next clusters, I handled it myself. The latest deployment involved a partner due to time constraints. It requires some knowledge and experience, however, once I watched the first setup, I was able to do it myself after that.
Migration is also possible to do by yourself. Between Nutanix generation six to generation nine, we were able to move VMs.
What about the implementation team?
For the first deployment of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), we had a third-party help us with setup, while for the next clusters I handled it myself.
What was our ROI?
The cost reduction has provided some ROI.
What other advice do I have?
For those evaluating Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) as a solution, I advise not to be afraid to move from VMware and to run some proof of concept, as that was my case. People tend to stick with known technologies, and I understand their reluctance, but change can be beneficial. Comparatively, having similar hardware and paying less with Nutanix while getting many features that work well is appealing.
In our case, we pay for 60 features with VMware but use only ten, while with Nutanix, we get 25 features at a better price.
I rate Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) a ten out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Comprehensive management through a single, intuitive interface reduces tool usage
What is our primary use case?
My main use cases for Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) involve managing infrastructure and looking at dashboarding performances.
I am currently using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) to manage my infrastructure.
The specific functionalities I am utilizing with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) include offsite replications, between site replication, load balancing, and regular management creations.
We haven't started with self-service, Intelligent Operations, or cost governance yet; we haven't looked at that too much.
What is most valuable?
What I find most valuable about Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is the single pane of glass.
A single pane of glass means one place to go look at everything.
The biggest benefit Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) has provided my company is a more overall encompassing area where I can go look at and review workloads and get an early jump on any indications of problems.
The biggest case and need regarding full stack visibility for operations to create a single pane for the entire virtual infrastructure, including both Nutanix and non-Nutanix environments, is monitoring, alerts, and reporting.
It makes it easier than having to find the individual servers, and I can have an executive summary for myself.
It cuts down the number of tools that we have to use or go to, allowing us to see anything else that's going on while we're managing our infrastructure, providing a single place where we could start consolidating.
What needs improvement?
I don't know yet how Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) can be improved; I'm still new enough into it and still reviewing it.
For the use case that I use Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for, it works fine and great; I don't have a specific improvement aside from general feedback.
Better AI would be a feature I would want to see in the next update.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for about a year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability and reliability of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) have been excellent; we've never had a problem, and we were pleasantly surprised with how well the image upgrades went.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) has not had any issues scaling with the growing needs of my company; it's been fine.
I don't know that we're big enough to see that kind of scalability or improvement with self-service because we're such a small shop, but it is nice not having to call an engineer.
How are customer service and support?
The customer service and technical support I've received have been phenomenal.
I would rate the customer service a 10, absolutely.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Having come from a VMware shop straight over to pure Nutanix, I find Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) to be more intuitive.
The biggest differences between VMware, Cisco, and Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is the UI; I feel the UI is more intuitive across the board with Nutanix, and that is the biggest difference.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) was seamless and perfect.
What about the implementation team?
Nutanix sent their partner to help cut us over and assist with the transition, which was flawless.
What was our ROI?
We actually saw a decrease in our budgeting and cost management coming from VMware over to Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), with a year-over-year decrease of about 10% to 15%.
For me, the biggest return on investment when using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is product stability, having everything in an all-in-one package with cloud availability there and not having to manage multiple tools.
I've seen more efficient IT management from using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), with efficiency improvements increased by about 10 to 15%.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Better pricing would help improve Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM).
Having come from a competitor, I appreciate the pricing model of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM); it's very easy to understand, so I wouldn't change anything.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I didn't consider another solution before adopting Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM).
What other advice do I have?
NCM Security Central has helped my team have visibility into our security posture across our infrastructure.
We're just now exploring low-code automation driving remediations, such as Xplay or Crossplay, since we've only had Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for about a year.
The cost governance feature gives me a projected path, allowing me to get ahead of potential cost escalations and understand why they may be happening. I can better manage my budgeting standpoint for the next year and stay on top of those costs.
It's another tool for managing multi-cloud costs; I use it in the same aspect as everything else, as a report I can review to future plan my organization's costs.
Overall, I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) a nine.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Reduces management overhead, allowing the end users to directly access features but could be more flexible
What is our primary use case?
The primary use case for Nutanix Cloud Manager is to distribute the workload for the infrastructure. It is used for virtualization and integrates with the front end to provide cloud features as a private cloud to the development and operations team, leading to less management overhead for the administrator team.
How has it helped my organization?
Nutanix Cloud Manager is a stable product compared to other vendors. It is beneficial for integrating with the front end to provide cloud features as a private cloud to development and operations teams. This reduces management overhead for the administrator team, allowing the end users to directly access features and reducing integration time.
What is most valuable?
The file server is the best feature because it supports different vendors such as Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware without locking with a specific vendor. Nutanix is a stable product with fewer limitations compared to competitors like VxRail. It is beneficial for integrating with the front end to provide cloud features as a private cloud to development and operations teams. This reduces management overhead for the administrator team.
What needs improvement?
The product could be more flexible with plugins. Quick resolution of disconnection issues and errors in plugins is crucial. Sometimes plugins are not working well, and the resolution time is too long.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager for around two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is a stable product. Bugs, glitches, and downtime are minimal. I would rate the stability a nine out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scalability is good, and I would rate it a ten.
How are customer service and support?
Technical support is good. I would rate it nine out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I used VMware VCF before, but it was not as flexible compared to Nutanix.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was moderate. It required some understanding of clustering, so while it was doable, it was not very easy for every user to undertake.
What about the implementation team?
The deployment involved around ten people.
What was our ROI?
Setting up Nutanix Cloud Manager has saved a significant amount of time. Compared to VMware, the setup time was reduced by about twenty percent.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing is moderate. It is not cheap or expensive.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I used VMware VCF before, but it was not as flexible as Nutanix. I also considered VxRail.
What other advice do I have?
I would give Nutanix Cloud Manager a seven out of ten. The complete solution is overall good, but some improvement is required, especially with the flexibility of plugins and disconnection issues.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
It is mature with a good learning curve, but the cost is higher than the competition
What is our primary use case?
We use NCM in a training environment.
The solution was picked as part of the hyper-converged platform using Cisco hardware and Nutanix hypervisor software.
How has it helped my organization?
NCM was one of the vendors we compared technology-wise. It is more mature now, of course, and scalability is there. Our use case that I deployed was not around that as well. It was more around the simplicity and automation of that stand-alone system. It meets all those business use cases.
From the lab and proof of concept of NCM, it efficiently achieved low-code automation outcomes quickly.
NCM's learning curve is on par with similar cloud management solutions. This is important because we want a single platform to manage multiple domains. As the ecosystem matures, we want to be able to integrate with many vendors.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable aspect of NCM is its ease of deployment. Nutanix provides the software and licensing to utilize Cisco's X86 hardware. It is a turnkey solution, so instead of building different infrastructure components, almost everything is out of the box.
What needs improvement?
NCM is a mature technology product, but it is more costly than some of the other solutions available, which leaves room for improvement.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using NCM for five years.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
NCM is scalable.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The five-year term for NCM's license cost and support was around five million. Compared to a competitive product that was almost half the cost of this system.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate NCM seven out of ten.
The use cases differ for everyone, so they should evaluate NCM based on their requirements.
Offers a single point of view to users for managing their infrastructure
What is our primary use case?
I use the company solution to manage all Nutanix clusters. We have three clusters, including one for VDI, one for the production server, and another for disaster recovery. The tool helps us manage everything in one view.
How has it helped my organization?
The product has helped my company to have a single point of view for managing the infrastructure, our environment, and virtualization. We use the tool for something important, which is the structuring of the code.
What is most valuable?
The solution's most valuable features stem from its ease of management of our infrastructure and virtualization hypervisor. I think the tool is better than the others on the market.
The speed of outcomes I have received using the tool's low-code automation is fast and has helped us a lot. We are a company that has the intention to want IaC to come first. We are changing how we manage things to facilitate the day's activities.
With faster outcomes, we can reduce the daily management needed to maintain the systems.
Considering how the tool has helped our company's team address the current automation needs while planning for future expansion, I would say that we have seen how it works after Nutanix launched Nutanix v4 API. It is important because we think it will be the most compatible with the other solutions in the market.
Compared to other cloud management solutions, Nutanix is the best solution, especially Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) since it has helped our company a lot. The tool's support is amazing, and I think it is the best. It is easy to work with the solution.
What needs improvement?
In our company, even though not directly in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), we saw that the tool has many layers in it. An integration between Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) and Nutanix Kubernetes Platform would be a great deal.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for a year, but my company has been using it even before I joined. The tool has been in the company for four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is an okay and stable solution. Our company has not had problems with it.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
For scalability, it is an amazing tool. Last year, we needed to scale our cluster, and it was easy. We had to just plug in and install the tool and nodes while including the cluster, and it is ready to go.
At the moment, there are no plans to increase the tool's usage, but we may plan to do so next year.
How are customer service and support?
The tool's support is amazing. During the day, our team will need to solve the problems associated with the tool. I think it's the best company we have had business with, and its partners are okay with it. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Previously, I used to use VMware and Dell VxRail. I switched to Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) from other products, considering its price, which is an important aspect. Another advantage is that when you use Nutanix, the cloud infrastructure is better, in my opinion.
How was the initial setup?
The product's initial setup phase was simple.
The solution was deployed before I joined my company.
The solution is deployed on an on-premises model. A little bit of our environment is in the cloud, but we have not yet integrated it with Nutanix. I use the cloud services from Azure.
What about the implementation team?
During the product's installation phase, the consultant and a partner from Brazil greatly helped our company.
My company has not sought help from any implementors with implementing the cloud product yet, but we plan to do so in the future.
What was our ROI?
Recently, my company studied the movement to go to the cloud, and we concluded that it is better to stay in our solution quickly and use Nutanix's integration with the cloud, while not forgetting our infrastructure and going to the cloud.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing model offered by Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is better than the ones offered by the other solutions in the market.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
My company evaluated Dell VxRail and VMware against Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). We evaluated Dell VxRail because it was an integrated and unified solution.
What other advice do I have?
I can't remember whether the tool's built-in playbooks freed up time for our IT team.
I rate the overall tool a ten out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Provides visibility into the entire infrastructure with a single click
What is our primary use case?
We work in the public sector, which includes local governments, fire departments, and transportation. The most interesting use case is that we have set up a private cloud with two sites where they are replicated, and from the same console, we have synchronous replication using 1M Ethernet. The RPO is zero.
How has it helped my organization?
Our clients like its simplicity. That is a great value. We moved from a three-layer infrastructure to a private cloud infrastructure. It has resulted in a lot of simplicity which is reflected in the availability of services.
Simplicity is the biggest value that we can see. This is super important for us because the technical team is dedicated to looking at the data and how to generate value for the business instead of worrying about the technology.
Using the built-in playbooks has freed up the time for our IT team. Instead of managing storage, CPU, and memory, they can dedicate their time to thinking about the needs of the business and attending to those needs. We have had clients who reduced their operations time by 60% to 70%.
Nutanix Cloud Manager helps your team a lot to address your current automation needs while planning for future expansion. You have a forecast of how your infrastructure is being used. This allows you to have visibility of what actions you should take to avoid reaching day zero. It helps you a lot.
Its installation is relatively simple. The administration is very intuitive. You have an HTML 5 interface that you can use on any device. I have clients who manage their infrastructure from their smartphones, no matter where they are. Its being very intuitive has helped us to deliver 4-hour workshops. We had an interesting case in the sector of transportation in Quito, Ecuador. A person who provided support and was with the help desk went on to manage the data center with just a 4-hour training. He went from being help desk support to being the data center manager, all with Nutanix. That easily gives an idea about its learning curve.
Nutanix Cloud Manager’s setup, learning curve, and ease of use were definitely important when deciding on a cloud management solution. In fact, we have been growing in infrastructure, and it has been maintained precisely due to the ease of use and small learning curve. It frees up time from the daily issues of looking at technology. The customers are happy and continue to grow.
What is most valuable?
Simplicity is most valuable because, with a single click, we have visibility of the entire infrastructure. We can focus more on the availability of services instead of being aware of the CPU, memory, or hard drives. With one click, we can see the availability of our services.
What needs improvement?
The interoperability with different clouds can be better so that one can even integrate the infrastructure of different clouds. They can interoperate better with other clouds because currently, you have to buy Nutanix resources in the cloud.
For how long have I used the solution?
It has been four years as partners and service providers for our clients.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Its stability is very good. We did not have any issues for which we had to stop our services.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is a very important aspect of Nutanix solutions.
How are customer service and support?
It is efficient and fast. It is in Spanish, which is an advantage. There is always the option for technical support in Spanish.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
In Ecuador, Nutanix began to introduce itself in 2016 in such a way that the customers moved from traditional infrastructures to Nutanix right away.
How was the initial setup?
We have both kinds of deployments. We have clients who have private clouds, and then we have clients who have hybrid clouds. Our clients use Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
As a company, we do the implementations autonomously. It is simple. I do not personally do it. Our technical team does it. We can do the deployment or migration of about 15 to 20 virtual machines in four hours, so investing about four hours to move an entire legacy data center solution to a Nutanix Infrastructure is more than fine.
We have an implementation strategy. We follow the best practices. We have a trained technical team, and they follow the objectives.
What was our ROI?
If you compare it with a traditional model or with a native cloud, then definitely the best alternative is to make an investment in Nutanix solutions. The return on investment varies depending on what you compare it with. In Ecuador, in the public sector, they force them to buy a three-year licensed solution. So, if you compare it to three years with traditional or cloud-native infrastructure, the Nutanix solution is definitely a winner.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
For Ecuador, this is a sensitive issue. It is a small economy, so the issue of budget is very sensitive. You find many small businesses and government clients who do not renew, for example, support or guarantees, which raises the risk level for them. We are always advising them that it is necessary to renew the services or infrastructure.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated many solutions before switching to Nutanix Cloud Manager. However, once the customers get to know Nutanix, they always prefer to stay with the solution.
Our customers choose Nutanix for the experience. Our customers have stayed with Nutanix because they did feel a change before and after. Before Nutanix, managing storage required time and working on weekends outside of business hours. Having to shut down the services to make firmware updates of different components of the data center was an issue. Now they can do this during business hours without the risk of services being unavailable.
What other advice do I have?
Overall, I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a ten out of ten.
A world-class solution that helps us to have almost 100% uptime
What is our primary use case?
We have a platform of about 300 virtual machines, and most of the technology was very old, pre-existing legacy technology. We needed a world-class hyperconverged solution that would provide us with the ease of migrating these virtual machines and allow us to have a hybrid platform in the long term. We wanted some of the things in the private cloud and other things in AWS, which is the public cloud that we have.
How has it helped my organization?
We have a local partner and all the support from the vendor. It has been a remarkable experience. The product is very easy to use, and the roadmap has been executed transparently. The administration has been quite fast. There are many things that were totally neglected, and we had to open some support cases. They have been responded to quickly and in a timely manner. It has been a success.
We have much better performance and efficiency. The uptime of the servers has also increased a lot. We have practically zero outages. It means that our service, which is key in the health industry in our country, is much more stable and has much better public reception. We are one of two companies that provide these transactional services so that people can receive discounts from their insurers when having exams or medical consultations. We serve more than 90% of the country's population for health and connect all companies that give these discounts or health benefits. Our government has a plan with an entity called Fonasa. It is the National Health Fund, and it provides health financing services to practically the entire country. We make the connections between hospitals, clinics, and this National Health Fund to give online discounts at the time of care. Therefore, the uptime has to be very close to 100%, and this solution has helped us get very close to that number.
In my country, we have very good communications technology and data transmission speeds, but when we have a platform that is out of our reach, such as a regional AWS, we always have latency problems. There are speed problems. At times, there are crashes, micro outages, etc. A very good thing about Nutanix is its speed and performance. We are very eager to try the new features it has. We started with a specific project focusing on the most critical production and the budget. This year, we will be able to cover the entire platform and all the server hardware and utilize all the features of Nutanix Cloud Manager. We are going to do several things in the short term.
Faster outcomes are important taking into consideration that people are seeking medical attention, and there are many people. When the time comes to make the payment, they access our transactional services through the authentic application by using a fingerprint or making payment online. If we do not have a platform that is very fast, there is a delay and slowness in all clinical centers. When the lower layers that are not in Nutanix begin to suffer service degradation, all the health service centers automatically start calling us and telling us that the service is not working as it should, and people start to get impatient. Therefore, one of the critical pillars for what we do is that all the processing is done very fast.
Using Nutanix Cloud Manager’s built-in playbooks freed up time for our IT team to focus on other tasks or projects. One of the reasons why we decided on this solution was the amount of prior knowledge that exists. It is not only in terms of the knowledge base and the use cases of other clients but also in terms of everything that helps you. There are pre-built capabilities to make your operations much faster and spend a lot less man hours to manage. We have managed to free up resources and dedicate ourselves to more complex tasks. The playbooks also help me to be able to have a backup within the team. It is very easy for anyone to take the playbooks and apply them, and I can dedicate myself to other things.
In terms of time savings, at first, there were less time savings because we had to "oil the wheel", but now, I have been able to relieve 25% to 30% of people's burden. When we manage very old legacy platforms, we need a lot of specific knowledge and a lot of hours because what we do takes time. If I need to create a machine, I have to load a backup. It takes a long time. I lose a lot of time while the person is monitoring the process. On the other hand, with Nutanix Cloud Manager, it is very unattended. I click on it, and I can do other things because I know that the process will finish in a timely manner.
We want to grow, and we want to have more cores, more nodes, and a 100% migration at the end of this year. The truth is that everything that the solution offers helps with this roadmap and its execution. The migration is very fast and well-supported. We are very happy.
What is most valuable?
There is the ease of being able to use templates. We can create virtual machines from scratch very quickly. We can use a script or make a copy. Generating backup is very easy. Training is also available to achieve a good skill level. The learning curve is short.
What needs improvement?
We need to get more training and achieve much more consistent training. There is training, and there are courses, but in local terms, we are missing something that would allow us to have a more widespread training program. That could be an improvement area for me.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager for six months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is as per very high standards of the industry. It is at an almost perfect level.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I have not had the need to take advantage of the scalability, but I am hopeful that there will not be any problem. I am hopeful that it will be quite smooth. The product works quite well. They have been on the market for many years. It is already a very solid product, and growth is supported.
How are customer service and support?
There is a very large knowledge base. The response times and service are also very fast. We have opened very few tickets, and they were resolved quite quickly. When we opened the first ticket, we were inexperienced in the support flow. Walter helped us by making contact with a technician who called us by phone to resolve the problem online with us. Unlike other products that only offer communication via ticket, we had a phone call that helped us solve the problem very quickly. That turned out very well.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We had Rancher. We were about to use VMware, but almost our entire platform was on-premises. We had virtualization but on-premise. It was difficult to administer.
How was the initial setup?
We still have a significant percentage of the platform on-premises. We have already migrated 50% to 60% to Nutanix. For the regional services that are in Ecuador, Colombia, and soon in Mexico, we have AWS.
I was there when the project started. I believe that every implementation has some moments when there is difficulty. That is why one has to have a partner who knows the product and is experienced in migrations and initial implementation. In our case, it was not so complex. The equipment was arranged, and the initial setups were made. The IT team was trained, and the provider helped us with all the migrations and environment preparation. They also trained us and helped us to learn. I did not see any problems along the way that made us say " Oh, we will have to replan.” It was quite smooth, and deadlines were met.
What about the implementation team?
We used a local partner who brought me to .NEXT24. The company is called W-Systems. They are a local partner that offered us the solution and through which, we acquired Nutanix.
Their technical staff helped us throughout the implementation, and we have had very good results. Their representative, the general manager, Walter Zunkel is the one who invited me to attend .NEXT24. We have been attending sessions and talks, and we have been able to do a lot of networking, it has been very productive and very beneficial.
What was our ROI?
It allows me to lower the fixed costs that I have per data center. There is also the possibility of relocating the man hours that I have freed up to projects of much more complexity. That may not be an immediate monetary return, but it does allow me to make a better investment of my team's time.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It is an expensive solution, but one has to make the trade-off between what you want to achieve and what you are willing to pay.
There is a return on investment in a short time. When you make an investment of this magnitude, you expect a return within three years, but it is much earlier here. I measure it in terms of what payments have decreased for the data centers. I am closing one of the data centers because I no longer need to have those physical machines, so that is a saving, and it allows me to leverage the expense that it has. In terms of cost, you have to make a large initial investment, but it provides a good return on investment.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated three alternatives. We had VMware and the other two, but I was not part of the decision-making, so I do not know which other two products they considered.
I was not involved in the evaluation from the beginning, but I saw the results. When you make a comparison and choose a vendor with whom you are going to have a relationship for many years, you have to evaluate the cost. You have to evaluate technical capabilities, and you have to evaluate benefits related to the business.
I believe that one of the things that made Nutanix win by far in the proposals is its ease, short learning curve, and very natural, organic, and intuitive adoption within the team. The costs were not so high. These solutions are obviously not cheap, but one has to be prepared for that. For me, it is cheaper to pay a lot of money for a good solution than to have to explain to the government about a service that was down for several hours. Nutanix is a platform that has a very short learning curve. Growth occurs in a very organic way. There are all new features. It is not necessary to educate ourselves much. The dashboards are super easy to build. The fact is that it is a world-class solution. I am very happy with it.
Nutanix Cloud Manager's setup, learning curve, and ease of use were important when deciding on a cloud management solution. The most important thing is the learning curve. I need people to start producing very quickly. The integration characteristics, the compatibility, and the backward compatibility with legacy technologies are other important things. The ease of migration and integration is also important. It is easy to take technologies that are no longer in use, make an evolution, and migrate them to Nutanix. It should also be easy to integrate components that are on other platforms or other architectures. These were several features that made us decide on Nutanix Cloud Manager.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a nine out of ten. There is always room for improvement.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Easy to use and monitor while also being affordable compared to competitors
What is our primary use case?
I use the solution in my company for all of the created VMs. We have all of our systems in Nutanix. My company migrated from Veeam to VMware and then to Nutanix. In my company, we have Nutanix for all of our servers.
My company chose the tool since it is a very simple and good product. When I checked the comparison between VMware and Nutanix, I found the latter to be better, especially since it is very easy to monitor.
What is most valuable?
The tool is easy to use. My company learned how to use Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) in about six months.
What needs improvement?
For me, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is a very good tool. The solution's dashboard is fine. The possibility of changing some of the icons in the dashboard configuration would be good since it is an area where the tool has shortcomings. If I want to change the LAN connection or a configuration, it is difficult since I have to keep clicking and clicking the options in the solution. I want to have a one-click button for the network. With one click, I should be able to download three or more VMs with the help of the tool.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) since 2019, so it has been almost six years. I am an end-user of the tool.
How are customer service and support?
The technical support for the solution has been very, very good. With the support team, once you create a use case, you can automatically call and get access to the technical team in fifteen minutes. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
How was the initial setup?
The solution can be deployed in a period of two months. As per the contract, I know that my company had to migrate from VMware to Nutanix in two months.
What was our ROI?
With VMware, which we had for one year in our company, we paid 20,00,000 United Arab Emirates Dirhams. With Nutanix, in five years, our company has paid 83,000 United Arab Emirates Dirhams, which is very good and not as expensive as VMware. Time for creating VMs is very easy in Nutanix, compared to VMware, as it can be done in two to three minutes since all the templates are great. With VMware, the time required to create VMs is about ten minutes. In terms of time, Nutanix helps save 20 percent when compared to VMware.
What other advice do I have?
I don't use the automation options offered by Nutanix.
I rate the tool a ten out of ten.
Makes it easy to manage our global infrastructure and frees up time
What is our primary use case?
We mainly use it for infrastructure as a service. We use it for managing the clusters and hardware and running the VLCM updates. We do not use it to manage files and all the embedded because we have other solutions corporate-wide for it. It is pretty much being used to manage the infrastructure of the clusters and make sure that we have all the licenses applied to all the different clusters around the world.
We are multinational. I have clusters right now but not on all 53 plants. We have some Acronis data centers. They are called Co Lo data centers. We have a couple of those data centers with Nutanix in them. We have one in Tokyo, one in Ashburn, and then we have a couple of data centers in Mexico with Nutanix. We also have some in the US, some in Portugal where I am from, Italy, Germany, Asia, China, and Japan. We are around the world, and we use Prism to manage all those data centers.
How has it helped my organization?
Centralization is the main benefit. We are a company that is growing a lot due to acquisitions. Each of the companies we acquire does not use all of the same hardware or solutions. The mission of my team is to design and deploy solutions for all the new companies around the world and make sure they adopt our solutions. This is good to showcase to them what we have and make them see that they can manage their own side of the world. They can get granularity there and be able to support all their business locally. We still can have a backup team, which is my team, supporting them in case there are issues. There is always someone looking at it if something goes wrong.
We do not have to be alerted by an outage. We can work on an issue before it happens or as it happens. Sometimes, when people get up, the issue is already fixed because we can do all that remotely. NCM allows that.
Nutanix Cloud Manager has saved our IT time. We got our weekends back. Previously, having a different type of infrastructure with Cisco UCS and VMware, updating the Cisco component, the EMC storage, and downloading everything sometimes was a week's worth of work. We had to do upgrades on weekends because we could not do it online. Since we started using NCM and LCM out of NCM, we went from one-day upgrades to one hour. Earlier, we were running it for a one-year period, and now we are running it every month and that is a complete cluster upgrade. There is no downtime and no business complaints. We just warn them that we are doing this. We have total confidence and total trust that it is not going to be an issue.
In terms of ease of use, I use a lot of hypervisors, and there is nothing that can be compared to it, whether it is VMware, Hyper-V, or even Azure. The Azure portal does not have a one-click to update everything. If you look at the on-prem things, I have Cisco UCS, Lenovo, and IBM servers that I use in VMware. There was no single panel where I could manage all that together. There were always different things to manage. You needed knowledge and training. Nowadays, a new hire can come in, and I can tell them to run this every week. They will be able to do it without training.
It frees up the staff that I have from having to deal with heavy troubleshooting. It is one less worry for me. We have 53 plants operating 24/7. We have problems on a daily basis. We have attacks. It is a huge asset not having the burden of dealing with upgrades because if we do not do those, we are open to vulnerabilities. With NCM, we can focus on everything else. Worrying about updates is a thing of the past. Anybody on the team can go ahead and take a look.
What is most valuable?
The single pane of glass is valuable. Seeing all my clusters there and getting all the alerts in one place helps to manage our global infrastructure. To me, the ability to view or see everything in one single place is very valuable.
We are also able to do lifecycle management and run updates. We have got our weekend back. That is very important. IT guys never have weekends. With Nutanix Cloud Manager, we are able to run updates during normal business hours. We are able to do it with the click of a button. Not having to worry and not having to see how it is running on the other side of the world makes a huge difference.
What needs improvement?
We have clusters not only with HPE. We have some with VMware to use Cisco Call Manager for VoIP. That only runs on VMware. They upgrade the ESXi host but not vCenter, which manages the ESXi host. It would be great if there is a way to include vCenter on the VM because you run the updates, but you do not update vCenter. It complains that you still have not updated it.
For how long have I used the solution?
We started using the first version when it was called Prism in 2018.
How are customer service and support?
The technical support from Nutanix is excellent. It is not always the same experience. It differs. Sometimes you get someone who is very experienced on a given module or hardware. It depends on who you get, but even if you do not get the fastest guy at the first call, you will get it once the escalation happens. We have not had a case where the issue was not completely solved with a definite solution. I am very happy with Nutanix's support.
We work with a lot of brands, and it is not always like that. Even with Microsoft, when we open a ticket, the first person is going to tell me to try things that my team has already tried before. We have to tell them that this is not the first rodeo that we are at. We have done this. We need to go beyond that, but they still have to do their due diligence. They do not care about that. They still want to run their script till they get to it. Nutanix is different. We tell them what we have done. They know we are certified. They take that into consideration and go to the next step, which is troubleshooting.
I would rate them a ten out of ten. They are by far the ones we like to work with.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The price depends. I struggle a lot with that because I manage a budget. Not all businesses have the ability to spend that amount of money. When I have a plant that needs 10 VMs running, the smallest cluster I can offer them for high availability is a three-node cluster. It is going to cost me a hundred thousand dollars, whereas I could get a Dell box with 6K Windows Standard installed on it and get Hyper-V running and a couple of VMs, but there is no high availability. We had plants that were running like that because they did not want to spend the money. We had a ransomware attack. In the case of sites with Nutanix, we were up in a week, whereas in the case of the sites with that kind of hardware, we were up three weeks later. They then understood the importance of having proper hardware that can support resiliency and high availability.
It is expensive when you are looking at small locations that need low-latency workloads, but for larger locations, as compared to other guys, even using VMware, it is not that expensive because if you add it all up, it is going to be pretty much the same value. You just need to look at a similar size solution to be able to make a comparison.
What other advice do I have?
We do not use low-code automation. We support manufacturing plants. We do not have to deploy and stop VMs. We use Red Hat OpenShift for some containerized stuff but not a lot. We have some websites for looking for products. We do not have any need to build VMs and destroy them and build them again. It is pretty much what we do on our Azure footprint. We have 400 VMs there. We do not have automation there. We never build templates. We build one or two VMs per month when we get requests. My team builds those VMs even for our developers so that we have cost and check. We do not need to use automation at this point. We appreciate the automation of life cycle management and all those rapid tests that we have to make, but that is the standard automation we use.
I do use playbooks out of Azure but not out of Nutanix.
I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a ten out of ten. I have no issues with bad-mouthing it or praising it. In this case, praise is due for sure.
Saves time and has a low learning curve but needs more integration with GPT
What is our primary use case?
We use the solution between different customers. Each has their own use case.
How has it helped my organization?
There's not one use case in particular. However, it does offer resiliency. The optimization and self-healing aspects are great. There are a lot of features. It offers a great infrastructure for our clients.
What is most valuable?
The time savings is very good. It's one click to upgrade, for example. There's no interruption or impact, either. It's very simple.
Its resilience and performance are excellent.
Using NCM's playbooks has helped free up our IT team's time to focus on other tasks. Sometimes, you can spend so much time writing your own playbooks, however, NCM has automation built-in that helps save time. Otherwise, we have to spend to save. If there are just two to five playbook executions a month, it doesn't make sense to write your own.
The learning curve is low. It's easy to learn and simple to use. It's very competitive in terms of ease of use.
What needs improvement?
We haven't noted any features that may be missing.
If they integrated more with GPT, that would be ideal.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the solution for three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
All Nutanix platforms and products are stable. If there is an issue, it's due to the fact that someone didn't follow Nutanix best practices.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability is very good.
How are customer service and support?
The customer support is amazing. It's the best support I've dealt with. When support is proactive and opens support cases on its own when it detects something wrong on your cluster, that's great. They'll email you and ask about your availability so they can fix the problem with you.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We do not choose NCM on our own. We rely on our customers to pick the product and then we play with it, figure it out, et cetera.
I am aware of their solutions. The Nutanix deployment, for example, is much easier in comparison. Configurations at the start are straightforward as well. It's got an easy setup. For a developer, it's easier to learn and code code blueprints.
How was the initial setup?
The setup is intuitive, and it's an easy solution to learn and use.
Most of the time, it is deployed on-premises.
We provide our clients with the blueprints needed to ensure a successful setup. We tend to follow Nutanix best practices.
What about the implementation team?
We're a consultant. We do reselling and service. We have an expert in our company that can assist with the deployment.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It's an affordable solution. However, it depends on the size of your infrastructure.
What other advice do I have?
We are partners, not customers. We're a dedicated Nutanix partner. We work with Nutanix based on our customer's needs. We're implementing and showing our customers how to use the product, and then we move on. We don't use Nutanix in our own day-to-day.
I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.