Nutanix Prism Reviews

This is a very good product with major use cases involving Nutanix HCI. Major customers are banking sectors including Jana Small Financials Bank, Bandhan AMC Bank, IDFC Bank, and HDFC Life Insurance. These are all our customers where we have implemented Nutanix HCI, and we have built the cloud-native.

Nutanix Prism is a bundle, similar to an example in HCI. In SimpliVity, it's completely with the HCI, and here Acropolis Operating System is present. It's a kind of OS for Nutanix Prism, AOS which we call, that is part of the best features of Nutanix Prism.

It is an intelligent management interface, Nutanix Prism. It's a single pane of glass that manages the clusters, VMs, storage, and whatever network we have will be in the single dashboard.

One customer required a single dashboard which contains the complete information for Nutanix Prism. They wanted to know the number of VMs, the storage they are using, and their switches, networking, L2 switches, L3, everything is bundled: server, storage, VMs, everything. We can showcase it in the single window.

The Prism real-time alerting and predictive analytics provide live metrics for VMs. It gives alerts every few seconds about system activities, providing complete alerts instantly. It spots performance bottlenecks such as CPU, memory, storage, IOPS, latency, etc. Everything is in the single bundle and gives alerts and real-time alerts. Also, built-in AI engines detect anomalies and send alerts instantly.

Alerts include root cause suggestions regarding Nutanix Prism, not just raw data. Additionally, it allows real-time VM operations to create power on/off, migration, snapshot or clone, and VMs instantly. Live resource reallocation and troubleshooting occurs with zero time.

The machine learning in Nutanix Prism involves data collections in real-time telemetry data. It tracks VM active usage such as CPU, memory, IOPS, latency, and host node performance, storage usage and trends, user behavior and workload. Data is collected every few seconds, creating large data sets over time. Pattern recognition and baseline creations occur as the ML model learns normal behavior of your system by analyzing historical data. For example, if X VMs usually use 50 to 60% of CPU and suddenly jump to 95%, Prism detects it as an anomaly.

Regarding predictions and forecasting features of Nutanix Prism, it handles capacity planning by predicting when you will run out of disk, CPU, or memory, and how many days are left. It predicts workload and understands the seasons or daily workload peaks and prepares suggestions ahead of time.

My organization is a bank, and we are using Nutanix Prism for our banking environments, such as managing virtual machines. 

Additionally, Nutanix now provides a Kubernetes platform for a virtualized environment on Nutanix itself. 

We are also deploying solutions on Nutanix for email, enterprise resource planning, and all use cases across our bank.

The automation part for Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) is great. All processes are fully automated, and the work done through Prism is very interesting and innovative. 

The solution is cost-effective as Nutanix handles the software life cycle management excellently. It simplifies firmware and software updates, making it hassle-free for IT engineers.

Our primary use case is for our virtual machines, specifically for our production. We are running about twenty to thirty production VMs, which are critical.

Nutanix Prism is mainly used for our daily operations, similar to VMware. Despite the lack of extraordinary features, it efficiently manages our daily operations now that we are managing our VMs. 

One of the most useful features is the disaster recovery setup, which includes two clusters, one for our production server and another for our recovery site.

I have not faced any issues since I started using the tool. I like the solution. It has many features. We are okay with the tool’s performance. Everything is available within one console. We can see how many clusters we have. We need not move from one place to another. We can control all the hardware and software from the same screen.

We faced an issue with Nutanix that we did not face with SimpliVity. We are using Veeam Backup. When we take backups, we can see an additional tape in Veeam. It reflects on Nutanix, too. The snapshot consumes 5.6 TB. I have opened a ticket for this issue to understand why the snapshot takes 5.6 TB.

It was not so when we took backups from Veeam to SimpliVity. Generally, the snapshot is taken during backups, but once the backup is complete, the snapshots are released. If we take backups for around 30 VMs, the snapshot takes around 5.6 TB. I do not want 5.6 TB to be used for the snapshot.

Nutanix Prism does not have a built-in backup tool. Other solutions like HPE SimpliVity and Sangfor have built-in backup features. We have to use a third-party solution like Veeam to perform backups in Nutanix. The vendor must add a built-in backup tool in Nutanix. It must work on the tape level. We shouldn’t have to use a third-party tool for our needs. Main features like backup, CPU, and storage must be available within the product we buy.

We use it to manage our clusters. We have it across eight Nutanix clusters, to manage and carry out the day-to-day activities. We use Prism Element as well as Prism Central. 

All our applications are run on-prem. In terms of databases, they include SQL database, MySQL database, and some MongoDB. We also have SAP and Java virtual machines. All of these are used on top of our Nutanix cluster.

Nutanix has improved our efficiency. Before, we had a legacy infrastructure, but using Prism on Nutanix clusters has decreased the footprint. Before, to get a given amount of resources, we needed to provision two or three racks. Now, those resources can be achieved through eight or 10 nodes, which do not even utilize a whole rack. 

Another improvement is the dependencies. Earlier, we had several devices including many for servers and storage. We needed a lot of manpower for each of these components: the physical servers, virtualization, networking, and storage. But with Nutanix HCI, everything is in the same box. A single administrator or two can manage all these things and that has decreased the dependencies. I estimate it has improved our efficiency by about 60 percent.

It has also helped with our data protection efficiency, increasing that by about 40 percent. Everything can be automated. When doing manual reporting and intervention, the risk increases. Now, we have decreased the amount of administration and that helps increase security.

Another major benefit is the cost. The cost of HCI versus a three-tier legacy infrastructure is much less. That is true not only for the OpEx but for the CapEx. It is reducing the footprint and the carbon emissions are also coming down. And management overhead costs have been reduced by about 55 percent.

We use Prism as a single-pane-of-glass console for all our alerts. My company started with one Nutanix cluster, but as we added more, we needed a central place to manage all of them. It's running in a hybrid environment, but we have some non-mechanical workloads that are completely on-prem.

The primary users are members of the infrastructure team, but our application folks have workloads running on that platform. They reach out to us with any troubleshooting or performance-related portions issues. We don't use Nutanix for automation. We have different tools for automating VM deployment and other tasks.

Having a centralized platform with information about our infrastructure has helped us with capacity planning. It's easier to estimate what we'll need in the next six months. We have a better understanding of what's happening in the environment. For example, we can see that we were at 40 percent capacity last month, and suddenly, we're at 60 percent. We can find the root cause. Maybe one VM had an increase in data usage, so we can narrow it down and address the issue.

Before implementing Prism, we had an issue with too many alerts for similar issues, so it was difficult to maintain them. The alerts kept coming, and we had a hard time keeping track of everything. We had multiple alerts about CPU, RAM, and storage. Prism helps us identify and eliminate false alerts because most of them were redundant. 

The help desk is more efficient because we aren't being bombarded with tickets generated by duplicate alerts or false positives. We've reduced false alerts by 35 to 45 percent. It takes additional time to investigate each alert to determine if it's real. Our staff can spend time on other project tasks.  

Also, you don't need to spend much time on deployment. Previously, it took weeks to deploy new environments or VMs, but now it can be completed in hours or days, reducing the number of staff needed to complete those activities. Our management overhead has been reduced because we're more efficient, and we don't need to invest time in upgrading or managing multiple servers. We can do that in a single console.

Our application owners and developers are happy with the performance, efficiency, and reliability. The crucial advantage is that we don't need long maintenance windows during upgrades because we can do it with one click on one system at a time. There's no need to shut down all the VMs because you can do them one by one, so it's seamless. There's no disruption to the business. That has made our internal customers happy. 

Implementing Nutanix hasn't affected our security posture much because we were already using multi-factor single sign-on. Prism has those features, too, so we're continuing to use them. 

We mostly use Nutanix Prism for monitoring and management. It serves as a unified dashboard for all our Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure, providing a single point of access and control.

All of our workloads are hosted on our private cloud, and we have set up one cluster for the proof of concept in Azure's public cloud.

The single pane of glass user experience has been really good. The dashboard, as it comes out of the box, has proven to be sufficient for our needs, and we haven't felt the need to make significant modifications or add extra widgets. The core of what we want to monitor and receive alerts on is already available in the default dashboard in Prism. Therefore, we use the dashboard as-is daily, and it provides all the statistics we are interested in and concerned about, right from the start.

Everything has been quite intuitive. It has been four years now, and originally, we struggled a bit to understand some of the more advanced networking concepts. However, apart from that, everything has been pretty user-friendly. Even when coming on board without any prior knowledge of the product, it was quite easy to pick up. In fact, it was far easier to grasp than competitors' products that I've worked with in the past, especially when it comes to the intuitive use of the interface.

The network visibility has been really good.

The two biggest improvements or benefits for us are related to our team and the infrastructure. The first significant improvement is the ease of deployment, which allows us to swiftly implement new clusters or projects once we have the necessary hardware. In the past, this process used to take days, weeks, or even longer, but now it only takes hours or days. The second advantage is the increased efficiency and accuracy in deploying. This has been a tremendous benefit for us, as it allows us to deploy more effectively and with greater precision. Furthermore, the ongoing and substantial benefit of Life Cycle Management. LCM has saved us countless man-hours and provided us with the capability to perform software updates even in a production environment, without the need for scheduled downtime during regular working hours or weekends.

Nutanix Prism has significantly enhanced the efficiency of IT management within our organization. It has reduced the man-hours required for patching updates by approximately 75 percent, in my estimation. Undoubtedly, this has been our most significant return on investment. Additionally, we have not experienced any adverse effects on end users or production processes since the implementation of these clusters, which occurred nearly a year before I joined the team, making it almost five years since their deployment. This level of performance is truly impressive.

Nutanix Prism has significantly improved the efficiency of our data protection teams. Although we aren't utilizing Nutanix for backup purposes, we continue to rely on Veeam and Spectrum Protect for our backup needs. However, we do make use of protection domains for specific environments, enabling us to achieve almost immediate recovery to a different cluster site.

The product is a great central interface to manage the hardware and software that Nutanix provides. We have a one-stop shop to manage, report, and provide analytics.

The HTML5 interface is very robust. It's easy to access and easy to use. It is powerful. It has a lot of good features.