Nutanix Software Subscription

We use Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)  because we manage a multi-hybrid, multi-cloud environment, with some workloads on-premises, some workloads on Azure  Cloud, some on AWS  Cloud, and some on GCP Cloud, so that is where our use case is for managing a complete hybrid multi-cloud platform, and we use Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)  as the management platform for that.

What I appreciate most about Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is that it provides centralized management and automation, offering a unified platform to manage services across multiple clouds, reducing tool sprawl and simplifying complex infrastructure tasks. The single-click operations are best, offering simple one-click upgrade and scalability for the infrastructure, which significantly increases operational efficiency. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) gives us basically a single pane of glass for management.

Next would be cost optimization and visibility with robust tools for cost metering, budgeting, and identifying underutilized resources, helping to optimize costs as well as the usage of the product and resources. It also includes intelligent operations offering machine learning-driven self-tuning, application discovery, and advanced reporting to enhance performance. Finally, there is security and compliance, providing robust security, including network planning and regulatory compliance monitoring.

We see the benefits of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) immediately, particularly with unified multi-cloud management as a true single pane of glass across on-premises and public clouds, which includes AWS  and Azure . As we experienced their customer support over time, we found it to be very superior with a consistent high level of customer satisfaction. The simplicity and speed of deployment are much faster and easier compared to other solutions we have used. On the cost management side, we realized it has a stronger ROI, being very cost-effective, with pricing models beneficial for multi-cloud environments, quantifying to a 425% three-year return on investment, a 21% higher developer productivity, and 88% less planned downtime.

Some downsides of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) are that it has very high cost and licensing complexity, particularly for smaller environments, making it more suited for larger environments. On the learning curve and support, while Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is user-friendly in some areas, the initial setup is complex and sometimes requires very specialized expertise, creating a steep learning curve. There is also limited third-party integration, as it has very limited non-native integrations compared to competitors. The documentation has gaps, particularly for advanced features, requiring some improvement, and certain advanced configurations and troubleshooting still require heavy reliance on the command-line interface rather than having a GUI.

I have been working with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for around one year.

I have not seen any lagging, crashing, or downtime.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is hugely scalable, and that is one of the biggest advantages of the product.

I have contacted Nutanix customer support. Both the speed and quality of the support I have experienced are fantastic.

It took us more than a month to fully set up Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for the first time, but after we became familiar with the product, we started using it and seeing how it helps us.

One person cannot do the deployment; we definitely need a team.

We see the benefits of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) immediately, particularly with unified multi-cloud management as a true single pane of glass across on-premises and public clouds, which includes AWS and Azure. As we experienced their customer support over time, we found it to be very superior with a consistent high level of customer satisfaction. The simplicity and speed of deployment are much faster and easier compared to other solutions we have used. On the cost management side, we realized it has a stronger ROI, being very cost-effective, with pricing models beneficial for multi-cloud environments, quantifying to a 425% three-year return on investment, a 21% higher developer productivity, and 88% less planned downtime.

In my current field, I have been working for more than 30 years. In my experience comparing Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) with other cloud management solutions, I find it far ahead in terms of the functionality it offers as compared to its competitors, both in ease of management and the way it makes things extremely easy with a single pane of glass to manage. Its main advantages are ease of use, automation, and cost-effectiveness, also offering unified control across private and public clouds. It has superior support with a Net Promoter  Score of over 90. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is very simple to deploy and has comprehensive native integrations, often outperforming niche or complex solutions on cost efficiency when compared to competitors like VMware Cloud Foundation , ServiceNow ITOM , Azure Arc , AWS Outposts , or Google Distributed Cloud .

The playbooks, often referred to as X-Play, have been very useful, really freeing up a lot of our time, making it the right strategy to enhance their product and make it more user-friendly. These playbooks provide a low-code and no-code automation engine within Prism Central, streamlining routine IT tasks and auto-remediating issues. They use triggers such as alerts, manual, and time-based to initiate actions such as VM management, third-party notifications, or scripts. Various features within their playbooks that we have used include trigger types that are alert-based, where, for example, if your VM memory usage crosses 70%, you can set a threshold value, again manual or time-based. Over 30 native actions are available, including VM power operations, snapshot management, and script execution. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) playbooks support integration with REST APIs, allowing connection with external tools such as ServiceNow , Jira , or Ansible . Use cases we have applied include auto-remediation, such as automatically adding memory to a VM if it hits a utilization alert, automated maintenance to start or stop AWS EC2  instances based on a schedule, alerting to send notifications to Slack when a new VM is created, and playbooks can be imported, exported, and monitored via the Plays tab to track execution history.

I would rate this product a 9 out of 10.

I have been working with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)  for approximately three years. I work as a multi-cloud architect and solution architect on several different OEM products within the cloud and virtualization space. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)  initially launched in 2022, and I have been working with the product since 2023.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) provides automation capability in multi-cloud management, automation, and security with different use cases depending on the organization. The product has different capabilities including self-service capabilities, blueprinting, and compliance, which we utilize.

Feature-wise, the self-service capabilities are quite improved from the initial version and provide governance and visibility of Google Cloud  and Azure . Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Playbook helps us orchestrate operations and reach the desired state, which is very helpful. The low-code automation allows us to manage VMs, remediate alerts, and handle day-to-day tasks with playbooks, enabling intelligent operations.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) has the capability for cost optimization and analysis, which helps us scale workload and perform cost assessment and optimization. This is a great feature available in the product.

When comparing Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) with other competitive portfolio products, there is some lack of capabilities. When compared with VMware Aria from an automation perspective, it lacks some CI/CD integration capabilities and integration of CI/CD pipelines.

The user interface could be improved. The UI should be more cosmetic and visually distinct, as sometimes it is very similar to other Nutanix platforms.

Stability-wise, there are no issues. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is a very good, well-known, and safely launched tool. I have not found any crash, legacy, or latency issues. The product is completely reliable.

Regarding speed and quality, I would rate the quality at five out of five on the largest scale. Support-wise, I would rate it around 4.5 for speed because sometimes it depends on the issue. If there is a P1 or P2 issue, the timeline will change. Support-wise, I would rate it 4.5 for speed, and the quality of support is five out of five.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is very easy from a deployment perspective because it comes with the SaaS service. It is completely SaaS-based, which makes it very easy for deployment and allows for a quick start. A fast start is achievable with this product.

For deployment and day-zero, day-one, and day-two operations, around two to three people are required. This may include a system admin, and it depends on how much Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is utilized. Two people is sufficient for operating and managing the product from an operations perspective.

There are a couple of cloud management solutions apart from Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). The most competitive would be Aria automation and the Aria Suite from VMware. Nutanix is launching Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for managing hybrid cloud management environments and performing cloud management.

The low-code automation speed-wise is satisfactory. When doing an apple-to-apple comparison with other automation tools, it is quite good on the Nutanix side.

It depends on deployment. If using SaaS-based deployment, it does not require any management from the organization. If using VM-based deployment, it will require management as per VM-level operations, such as upgrades.

I am not a direct customer of Nutanix. I manage customers who have a Nutanix environment as a managed service provider. Some of our clients have Nutanix clusters, and some have VMware clusters, which we manage as a managed service provider.

We are not a partner with Nutanix, so we do not sell the product, but we suggest it based on the use case of the customer. If a client comes to us with a requirement for automation or management, we will facilitate a tailored solution and recommend it. However, the purchasing and cost are handled by the authorized Nutanix partners who are aligned with that particular customer.

I would rate this product nine out of ten overall.

The main use case for Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)  is to create a hybrid cloud experience. It serves as a turnkey solution where we can add management features to get the same experience we have with an NCM Nutanix product on-premises, even if we run Nutanix in the public cloud.

I work for an IT distributor where we sell products for virtualization and data centers, with Nutanix being our main solution for this kind of business. We resell Nutanix for other companies from various industries or markets in Brazil.

The setup of Nutanix is very easy. The overall complexity of the solution is much less, and it's a solution that provides freedom of choice. We can run Nutanix on any cloud, on any hardware with any hypervisor.

The cost governance features of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)  are some of the most important features in this solution. We have features that help customers spend less on public cloud infrastructure. We have the observability of these costs, attribute quotas or chargeback policies, and with this kind of cost management, the expenditure of IT infrastructure in the public cloud could be significantly less so that the return on investment can be very relevant to companies that spend substantial money with the public cloud.

The console of the Nutanix solution has various reports that we can fulfill and use a SaaS-like solution for Nutanix that allows us to input our expenditure profiles of the public clouds and then compare that with the cost that we might have with the on-premise solutions.

The main area that could be improved with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is the cost. This is a license that we can use as a complement for the NCI product, which is the main product of Nutanix. Here  in Brazil, we have a total cost of ownership based on the NCI, and sometimes the NCM additions make the product a little higher when we compare it with the public clouds. We are much cheaper when we compare with the Broadcom vCloud solution, but not as competitive when we compare with AWS  or Google when these kinds of solutions are built into the platform.

I have worked for about 10 years with the Nutanix portfolio: NCM, NCI, and NUS.

These solutions are already deployed in a high availability way with load balancing. Any problem with these machines does not compromise the structure of what we have built within. The solution has very high availability with no problems.

In terms of scalability, it is really high. The threshold is not about NCM; it's the size of your on-premises or cloud infrastructure. As long as your AWS  or public cloud workloads can grow, the solution is already set up to manage it.

I would rate their customer service with Nutanix a nine out of ten. The support of the Nutanix team is great. The complexity of the matters might make it slightly lower, but even then, this is higher than the average of the market.

I have never used a similar solution in my company. I have only studied the solution from Broadcom.

The deployment of the Nutanix solution is instantaneous. These solutions are packaged in the Nutanix Prism  Central that is a piece of software already deployed in the cluster. It requires only the setup of the policies that we want to have, the creation of the playbooks that we're interested in, and the setup of the cost profiles and the quotas or the project. The setup is already done when we deploy the Prism Central solution, which is a main managed solution for this kind of cluster.

Using NCM's built-in playbooks has freed up time for my IT team. We have saved more than 50% of the time. We can create the experience of scale-out and elasticity that we have in the public cloud, provide this to on-premises solutions, and it saves lots of time in micromanagement of the VM profiles.

Regarding the speed of outcomes from their low-code automation, some companies have longer cycles of deployment of applications of infrastructure, and time is money. Once we can deploy large solutions with CI/CD solutions and integrate a DevOps-like flow of production, we can reduce this time and accelerate the value of the solution for the infrastructure. Nutanix gives that with the turnkey solution. We do not have the complexity to assemble a CI/CD solution with open-source solutions or multiple products. This is a complete flow of work for DevOps, integrated even with the Kubernetes  or containers infrastructures that can accelerate this kind of deployment significantly, varying with the profile of the company that utilizes it. My company is not a development company, so this does not have this kind of value since we do not develop, but I can see the value that this feature has for companies that build software in-house.

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