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.
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A world-class solution that helps us to have almost 100% uptime
What is our primary use case?
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.
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.
The learning curve has been smooth, and the technicians are performing a little better regarding response times
What is our primary use case?
We started migrating from VMware to Nutanix four years ago, and we're seeing much better performance.
How has it helped my organization?
We had a difficult disaster recovery situation that we handled with Nutanix Cloud Manager. We also migrated licenses from on-premises in a local environment to the cloud, which is much cheaper.
What is most valuable?
Nutanix Cloud Manager is easier for technicians than VMware, so fewer people are needed to do the same tasks. It's critical because if we do things faster, we do them at a lower price, especially if we use fewer human resources.
NCM’s built-in playbooks have freed our IT team to focus on other tasks in some areas, but we also have our own local playbooks. This has freed up time for our IT team. Since 2023, we have spent an average of six hours completing an implementation, which allows us to use our IT staff more effectively for other tasks.
The learning curve has been smooth, and the technicians are performing a little better regarding response times. The only thing that makes a little difference is the virtualization part, which I believe is compensated by the performance part. A short learning curve is important because the infrastructure team is a bit large, so doing things with less time is better. If we take longer, then it will be more expensive.
What needs improvement?
We are still learning about cloud usage and the integrations we are targeting right now at the event. I believe there is room for improvement, especially with the prices, which are not very friendly.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used Nutanix Cloud Manager for four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We haven't experienced any downtime.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It's easy to scale Nutanix Cloud Manager for the cloud and local services.
How are customer service and support?
I rate Nutanix support nine out of 10. We are happy with the customer service.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We used VMware previously. It's okay. We made the switch four years ago when we purchased another company that was already using Nutanix. From that moment, we started working with Nutanix, which we didn't know about before.
How was the initial setup?
Deploying Nutanix was a smooth experience. The technicians were fluid, and the deployment had no major problems.
What about the implementation team?
We used the help of EDVAL, an integrator company. I liked working with them
What was our ROI?
Due to the migration, we are at around 9 percent. We are now talking with them because we have VMware things we are going to migrate to Nutanix. There is a migration and expulsion plan, there is an optimal communication process with them. We are talking to salespeople about reaching around 15 percent or 20 percent reduction thanks to Nutanix's approach and scaling nature.
What other advice do I have?
I rate Nutanix Cloud Manager eight out of 10. I wouldn’t give it a 10 because of the price.
Businesses can save time, and one can easily learn to use how it works
What is our primary use case?
I am an MSP currently, but ten years ago, I was a customer of the solution. What I love about Nutanix is its one-click upgrade. I know that with the tool, all of our company's infrastructure will have a standard upgrade through the switch. With Nutanix, I have to click and go for the launch option.
In my company, people in the operations team gain benefits associated with time and productivity. With the tool, our company can give time to customers so that we can answer or respond to their problems, not just technical problems.
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is an invisible tool for managing an infrastructure, just like any tool we use to manage any environment. It has been helpful in the long run, considering that I always get to direct my company to help other organizations and stay customer-friendly.
What is most valuable?
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is not comparable with other cloud management solutions. In the past, when you used to drive your car, you had to know how to repair or fix your motor. Nowadays, you just hop into your car and drive, and I would say that Nutanix is similar. Compared to Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), other companies are still behind the line. Public clouds are similar to Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), but things may seem very locked, making them a trap for customers. As soon as one plans to work, Nutanix needs to be attached to all the public clouds and private cloud instances.
Learning how to use Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is quick. The new version allows us to have a product demo. You can use AI for help and ask it to help you connect with the web server.
What needs improvement?
I don't want the product to be made better because I won't have any work in my company. I don't want to get replaced by Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). I am sure Nutanix can develop and provide more functionalities to customers to help bypass issues.
Considering the shortcomings where improvements are needed, I would say that the tool should have a cheap hardware model that can be used to manage the proof of concept phase. When I set the solution, I prefer to put it on the table, turn it on, and test it on the external desk. With Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), it is not the same thing. We want to feel physical things. We want to feel the real sense, but with the cloud, there is no scope to have it in the physical sense.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) since 2014 as a customer and as an MSP.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is a very stable solution. Like in the case of VMware, you can definitely test some versions, but such versions have short-term support. You can go with the tool's version later on to get long-term support (LTS).
How are customer service and support?
The solution's technical support is wonderful. With the new products, you can say that our company's team has to stay focused. In the past, we had only one product, and all the teams in our company used to use the same solution, but now things have become more specific. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
What was our ROI?
The product has helped my company save time by at least 50 percent. The tool doesn't help save money because it requires human operations. Human beings can be more productive in business cases, not just in the area of information technology.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The product is expensive. For a tech person like me, I want the product to be free. When I have to sell the tool to a customer, I would say that it is not very expensive and can be termed priceless.
What other advice do I have?
In terms of the speed of the outcomes from the tool's end, my company does not use the product's automation functionality.
In my company, we don't use the tool's built-in playbooks.
I rate the tool a ten out of ten.
Good price, excellent support, and a lot of time savings
What is our primary use case?
We completely migrated all of our data centers from VMware to Nutanix. We were running a hyper-converged infrastructure based on HPE systems. We chose the full Nutanix stack because of the level of performance and the availability. There was the robustness of the systems, and it also looked simpler to manage than VMware.
How has it helped my organization?
The system is more robust now. In terms of performance, some users mentioned performance improvement for some legal applications without having to touch anything.
When it comes to faster outcomes, we are not dealing with projects that need to be delivered to the market very fast, so that is not the most important point for us. Nutanix does help us with our DevOps operations. We can support our development teams in a better way by providing them with resources faster than before. We have completely automated the provisioning of Linux systems that are used to host web applications. We are better than before.
Its ease of use is very important because the team is limited in capacity. We wanted a good partner to support us. One concern before migrating to Nutanix was that the community is less developed than VMware. Now that we have migrated, it is not a concern anymore. Nutanix was able to live up to our expectations.
What is most valuable?
There is less management for the team than before, so there is a complete gain of time. It freed up our staff's time for other work. This is something that is important for our company. We have 130 people in our company, and my IT infrastructure and operations team has six people, including two people for the service desk. We do not have many system engineers or network engineers, so the more we can gain on basic tasks, the more time we have for the projects or to improve our different solutions. We are able to save 10% to 15% of the time or at least one infrastructure engineer's time.
What needs improvement?
The web interface could be improved at some points.
We are currently facing one issue regarding management. We have two clusters supported on different sites with synchronous replication. The central point of management must be completely deployed on a Nutanix system with a witness. That is something that should be improved in the future.
The other issue that we are facing is related to integration. There is a lack of integration with our Veeam backup solution. It is not very well integrated with that, but this issue is not completely on the Nutanix side.
For how long have I used the solution?
We migrated to Nutanix last summer. It has been almost one year.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It meets our current needs. I would rate it an eight out of ten for that. In terms of future expansion, when we migrated last year, we already planned for the resources. We are okay for the next three to four years. We may install a new cluster next year on a third site.
How are customer service and support?
Their technical support is excellent. They are easy to approach, and their action time is very fast. For all the priority cases that can impact production, I can directly contact my local Nutanix team. Within 20 minutes of opening a case, we get a message.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We did not use a similar solution before, so I cannot compare it with others, but it is easier than what we were doing before.
How was the initial setup?
We are using only the Azure cloud. We deployed the new infrastructure in parallel to the old one. We interconnected everything. The migration lasted two weeks. In two weeks, we migrated all of our virtual machine servers from the development environment to the production environment.
It was a very simple process from Nutanix's point of view. We also moved to new firewall technology in parallel. It took two weeks because we were retaining all the firewall policies at the same time. If we had to move only from VMware to Nutanix, we could have done the job in one night for 1,200 virtual machines.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Its price is correct.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
There was a competition with VMware for the virtualization part and with different types of vendors, such as Cisco, HPE, etc.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager an eight out of ten. Some interfaces can be improved, but its performance is perfect.
Offers a single pane of glass to manage clusters but needs improvement in the stability offered
What is our primary use case?
I use the solution in my company to manage around 27 clusters. It is all a single pane of glass to manage them and monitor them in a way that is not really associated with cross availability but more in the area of whether there are any impacts, alerts, or any such related stuff.
How has it helped my organization?
It is difficult to speak about the benefits I have experienced from the use of the solution because the product serves as a central point. Having a centralized single pane of glass is important.
My company can also see our Pure Storage and ESXi landscape in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), even though such products may be third-party or foreign imports. You see everything in one control plane, which greatly adds to our value. The tool's ease of use is good because a lot more people can access Prism Central, allowing all to do simple operations without needing a lot of training, etc. The tool's user interface is intuitive.
What is most valuable?
The solution's most valuable features revolve around the single pane of glass it provides, which helps me see all my infrastructure and quickly manage VM operations without having to go to individual clusters. Some of the tool's good features are having one central place to monitor for alerts and one central API to interact with other clusters and deploy VMs.
Nutanix Cloud Manage helps our team address our current automation needs while planning for future expansion. Our company uses capacity monitoring, and it is quite valuable to see the growth and a view on resource consumption and get an alert if it predicts some kind of resource shortage coming up maybe. The runway in the tool is really helpful, but anything else apart from it is not there yet in the product.
Comparing Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) versus other cloud management solutions for setup, learning curve, and ease of use, I would say that Nutanix's learning curve is quite small, and the ease of use is quite high. The aforementioned area consists of the biggest advantage associated with the tool, especially since you don't have to have a degree in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) to be able to use it and get started or get a feel for it. The tool is quite easy to use. When deciding on a cloud management solution, the tool's setup, learning curve, and ease of use were not major but maybe small factors why my company chose Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). My company chose Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) because of the natural progression of our company's engagement with Nutanix. My company also uses Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) with Prism Central.
What needs improvement?
The product can be improved in terms of stability. The update process has to be more tough, meaning it should be more bulletproof. The switch to the CMSP should have been more thought out, tested, and validated by Nutanix. More frequent updates would be good in the tool. Better role-based access control would be good for the tool. Better documented APIs that can be used across all Nutanix products can be a good improvement. It would be good if you could have multiple Prism Central and combine them at a centralized point. From an improvement perspective, the tool should offer a real high availability platform because it serves as a central point, and you need it.
The stability of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is an area of concern where improvements are required.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for six years. My company is a customer of Nutanix.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) used to be a very stable product in the past. The versions released by the product before 2023 were great, but after that, I see that there is a big technical gap in the tool.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is not kind of a scalable solution for now. The product could be used to scale up in the same cluster, but it was not something that our company wanted. My organization wanted to scale across clusters. For now, as far as I know, the tool's scalability part cannot be considered as a feature, but it may have new functionalities coming up in the future.
How are customer service and support?
The solution's technical support is great. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
There weren't many solutions that my company used to use in the past, apart from maybe a few products for the central management of infrastructure components like a vCenter traditionally, and now we use it in parallel to Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) and not replacing it with any other tool.
How was the initial setup?
Six years ago, the product's initial setup phase was easy, and since then, my company has been running the same installation process. With day-2 operations, like upgrades, which were normally easy, I see how a lot of the features have changed presently, including the whole architecture underneath, and because of this, my company has faced some challenges with the product.
There is no strategy required to deploy the project since it is very intuitive.
The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.
My company uses the product in different locations and data centers.
What about the implementation team?
My company did not seek help from an integrator, reseller, or consultant.
What was our ROI?
The ROI I have experienced from the use of the solution stems from the fact that it is easy to use, and the entry border of the tool is quite low, so a lot of new people can easily use it. With the tool, you have one single pane of glass across multiple infrastructures.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Nutanix changes its licensing models frequently, and it is difficult to figure out how and what is included in which package. The problem lies with how frequently the prices and licensing models are changed and the names provided for the packages. As per the main focus of our company, I would say that having Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is the cherry on top for us.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I have not evaluated The other products in the market offering the same features as Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM).
What other advice do I have?
In terms of the importance of faster outcomes for our organization from the use of the tool, I would say that fast is not always best, but if you have a very good process in place, fast is good as long as you follow the process.
The use of Nutanix Cloud Manager or NCM's built-in playbooks has not freed up time for our IT team to focus on other tasks or projects. I know on paper and maybe for management, the tool's ability to have built-in playbooks and how it frees up time for the IT team so that they can focus on other projects sounds interesting, but at the end of the day, you don't want a lot of those things to be completely automated unless you have very strict quotas in place which also needs good housekeeping. In a historically growing environment, following the aforementioned areas is not always possible, so you may not want such automation happening, but what is nice about it is that I can forward all the alerts that are generated in Prism Central using a webhook to any kind of messaging kind of application, which removes the barrier of having to check on it. It is quite nice that with the playbooks, I have some low-code way of having some kind of automation going.
Considering the versions of the product before 2023, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.
Considering the versions of the product after 2023, I rate the solution a five or six out of ten.
Provides the ability to allocate resources from anywhere and saves time
What is our primary use case?
My client is a French company for train travel. They had several servers. They had about 10,000 servers on the VMware infrastructure. The target of the company was to migrate to the new architecture, Nutanix Hyperconverged, because of the costs of VMware. My principal work was to automate the migration from VMware to Nutanix.
We have a private cloud with Azure and AWS. We will also have GCP over time.
How has it helped my organization?
There are many benefits. The main benefit is to be able to allocate resources anywhere we are.
Nutanix Cloud Manager is my first low-code solution. For me, it is very user-friendly.
Nutanix Cloud Manager saves time. My client's goal is to automate maximum things. With Nutanix, it is simple to automate.
Nutanix Cloud Manager saves us time. It has saved about 40% of our time. Time is money, so there are money savings.
What is most valuable?
The convergence between the network and the storage is valuable.
What needs improvement?
The time between the solution's production and delivery is too short. We see several bugs. Many tests are not done before delivery. They need to test it more and for a longer time.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager for the past two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I had an issue two days ago with stability. We had an image in one cluster, but it could not be replicated in the second cluster. Our both clusters went down and no action was possible on the VM. The team had a blackout. No action was possible. The only option was to reboot the system. It is fixed now.
How are customer service and support?
Their customer support is very good. They are very efficient, but it is sometimes complicated to have someone available during work hours in France. Their support is usually in the USA.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
The client was using VMware. They moved to Nutanix because of the costs and support. It was the client's choice. I had no hand in this, but if I had a choice, I would have also gone for Nutanix.
The advantage of Nutanix over other solutions is the GUI. It is more user-friendly than other vendors, such as VMware.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Its licensing is cheaper than VMware. However, the price for certain licenses or use cases is not clearly indicated. For example, replication of the cluster to switch from one VM to another when one is down is not included in the standard price. It requires an additional license, but it is not clearly indicated. My client chose Nutanix because it is cheaper than VMware. They thought that this feature was included in the standard price, but it was not.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager a nine out of ten based on our use case.
We can do a lot with little effort and APIs are very helpful for our automation
What is our primary use case?
It is a part of our automation tool.
How has it helped my organization?
It has helped us with our automation. That is the biggest benefit of it.
It is quite easy to get started and be up and running. I would rate it highly in that aspect because you can create lots of things with a small amount of effort or in a small amount of time. These faster outcomes are important for everybody. We do not have any special needs for speed, but everybody needs speed.
Nutanix Cloud Manager’s built-in playbooks have freed up time for our IT team to focus on other tasks or projects. You set it up and then you forget about it, but it is hard to provide any metrics because we have some work to do to use it all the way. We are expecting to have about 20 hours a week of time savings when we are done. That is the expectation, and let us see if we end up there.
Nutanix Cloud Manager is a part of our automation, so it needs to be there. It is important.
I can compare it to Azure. Nutanix is way simpler to start with. It is simple to use. It is not a simple tool, but it is simple to use.
What is most valuable?
The ability to use the APIs and talk to it through APIs is the most beneficial feature for us because we have to do automation.
What needs improvement?
Its licensing can be better.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Nutanix Cloud Manager for about two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is very stable. We have been using Nutanix for 13 years. We have not had any downtime because of Nutanix.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I have not thought about it. If Nutanix Cloud Manager scales with your cluster as a whole, it is then good.
We do not have plans to increase its usage for this use case.
How are customer service and support?
In general, Nutanix's customer service is good. It was better a couple of years ago, but we know that the company is growing. You can feel that as a user, but it is still good. When you get the right technician, you will always have things sorted.
We get the response on time. Sometimes, you might need to prioritize your ticket a bit, but it is working fine.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We did not use any other solution in the same way that we are using Nutanix Cloud Manager.
We are a heavy Nutanix customer, so we just ended up with it. Its ease of use was important because it made things easier.
How was the initial setup?
It was easy. We did the trial and started using it.
What about the implementation team?
We take care of the deployment. I am a consultant.
What was our ROI?
We have time savings, and time is money.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It is a nightmare to keep up with all the licensing. I would prefer everything to be at one price.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluate a lot of things.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate Nutanix Cloud Manager an eight out of ten. I have not yet explored everything in it. I am not sure about everything it can do. It might be a ten, but I do not have that much experience with it to give it a ten.