United Community Bank, a full-service financial institution serving 4,500 employees across the Southeast, successfully transformed its IT infrastructure by migrating from VMware to Nutanix over a five-year journey.
The organization reduced its host count from 150 to 60 while managing approximately 900 VMs with a lean team of just seven IT administrators. By leveraging Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), United Community achieved significant operational efficiencies, consolidated third-party tools, and built a robust automation framework that delivers self-service capabilities.
Robert Bennett, IT Infrastructure Manager at United Community Bank, explains the challenges that drove its migration away from VMware.
First, the organization faced escalating costs. “It was a 9.5x increase on our costs that year, and for no additional benefits that we were going to use and leverage.” Robert Bennett states.
Operational complexity added to the strain, as managing separate vendors for storage arrays, hypervisors, and disaster recovery created frequent support headaches. And limited automation meant the team had to perform resource analysis manually, lacking built-in right-sizing capabilities without investing in costly tools.
United Community chose Nutanix to achieve the best of both virtual machine and cloud capabilities through a comprehensive, integrated solution. According to Bennett, the simplicity and scalability of the Nutanix platform, combined with its built-in features, were key drivers behind the decision.
“The whole package is really what kind of drove us down the pathway,” he said. Nutanix also offered a superior value proposition, delivering a lower total cost of ownership compared to VMware and traditional hardware and storage arrays.
“Nutanix was a less expensive platform,” he explained. “It provided us a lot more value.” Bennett added that the platform’s built-in capabilities eliminated the need for costly add-ons or third-party solutions, further enhancing efficiency and reducing expenses.
United Community’s migration journey demonstrates the practicality of transitioning from VMware to Nutanix, including:
"We rolled out our Nutanix platform in just a few weeks,” said Bennett. “Most of that was our testing and validation to make sure that we were comfortable with it before we started moving all of our primary workloads over to it.”
Remarkably, United Community executed most migrations with an intern. "We actually did most of our migrations in year one with an intern," Bennett revealed. "By the time we got through the first round or two of the migration, we actually leveraged the Nutanix Move tool, which is the conversion tool from VMware, Azure, other locations into the Nutanix platform."
Across hundreds of VMs, United Community encountered only two issues, both related to MAC address licensing conflicts, not the Nutanix products. "Other than that kind of minor MAC address licensing problem, our migrations were primarily done with an intern and some coordination with application owners. It was a pretty smooth process.”
The results with Nutanix were dramatic. "We've cut the number of hosts we have in our environment almost in half,” said Bennett. “I think we went from 150 or so hosts down to about 60 to 70 hosts. And so it's been a pretty significant decrease in platform, but again, we've also gained performance and functionality at the same time”.
Nutanix Cloud Manager has become central to United Community’s operational efficiency, providing capabilities that eliminated tool sprawl and automated routine tasks.
"Many optimization capabilities are out-of-the box with Nutanix,” Bennett explained
”If VMs that are over-provisioned, it automatically detects that provisioning and starts to scale back that VM incrementally within a change window every week,” Bennett added. “VMs that are tagged appropriately will go in and automatically start taking away CPUs based on the historical usage".
This automated approach gives application teams more flexibility, according to Bennett. "It allows us to deploy and have the flexibility to let our application teams scale up their VMs when they need to,” he said. “And they'll also clean themselves back up and start scaling back down over time.”
Bennett also shared his perspective on resource consolidation. "I'm fully aware of what Turbonomics does, it's been a tool I've used in the past,” he noted. “But by putting it in the platform with Nutanix, I have one screen I can log into where I can see all the automations for the environment.”
“I can see all the history that's going on, I can see all the virtual machine workloads we have, I can see all the object storage workloads that we have, and all the different things that are out there–all from one platform,” he explained
"We use Nutanix Self-Service and Terraform to deliver an integrated experience and manage clusters, VLANs and changes," Bennett continued. "Application owners can now go in and request VMs and have them delivered more quickly than we used to, of having to go in and manually provision everything out, or run scripts or whatever in the background from one of my engineers. It's allowed us to start moving to that self-service platform for our application owners and end users".
Bennett highlights the strategic importance of Terraform integration. "We have some workloads in Azure and AWS as necessary, and by using Terraform to do some of that management, it allows us to keep a consistent platform to build VMs and other offerings consistently between AWS, Azure, public cloud providers, and the Nutanix platform. And we can work the same way from the back end.”
NCM integrates with United Community’s existing automation ecosystem. NCM actively supports ServiceNow and Terraform, enabling customers to easily integrate those automations with the Nutanix platform as a single unified management entity.
The Nutanix platform also provides low-code automation to drive event-driven operations, easy resource automation, and a common framework to deploy across hybrid multiclouds.
Bennett describes the dramatic disaster recovery time savings achieved with Nutanix, calling the failover process a game changer.
“Our last disaster recovery failover and validation test took about two hours.” said Bennett. Without Nutanix, it used to involve multiple tools, multiple steps, and multiple vendors over an entire weekend.” Bennett also highlighted the advantage of Nutanix’s built-in functionality over add-on solutions, noting that a third-party plugin is no longer necessary. This consolidation reduced the number of vendors involved and eliminated the need for a separate disaster recovery solution to move VMs between datacenters.
United Community is continuing to expand its use of NCM with several strategic initiatives, including enabling Nutanix Flow for microsegmentation to strengthen its security posture, increasing Nutanix Self-Service adoption through standardized Terraform workflows, and implementing anomaly detection and right-sizing policies to accelerate cost savings.
Additionally, the team plans to publish baseline blueprints in Nutanix Self-Service to reduce ticket volumes. With the team’s leveraging of free Nutanix training and conducting show-and-tell sessions with engineers, United Community demonstrates how a small infrastructure team can achieve more with fewer resources, thanks to the Nutanix platform and automation.
Key Results:
Cost Management: A significant proposed VMware cost increase was avoided through Nutanix adoption, and NCM provides ongoing value through right-sizing, fewer hosts, and Automated Chargeback for cost control.
Simplified operations: Intern-executed migration with Nutanix Move tool demonstrates solution simplicity.
Team Efficiency: A seven-person team manages services for 4,500 employees with automation across multiple sites, keeping operations lean.
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