Taking Back Control of Your Infrastructure: Introducing Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) 2.1

The Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) solution provides a unified foundation that transforms traditional infrastructure into a modern, public-cloud-like operating model. While Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) handles core virtualization, the addition of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) establishes a critical operating model to build, operate and govern your hybrid cloud. By combining NCI and NCM, IT teams can systematically reduce operational complexity and avoid disconnected silos as their environments grow. Ultimately, NCP enables businesses to accelerate deployment and operational adoption by delivering a consistent management experience across their entire estate.

We are excited to announce the general availability of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) 2.1, our next-generation platform for hybrid cloud management. 

Designed to elevate agility across your IT organization, NCM 2.1 delivers an all-inclusive Build, Operate, and Govern framework packed with fresh capabilities like custom metrics, custom dashboards, custom forms and cost governance enhancements. The latest release not only streamlines your journey to migrate from VMware VCF9 to Nutanix, but also empowers your organization to seamlessly deploy a private cloud-as-a-service. Furthermore, this update to NCM helps improve infrastructure utilization and operational efficiency. NCM 2.1 introduces a highly available 3-node "Small" form factor optimized for leaner environments to complement the “Medium” form factor that was introduced in NCM 2.0.

Build, Operate, and Govern your Infrastructure

NCM 2.1 provides you with a comprehensive management plane and gives you the capability to Build, Operate, and Govern your hybrid clouds.  

Build: Accelerating Business Time-to-Market

Custom Forms in Self-Service enable the building of custom experiences by hiding technical complexities from end users while ensuring essential operational and security data is captured.

• Custom Forms in Self‑Service: Custom Forms allow tailored launch experiences for blueprints and runbooks, hiding irrelevant or overly technical parameters from end users while still capturing the information and enforcing the controls required by operations and security teams.

NCM 2.1 allows the creation of Custom Forms to tailor the experience for end users. This view shows the creation of a Custom Variable, called Software Add-Ons and specifying the properties of this variable for the End User. 

Operate: Gain full visibility at scale 

NCM 2.1 embeds intelligent, machine-learning-driven automation into your environment. The platform provides predictive capacity planning capabilities, automatically right-sizes virtual environments, and proactively reclaims wasted resources. These capabilities allow your team to shift from reactive maintenance to proactively focusing on strategic innovation. NCM 2.1 orchestrates operations seamlessly across heterogeneous environments. Whether your long-term roadmap involves Nutanix AHV or existing VMware ESXi deployments, NCM 2.1 provides a critical operating model. 

• Custom Metrics: Teams define business‑aligned KPIs using base platform metrics, mathematical operations, and flexible filters, and then plug those metrics into analytics and automation for proactive, environment‑specific alerting and remediation.

NCM 2.1 allows users the ability to create Custom Metrics, in this case, a formula was added for CPU Oversubscription.

• Custom Dashboards: Enables role‑ and use‑case‑specific views with rich visualization options, drill‑downs, thresholds, and one‑click reporting so operators, admins, and leaders can each see and act on the insights most relevant to them.

NCM 2.1 allows users to aggregate both OOTB and Custom Metrics into Custom Dashboards. Here a Custom Metric that was created to determine the number of Database VMs that are currently powered has been added to the bottom right of the Custom Dashboard, Environment Resources.

Govern: Support governance, security programs, and cost management initiatives

NCM 2.1 gives IT practitioners a single, transparent view of cost and compliance across their entire estate. NCM provides Full FinOps visibility and cost allocation.  

• Bring Financial Clarity to Your Private Cloud: NCM applies a Total Cost of Ownership model that aggregates hardware, software, facilities, telecom, services, and people costs to derive realistic unit costs such as cost per VM per hour, with enhancements for snapshot metering, per-core subscription pricing and a cost model based on the active cluster configuration rather than depreciation schedules. NCM 2.1 introduces snapshot metering via a Recovery Point model, allowing NCM to deliver even more precise financial visibility across your cloud infrastructure.

NCM 2.1 provides users with the ability to Create a New Rate Card and specify Storage Cost for each Gigabyte used in a VM Recovery Point as part of the User Defined Metering (UDM) Model.

NCM 2.1 provides users with the ability to now visualize the cost of each VM Recovery Point.

Why NCM 2.1 is a Strategic Alternative to VMware VCF 9.1

Organizations evaluating VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 may wish to assess how its architecture, lifecycle management processes, and compliance workflows align with their operational requirements, particularly in environments seeking centralized management and consistent upgrade operations.

Next-gen NCM 2.1 addresses these needs by providing a unified architecture, manageable from a single pane of glass, allowing efficient, cost effective, and reliable Day 2 operations.

Small Form Factor: VCF 9.1 deployments typically require a dedicated management domain that consumes infrastructure resources before customer workloads are deployed, which obviously is not optimal in these times of supply chain disruption and high costs for hardware. In stark contrast, NCM 2.1 introduces a highly available Small Form Factor with a 60% smaller footprint than Nutanix’s  Medium Form Factor . This eliminated overhead makes NCM 2.1 the ideal, cost-effective solution for edge locations and distributed remote offices.

NCM 2.1 provides users with the ability to deploy a Small Form Factor.

Flexible Licensing: Provides a clear alternative to legacy suites and forced, expensive VCF bundles. Nutanix gives you the autonomy to choose the exact management tier that fits your operational maturity, ensuring you only invest in the capabilities your business actually requires. Options include Starter, Pro, and Ultimate Bundles

NCM helps you get the most out of your Infrastructure

NCM 2.1 is designed to help ensure that no piece of hardware sits underutilized, avoiding stranded capacity and extending the ROI of your current infrastructure. Use Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) native capabilities to unlock hidden capacity in the infrastructure you already own by understanding how current resources are allocated, forecasting future infrastructure needs, driving financial accountability and strengthening governance.

• Optimize Current Resources: Distribute workloads across your infrastructure estate using data from out-of-the-box (OOTB) metrics and customizable capacity thresholds from NCM to gain deep insights into wasted resource allocation and spending.
• Plan and Forecast Future Needs: Leverage machine learning models to move from reactive decision-making to proactive capacity management using both OOTB or custom dashboards introduced within NCM 2.1. By having accurate, data-driven forecasts, you can plan your procurement timelines with confidence.
• Drive Financial Accountability: Bridge the gap between infrastructure resource consumption and fiscal control using NCM. NCM enables organizations to move away from guesswork by providing transparency and automated financial oversight, including the capability to set budget alerts to help ensure that spend doesn’t exceed predefined thresholds.
• Strengthen Governance: With NCM 2.1, implement approval policies using custom or OOTB forms that require multi-level authorization to help ensure that internal stakeholders have a valid business justification for requesting resources using Nutanix Cloud Manager..

A next‑generation Build, Operate, and Govern platform

NCM 2.1 is a pivotal release that builds on the foundation of NCM 2.0. This release delivers the architectural freedom you’ve been waiting for. It gives you the power to Build fluid self-service environments, Operate with deep proactive intelligence, and Govern with effective financial governance and security management. With the groundbreaking Small Form Factor, Next Gen NCM scales down to deliver these enterprise-grade automation capabilities to smaller environments, while also helping you navigate the Supply Chain Disruption.

For more information on Next-gen NCM and key features, please visit these supporting blogs:

• NCM 2.x: One Platform, One Experience
• Build: Accelerate your enterprise automation using self-service
• Operate: Enterprise-Grade Observability, End-to-End
• Govern: The Secure, Air-Gapped Governance Platform

Availability

Upgrade today! NCM 2.1 is available now to all organizations.

_{©2026 Nutanix, Inc. All rights reserved. Nutanix, the Nutanix logo and all Nutanix product and service names mentioned are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nutanix, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Nutanix, Inc. is not affiliated with VMware by Broadcom or Broadcom. VMware and the VMware product names recited herein are registered or unregistered trademarks of Broadcom in the United States and/or other countries. All other brand names mentioned are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s). This content may contain express and implied forward-looking statements, which are not historical 8facts and are instead based on our current expectations, estimates, and beliefs. The accuracy of such statements involves risks and uncertainties and depends upon future events, including those that may be beyond our control, and actual results may differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied by such statements. Any forward-looking statements included speak only as of the date hereof and, except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update or otherwise revise any such forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances.}