Nutanix Prism Reviews

Prism Central is my daily management interface. There's a good overview of the individual clusters that we run.

We use it to take a look at IOPS for disk performance, disk latency, and storage statistics. We also look at the cluster memory resources to make sure that there's enough memory available. We also look at the CPU usage to make sure that there are not any unusual spikes or anything that could be played into creating a boot storm. If you're running virtual desktop stuff and they decide to recompose, suddenly there's a boot storm. We can get a feel for performance at any point in time.

We have four Nutanix Clusters in our environment, and the workloads go from database to general server and compute, applications, web services, and virtual desktop infrastructure. Our Citrix environment is run on a Nutanix Cluster as well.

It's all run in our data center.

We have greater visibility.

It also gives our infrastructure and our server teams better insight into, and controls over, how they stand up servers. Recently, Nutanix allowed templates to be built, similar to the way that VMware does things. Building servers, and eventually, being able to automate those tasks, is something that's going to make things a lot easier for those who build the servers.

And for the end-users who need access and take a look at the console, they can log in and they only have access to exactly their servers. It gives them a single pane of glass. They can see everything to do with their servers. They can customize their own dashboards for visibility into the particular virtual machines that they're responsible for. There's no worry about them clicking on the wrong server, consoling into the wrong box, or powering off or even deleting the wrong server. Those are all very positive things that the Prism interface has introduced to us.

Along with users having console access to those machines, it's great for us to be able to restrict certain users from hitting the console. There are some users that simply don't need to fiddle with it. They just need to see the current run or what kind of statistics their server is showing, or the uptime. They don't necessarily need to log in to it from the console. That's what SSH is for.

As far as security posture goes, we have put better controls around which servers our users can access and what they can do. We did that a little bit within our VMware environment, but not to the level of granularity that we have in Nutanix, with the roles and role mapping.

For me, the most valuable feature is that, when you log in, you have customized dashboards. You can add widgets to those dashboards and you can change the density of certain data points in the dashboards. When I log in, I quickly see where the cluster lies, as far as memory and CPU resources go. I can see how much storage we have left or if we need to consider purchasing an additional node to expand the cluster. That's what I first look at.

They populate the dashboards by default. Adding a widget is extremely easy. It's just a couple of clicks. And customizing the data density is a matter of choosing small, medium, or large. It's like: "What t-shirt size do you want to see?" It's a simplistic interface. Nutanix certainly takes its users, and the user experience, very much to heart.

There are also some great built-in dashboards that allow us to get some customer reporting performance statistics and to get a feel for what the future is. There's some reporting that does a "flash forward" to six months down the road with predictive usage for the cluster.

In addition, I have Life Cycle Management for updates. I'm primarily responsible for keeping the Nutanix infrastructure up to date with the latest code and the Life Cycle management takes care of that in a very small number of clicks. In other environments, I've run VMware with the Cisco offering for UCS, making sure that firmware and software all match up and that they don't fight. That was a pain. Nutanix's Life Cycle Management puts it all in one place and does all that legwork for me. When it comes time to run an upgrade, I click the button. It runs through the pre-install checklist, does a sanity check on itself to make sure that everything is inventoried properly, and then it applies the updates. I can walk away and have supper, or go to bed and wake up the next morning, and it's done.

We also have some disaster recovery and business continuity plans, using Nutanix and its data protection offerings. We have some protection domains that are set up to replicate virtual machines between sites. And that's something that was, once again, very intuitive and easy to set up. Scheduling those jobs and getting the status of those data protection jobs was very simplistic. If something fails, you get an alert email and it tells you exactly where the failure occurred.

We made our initial Nutanix purchase in April 2020 and we've been using it since shortly after that.

I've had no issues with the stability of the system. All of the workloads are replicated between different nodes. If we have a hardware failure, the other node is there to take care of it, and then we can remediate by a reboot or hardware replacement. That's very simple. It is a very resilient solution.

Scaling it is extremely simple. With the planning resource, you can complete a capacity runway report and it will give you a scenario for how many nodes you need to add and, potentially, what models to use. And to expand the cluster, you go into Prism, you click "Expand Cluster," and you find the new node and it brings it in. It's very simple.

If there's ever a question, Nutanix support is always available. They are very prompt in their responses and very knowledgeable. We haven't had to worry about any information that has not been very clear to understand. They do a very good job explaining and keeping things on the level.

I've been involved in several sessions with Nutanix where we look at certain pieces of the interface, whether it be a task list, Life Cycle Management, or the list of your virtual machines. They have asked what data points we want to see for these machines. Do we want to see their IP addresses? Do we want to see the percentage utilized for memory or for disks? They put out calls and they take user feedback very seriously.

However, within the realm of hardware support, these are comments that I've already submitted all the way up to the top. With our previous storage solutions or hardware platforms, when there was a failing component, the replacement component was shipped out the next day. There was no user interaction needed for that process. With Nutanix, sometimes I have to open the ticket to begin the hardware issue, and there are some shipping acknowledgments required. The process itself is not extremely clear and I've been assured that that process will be improved in the very near future.

With any vendor, whenever there is a support issue, sometimes coming together and finding the root cause of that issue can take some time. And that's something that we've experienced with the interface. We were trying to enable multi-factor authentication and we encountered a bug in the Prism interface. It took a couple of months for us to locate the root cause and for them to be able to build a patch for it. We found a workaround, but it did take some time. 

Beyond those things, we have really had a very positive experience getting Nutanix up off the ground and getting everything migrated over to it.

Positive

Before we started using Nutanix, we used VMware which was our virtualization vendor of choice at the time. But seeing some of the offerings that Nutanix had, and our company's partnership with them, certainly made it a very easy choice.

The installation process of Nutanix was very easy. Nutanix provided very knowledgeable installation engineers. The process was very simple. They asked for a lot of information in advance to make sure that we had all of the proper IP addressing and network configuration, and that our switches and everything else were prepared. So when it came to installation day, it was a couple of simple scripts and we sat back and waited for the cluster to update.

It was just me who was involved from our side in the setup.

When it came to migrating workloads, the virtual machines, and everything else, Nutanix does have a very nice tool, Nutanix Move, that helps facilitate all of those moves. We can schedule it and it synchronizes. But that can be time-consuming and it might not always be so intuitive for someone who is a little more basic. But it's a tool that gets the job done. You don't have to worry about restoring from backup.

I trained most of our staff on how to use Nutanix. We had about a one-hour session for most users. And for anything that they wanted beyond that, I referred them to Nutanix University, which provides free training. It's really a great site that I would suggest to anyone who is using Nutanix.

The solution requires software and firmware updates, but that's all handled through the Life Cycle Management that's built into Prism.

From what I understand, our maintenance cost for NetApp and the SMARTnet renewal cost for our Cisco UCS pretty much paid for our Nutanix environment within the first year and a half. We have certainly seen a return on our investment in maintenance and SMARTnet costs.

The licensing structure is something that they're currently improving on. When we first purchased, we were informed that their licenses are transferable. If we were thinking of doing NC2, meaning Nutanix clusters on Azure or AWS, the licensing would be very quick and easy to swap over. 

When we actually went to question them about that, we found that there were a couple of different licensing models, some consumption-based models and some licensing models that were tied to physical hardware. That was, perhaps, not the best experience. But the licensing structure is something that Nutanix, as an organization, is working on, and something that they're hoping to have improved in the very near future.

We didn't evaluate any other options for this particular move. The alternative for us was to buy an additional storage array and a different server infrastructure. We probably would have ended up going with VMware vSAN on Cisco UCS.

We have evaluated running Nutanix in the cloud, that's something that's potentially on our roadmap, but we're also looking at just running servers in Azure, in addition.

I would certainly suggest that you request a test drive of Nutanix. They offer very simple test drives in their environment. Or get involved in the user group. Nutanix has a forum and research is key. Are there any lessons learned that I have personally learned in this process? Definitely consult with the network team before implementing, to make sure that there is proper capacity, but that's not a comment about Nutanix. That's a comment about infrastructure in general.

Prism is the management dashboard for Nutanix. I'm in there quite frequently; not necessarily every day, but certainly, multiple times a week, whenever I'm checking on the health of the Nutanix environment.

There are a number of other applications that are tied in, Nutanix products, that use Prism for management, like Nutanix Files, which we use. I'm using it to check on that frequently.

I also check alerts and logs with it, and any kind of maintenance or upgrades that we do are all done through Prism. Anytime we do an AOS or foundation upgrade, or upgrades of whatever products are attached to it, they are done through Prism. 

It's pretty much a one-stop shop for most day-to-day management of Nutanix. The only time you would ever really go outside of it is if you're having some infrastructure problem that would require you to touch the hardware physically.

We're all on-prem. We're not using any Nutanix cloud. We have multiple locations with Nutanix. It's our production environment, which includes web servers, database servers, email, and storage. Our entire environment runs on it.

The biggest benefit is the fact that we can ignore it. Seriously. So much of my day is putting out fires or trying to track down problems, performance issues, or errors. The Nutanix platform has been pretty rock-solid in that respect, so I don't have to troubleshoot it as much. But when I do, I don't have to go digging in a bunch of really deep, esoteric log files and look up commands to enter into a CLI to dig out information from the system.

It has a little "heartbeat" icon. If there is something wrong, it's yellow. If there's something really wrong, it's red. It's really simple to see. I check every morning to look at the health of the system. If I ever see a yellow or a red I just click on it to see what the message is. Sometimes it's more involved and I have to reach out to Nutanix support to resolve things. It's hardware, after all, it has failures. That has happened to us. But as far as the Prism aspect goes, being able to track things down and quickly get a resolution, or at least get a support case open for it, is so much easier than most other platforms I've used in the past.

In addition, the network visibility and the microsegmentation of Prism, with Nutanix Flow, is very simple to set up. Once you've done the bulk of the configurations during the initial setup, the day-to-day modifications that you may need to make in your environment to set up new clients are very simple. You click into the Prism menu that brings you to the network area, plug in whatever IP ranges or VLAN segments you need to set up or move clients into, and it's pretty much done. Compared to doing something on a Cisco switch or even in VMware, it's a breeze.

We also use Nutanix's Data-at-Rest encryption. That's very simple to set up. Encryption is typically very onerous and complex to set up in most environments, but the Nutanix implementation of it ties into the single-pane-of-glass approach. You configure a couple of settings in the beginning, and then you go into your storage and decide what you want encrypted. It's pretty much set-it-and-forget-it.

It has made a big improvement to our overall security posture, thanks in large part to the microsegmentation. The Data-at-Rest encryption for storage is also something that we did not have prior to Nutanix.

It has also definitely helped us to reduce management overhead costs. I spend many fewer man-hours working on the hardware environment, compared to what I spent on the equivalent hardware environment that it replaced. And it has definitely helped improve the lives of our support staff in general, the systems administrators and network administrators.

The most valuable feature is the solution's single-pane-of-glass approach to consolidating all of the various metrics and interfaces that I would typically have to access via multiple screens in other products. The ease of use would probably be the single biggest selling point. I just have to go to Prism and, from the main dashboard, I get most of the statistics that I need at a glance. And I can drill down further in the environment through the Prism interface if I need to.

Nutanix's single pane of glass is very good. It's quite convenient. I'm seeing the concept more in other products nowadays, but when we first started using Nutanix, it was more unique. Nutanix was one of the first vendors I saw that was able to really unify so much of their product into that single management pane.

And the Prism user interface for compute, storage, and networking is extremely easy to use. In terms of the network, once it is set up, other than watching traffic, we don't really change things very often. But when it comes to storage, I can create and extend storage pools, and make modifications to storage. Obviously, I can also see how much storage we're using. I can also make changes to our replication factor, the tiering. All those things are very simple to do. Most of them are mouse-click interfaces. I may have to enter a couple of values, but there's no code or command lines. It's all extremely simple, GUI-based management. The compute is the same thing. We can see what we're using, resource-wise, very easily at a glance from the dashboard. We're able to see if there's any unusual activity such as high CPU or memory usage. We can drill down and find out what's going on with that, with relative ease.

The simplicity that Prism provides is something of a dual-edged sword. It can be almost too simple at times. When there is an issue and something is really wrong, it can make it a little more difficult to track it down because the Prism interface is very limited for drilling down into those highly technical or highly complicated errors. That's usually when you have to break out the admin guide, look up the commands, and log in to the backend hardware. You don't get good, in-depth troubleshooting through the Prism interface.

We have been using Prism for about five years.

I don't think I've ever encountered an issue with Prism that was more than cosmetic. It's an extremely stable management interface.

Prism Element, which is the standalone solution, obviously doesn't scale very well. That's tied to the various clusters that you deploy. But Prism Central, which is their paid product, which makes a single pane of glass out of all of the single panes of glass, is pretty good. If you are a large enough organization and you have a number of Prism Element installations spread out, then Prism Central would definitely meet your needs as far as growth and management go.

In our organization, there are nine departments using it with a total of about 200 users.

Their support is pretty good. I've had a few issues related to support, mostly for after-hours stuff, where I believe they changed some call centers that they used. But most of that has been hammered out by now.

They're good. They've always given quick responses, even if they don't necessarily have the answer I want to hear. I can't fault the speed of the support reaching out and continuing the lines of communication. They keep you up to date on the issues pretty well.

Positive

Before we had the Nutanix platform, we used VMware on bare metal hardware.

The initial deployment was a little rocky. The vendor had a solution team come out and do the build of the product and the configuration. That was done incorrectly the first time, so they had to come back out and redo it from scratch. I'm not sure what the problem was; maybe it was a miscommunication at the time of purchase. But once that was straightened out, it was fine.

In terms of learning Prism, within the first week it was easy enough to have a very basic overview of it. Almost anyone, even non-technical people, could read the dashboard pretty easily. Overall, it took two or three more weeks to get a good, comfortable knowledge of the deeper parts of it. In total, it took about a month.

The maintenance required for Prism is the upgrading that we have to perform on it.

The team that came out was a third-party, authorized VAR. They were not Nutanix employees who did it.

I know that what we paid for Nutanix is comparable to, or a little bit less than, what we paid for a similar VMware environment. In that respect, it's worth the money because the simplicity of the management and the setup make it so much easier from an administrative point of view. It has saved us a lot of man-hours and, therefore, money, by not having to manage the product so much.

Pricing is not something I'm involved with, but it is easy to apply the licenses that we acquire.

I've used Prism Central, which is their paid, upgraded version of Prism, and I found it quite helpful. But, ultimately, the price they wanted for the features that we got wasn't worth it for us. But I can see where it would be helpful for some organizations.

We were looking at other hardware platforms besides Nutanix. Prism wasn't something that we were necessarily looking for by itself, but it was a selling point of the Nutanix platform for us.

Prism is tied into the Nutanix environment. If you're looking at Nutanix as a solution, make sure that you look at the hardware that it's running on and that it meets your needs. That is the one place where we ran into issues. We started out on hardware that ended up being too low-spec for us and we ended up having to get more hardware than we had initially envisioned. It wasn't spec'd out properly in the beginning. But that's not related to Prism itself.

To this day, I don't think I've encountered a product that's as easy to use as Prism is, for everything that it does.

We have a four-cluster environment, two of them are on VMware and two of them are on AHV. My job is to look at the clusters and any related alerts. We have to commission and decommission virtual machines. If there are any upgrades of the BIOS or AOS, that's also part of my job.

Most of our Nutanix stuff is on-premises. We do have Azure, as well, but we have not fully migrated to the cloud yet.

We have database servers on Nutanix as well as application and domain servers.

Nutanix Prism has definitely helped improve the efficiency of our IT management. Before, we had HPE standalone servers with ESXi hosts and it was really cumbersome to manage all the hardware resources, as well as the VMs on it. Since it was a stand-alone host for everything, we had issues with getting alerts. It was not easy to get all the alerts in one spot and monitor them. We had to go to each server and monitor it regularly. Being a data center administrator, it's my job to look at the data center and make sure it is up and running 24/7. That was difficult before Nutanix Prism. Now, we can manage everything from one spot.

We also get reports for future planning, telling us how many resources we have left and how much time we have left before they are full. That means we can plan, accordingly, to add some new Nutanix nodes.

We also get hardware information in one place now, so when we come to a refresh, we get that information right there. That helps us a lot and saves us time.

And because it has its own internal network encryptions, the efficiency of our organization's data protection team has improved. It is protected against ransomware, as well. Even if, somehow, someone gets access, it will not help because it has its own encryption and it's not easy to break. The high level of data security increases our confidence and reliability.

Overall, it has improved our efficiency by more than 50 percent because we are now spending less time on everything than before when we had HPE. And our management overhead costs have been reduced by 50 to 70 percent. Whenever we had maintenance for our HPE stuff, we had to bring it down. There was no ability to migrate the load somewhere else. But with Nutanix, whenever we have maintenance or an upgrade, it migrates things on its own. That means zero downtime for us, and that helps a lot.

The recent life cycle management feature is really helpful to us. Before that, we had to do everything manually, but now it's like a one-stop shop. We can upgrade firmware and all of the software from there. Also, managing storage information and other hardware-related resources is easy using Prism.

In addition, the user experience in the single pane of glass is excellent. It is very easy to manage all the workloads, whether in production, dev, or test. We can check all the alerts. If there is any upgrade or if something goes wrong with a VM, we find out in advance because we have set up alerts. We are running a script so we get alerts, in advance, about multiple things before there is a crash or a disaster situation.

The dashboard has all the information about resources available, as well as any related alerts. You can just click on a hyperlink and it will take you to that location where you can get more information. It's really very helpful.

For compute and networking, it's very safe and secure. It has its own internal network and that keeps our data safe and encrypted, which is really good. The network visibility and microsegmentation are also very helpful. If there is any network-related issue or a bottleneck, whether on our end or at the ISP, we can monitor everything from there. We can see IOPS information and, if something is going on with a specific VM, we can see why the network is high, figure out the issue, and sort it out easily using Prism.

Another helpful aspect is the replication factor, whether it's RF2 or RF3. If there are hardware issues, it automatically migrates the metadata to somewhere else, and we have availability. There is zero downtime.

With the AHV, we can plug something in to add more CPUs or more memory without taking those particular services or that particular VM down, which is great. There are also workload migrations based on resources and utilization. In addition, we can create a template for any VM and use that to very quickly make a clone, more quickly than with VMware. And from a data backup point of view, we have snapshot backup and replications that are faster than VMware.

When we get a request from a user for a file-level recovery, there are self-recovery options, but they only work if the replication is available to that cluster locally. Our company policy is to have 30 days of backup at DR sites and just the last backup at our production site. Whenever we have a request, we just have one copy at the production site. In VMware, we could restore a VM and attach the hard drive to any other server and copy the file easily. But that kind of facility is not available in AHV. 

Either we have to migrate that snapshot to VMware or we have to find the hard drive ID and then turn it into a disk image and then we have to attach that disk to a VM to copy that particular file. That's really time-consuming for us, compared to VMware. If they could improve that scenario, that would be great. Or even if we are not able to attach that hard drive, if they could make the snapshots we have at DR sites available so that we could also see them on the production site, that would be great. That would save time and make our life easier.

We have been using Nutanix Prism since 2017. When I joined, I didn't know anything about Nutanix, but thanks to Nutanix University I learned everything and received the NCP (Nutanix Certified Professional) certificate.

The stability of Nutanix is really very good. Unlike our HPE standalone servers, where we had to shut down all the VMs to do maintenance, Nutanix is the opposite. Now, we don't have any downtime for maintenance.

It is scalable.

The technical support provided by Nutanix for Prism is excellent, compared to HPE. Nutanix has very knowledgeable staff and whenever we need support we get it.

Positive

Before Nutanix, we had an HPE standalone host to manage everything. But that was very cumbersome: which storage area and compute area? Also, individual hardware is difficult to maintain and costs a little more than Nutanix. We were experiencing an issue with HPE's service, so we decided to move to Nutanix.

We are planning to get rid of VMware, but it's taking some time.

I wasn't with this organization for the initial deployment. When I joined, we just had two VMware clusters with 45 nodes in one cluster. We split them into two and created a second cluster on AHV. We have two clusters at our production site and two clusters at our DR sites. One is AHV and one is VMware.

We are located in Canada. Our DR clusters are also located within Canada but at a different site. Both clusters of our production site are in the same data center and have a full load. We have very few standalone HPE and Dell servers that are required by specific groups within our organization. Otherwise, we have gotten rid of all the HPE and Dell servers.

Maintenance of Nutanix consists of upgrading to whatever latest version is available and, if it is stable, we get up to date. Right now we are about to upgrade the AOS and VMware again. The maintenance is around keeping things up to date.

Our return on investment is quite a high percentage. Before, with HPE, we had lots of problems, including with support. Compared to HPE, the return on investment is on the higher side.

The good thing about Nutanix Prism is that we don't have to pay for a hypervisor, but their licensing cost is a little bit on the high side. We tried to implement files and other things in our environment, but the cost of the licensing was a little bit high for us so we did not implement those things. 

Still, we are using Nutanix as a file server, but we have built a VM on it and use it as a file server for use across the Nutanix cluster.

It is very efficient for managing compared to any standalone server, whether it's HPE, Dell, or whatever you are using in your environment. You can easily manage things with Nutanix. It's a one-stop shop. You can use Prism Central to manage all your clusters and there is lifecycle management to deploy your software. I would highly recommend it.

We have a Nutanix cluster with multiple customers running on it. From Prism Central we manage things, see the status, and enlarge the different VMs. We use it for that a lot because we use it for small and medium-sized businesses. For those companies, Nutanix is too expensive, it's for bigger businesses normally, so we are giving these businesses an option to have a "Ferrari" in the garage since they cannot afford it.

We have everything in our data center. We're mostly running databases and virtual machines.

The high availability is very important. When one node or machine breaks down, it keeps on running. That's a major benefit for us because our companies won't notice when something is down or broken.

For the technical guys, it's the patching, updating, and the monitoring that are very easy for them. It takes a lot of the standard operating tasks out of their hands and does a lot automatically. For example, if we add new hardware, we just plug it in and it will install itself. We don't have to do anything manually. It saves a lot of time and that's a positive for us.

Nutanix has helped us a lot with efficiency. For the virtual machines that we run for a couple of customers, we have images for them. It will make an automatic copy of that VM with all the settings.

Also, updating without the downtime helps us a lot. Otherwise, we have to go to the customer and ask them, "Okay, can we shut down that server for five minutes to restart it?" We don't have to do that now, making us a lot more efficient than before.

Our help desk and all our IT people can go into Prism and check things. The help desk can easily check if the CPU of a server is high. They just fill in the server name and they can see if there is high CPU or high memory or if disk space is low. And they can adjust it straight away with the customer and then check, "Is it better now?" The customer will say yes or no. That makes it a lot more efficient for the help desk, but also for our second line. If normal tickets registered by the help desk go to our second line, the second line has to resolve them. Now, the help desk itself resolves things. Customers are happier because they get immediate help and they can work again. And our second line can take care of other stuff. I would say our help desk is 50 percent more efficient.

We're also using HYCU, which is a part of Nutanix, for backups. It works a lot faster than Veeam, which is what we used before. And because we have our own server, our own private cloud, what I have heard from my technical guys is that Nutanix has upgraded it further. They have added extra SQL Database security. According to them, that part is more secure than it was before. I am only estimating, but it may have increased our data protection team efficiency by 25 or 30 percent.

With HYCU, I think it's easier for us to sell Nutanix to our customers because security is a big thing at the moment. It's the SQL Databases that we can say are more secure than before, and our servers are all located in data centers with high-end security.

And we have been able to reduce management overhead costs by 50 percent. There were two managers and now there's only one.

Upgrading of virtual memory, CPU usage, disk space, et cetera is done on the fly so you don't have to reboot anything. That helps us a lot.

Also, because in my role I create a lot of reports, it is very handy to be able to show the customer, "This is your cluster. At the moment, you are using this much CPU, this much RAM, and this much storage." I can give them information on what they're using, how many VMs, and the amount of data they're using. For me, overall, the best feature is the information I can give to the customer.

The part of network visibility that I have at the moment, because we don't have the full set yet, looks good. I see the controller IOPs and the cluster latency. But we mostly look at the storage, memory usage, and CPU usage. We're located in the Netherlands. Our internet lines are very good and stable. We don't have a lot of issues with that.

We're now upgrading our Nutanix licensing and we will also be able to see the network and infrastructure. We will be able to see how much a company is using over the internet. We will have the full networking capabilities, so we will be able to see how far and where a line is going, from which cluster to which switch, and then router; the whole structure.

The single pane of glass means we can see all six clusters in one view. We can see how much memory is used by every cluster, as well as the storage, latency, and CPU usage. Everything is in one view. For me, that's very convenient. There is also a dashboard for people to look at. We have put it on one of our TV screens so that everybody can see what the status is at the moment: Is there something going wrong? Is there a critical warning? That's very helpful.

We can also see how far the high availability goes. If it's green, it's still in high availability. There is a little mark saying, "If you go beyond this, your high availability is gone." That helps us a lot in terms of storage, for example, to see if we need more disks or if we need to upgrade.

Another feature is that you can make your own dashboards and change how you see information. I like the visuals. For example, with storage, you see the blue bar and see resilience data and that the resilience is okay. If it goes past that, and we had that happen one time, it gives a warning and it pops out so you know exactly when to act. Visually, it looks good. And you now have dark mode, that's what IT people like, so they're all happy.

I would like to see a few more options in the reporting. Sometimes, people want more graphics. It has to look nice for our customers. Some customization in that area would be helpful. 

On the technical side, although you don't need a shutdown to upgrade Nutanix, for downgrading you do. If it were possible that when downgrading CPU or memory you didn't have to reboot the VM, that would be very helpful for us.

We were one of the early adopters, so it has been about seven years since we started using it.

What helps us a lot now is that it's very stable. If there's a power outage or a switch goes down, Nutanix will go down, but when the switch is back up, Nutanix fixes it itself and it's running again. That may be part of the AI it has. Crazy things don't happen.

It's very easy to scale.

We have it in three physical locations. We have about 40 customers in Nutanix, ranging in employee count from 15 to 500.

We were early adopters so, in the beginning, we had one major problem and all our customers were down. At that time, we got a lot of help from Nutanix. They stood by us and kept us in the loop and kept monitoring things and helping us.

If you send in a question, within a few minutes you have your answer, and they're looking at it with you. The support is very good.

Positive

We used VMware. The switch had more to do with the features. When you want to add a machine to VMware, you have to do a lot of manual labor to get it there. Also, memory-wise and storage-wise, Nutanix is smarter. It distributes the data more evenly than VMware, from what we saw. Those are some of the reasons we changed to Nutanix.

We have had Nutanix for seven years. After the first five years, we swapped all the hardware and changed the licensing. If I look back at then when we bought it and now how much money we received as a result of having it, we got our investment back after two years.

Prism is part of the package we get but Nutanix is more expensive. We just bought some new hardware and licensing and the new prices were a little bit higher.

The only maintenance involved with Nutanix is the updating.

I would recommend Nutanix, especially because of the stability, ease of use, and easy monitoring.

We have an on-prem hybrid solution and we have been using it for our data storage. We have things running in the cloud and we have a portion that is running on-prem and that is where we're running Nutanix.

We use it for mixed workloads including web servers, front-end servers,  and container-based servers. Those are the on-prem workloads that are running on Nutanix. And the workload on the cloud is our cloud environment.

On the infrastructure side, we had multiple team members that were managing the environment before we started using this solution. We had separate people for storage, hardware, et cetera. Once we got Nutanix, we just needed a few people to focus on different things. Now, each team member can view the single dashboard and see the storage, network, and cluster health. That's where we look for anything that we want to do on a server. As a result, the team size has been decreased.

Because it's a single hardware setup, you can manage storage, network and zones—everything—from the same dashboard, and that has improved our IT management efficiency. We don't have to go to multiple places or request help from, and wait for, a different team. Previously, when we had a deployment, we had to wait for things like storage allocation, and the network piece to get the IPs. There were many different pieces. Now, one person can do all these tasks. It enables end-to-end management and operation of our virtualized platform.

We have also had to submit far fewer incident tickets, compared to what we had before when different team members had to focus on many vendors' products. The storage was different from the network piece which was different from the server. There were a lot of licensing issues that we had to take care of as well. Now, it's just one vendor, Nutanix, that we have to follow up with for the whole environment.

In addition, we have not seen any performance issues or issues related to the clusters. As of now, the application owners and developers are happy.

There is also a significant improvement in automation, which was something we were not able to do in our earlier hardware. Nutanix has different automation scripts available that we have been able to and they have saved a lot of time.

There's a single pane of glass that we use for 

• alerts 
• patching 
• what's going on in the storage
• cluster issues. 

You can go directly to the Prism dashboard and it gives you all the information. It's easy to use. I have worked on other platforms but the single pane of glass that Prism has is very helpful for seeing what's going on in your environment: usage, storage, capacity, and behavior.

It gives you the ability to do a deep dive if you have to do any troubleshooting. It provides central management.

If you have network segmentation enabled for the environment, you can go into the network and view what's going on. When you log in to Prism and see alerts popping up, if some of the alerts are related to the network, you can go to the network piece and see what the issue is.

And in terms of security posture, we have encryption enabled and we have been using Nutanix Flow for managing our environment and seeing the traffic.

There are a few areas related to visibility on the dashboard that can be improved. It's good, but the visibility can be improved in terms of single locations. It's not a show-stopper, but because Prism is one of the most popular products from Nutanix, it is an area that can be improved.

We have been using Nutanix Prism for more than two years.

The stability is very good. 

The only issue there is that they send frequent updates that we have to do every month. But because of the patching, the Prism dashboard is stable.

It's very easy to scale because it's based on the environment. If you have a small environment, you can have one Prism Central. It's based on your workload. That determines how many Prism Central nodes you want to run on.

We have contacted their technical support team multiple times. Every time we reached them they were able to share information. Sometimes they would point us to KB articles and, if that was not able to help us resolve it, we uploaded the logs and then they were able to make suggestions.

Positive

We were using VMware and Dell-supported hardware that went end-of-support.  We replaced Dell equipment with Nutanix. We did not have a hybrid cloud at first and we moved the different pieces of hardware to a hybrid cloud environment in Nutanix.

Prism is the dashboard that gives you that single pane of glass to view your Nutanix cluster. We had a Dell storage dashboard, but it was not even near to what we can see in Prism. We used VMware to see the hypervisor environment and for any kind of hardware-related issues, we had to go to the Dell dashboard. Similarly, the network people had to go to the network switches and the clusters that had been connected. But Prism comes with Nutanix and you can have a single dashboard to see everything within your stack: storage, compute, and network.

We worked with the Nutanix team for the deployment to understand the initial requirements for setting up the cluster and rack sizing, and we had to work with the data center team. We needed an initial understanding of how many servers, cluster sizing, et cetera, all based on our environment. We started with a small environment, based on a recommendation in the KB articles, and followed the steps there.

For us, it was easy. We took around three months to deploy the cluster and then we had to start migrating the workloads from the old platform to the new platform.

It took our staff a few weeks to learn how to use Prism. We had to adapt to the new dashboard, where you can see everything. There are help options available for whatever you are trying to achieve. You can look at the Prism book and there are plenty of KB articles available on the Nutanix side that show you how you can do what you want to do in Prism Central. There is also an option to use the command line, but people who have a good understanding of the Prism Central GUI can do it from there.

There is no specific maintenance needed.

We had a large team before, with different team members focusing on different things. Now, we have a small team that can focus on everything in the Nutanix platform. Previously, a few of our staff were focusing on hardware and compute, others were focusing on the virtualized environment, and a few were focusing on network. The network guy did not work on the storage, the storage guy did not work on the virtualized platform. But since we got the Nutanix platform, one guy knows everything. That's obviously our return on investment. You don't need too many people for managing the environment.

The pricing is one factor that could be better. The cluster licensing and how it works is another.

We evaluated the Cisco UCS platform and the Dell platform. But we finally ended up with Nutanix because, when we tried doing everything, it was easy to manage and everything was flexible in the Nutanix platform.

My advice is to first look at the workload you're trying to move. Use the workload-sizing sheets that are available on the internet. There are plenty of test drives available. We did a couple of test drives, running the Nutanix cluster to understand how it works.

We have some use cases around running IoT devices that we have been testing with our developers. We looked at where they fit better by running them both in the on-prem and the cloud portions. That way, we determine which environment will be better when running new workloads.

Overall, it gives you a user-friendly single-pane UI, a centralized console, with a lot of valuable features for managing the environment.

We use it for managing the cluster and all the hardware that goes with it, as well as for updates, management, and the whole lifecycle of the hardware. That's all done through Prism Element.

We run it in data centers and we use it for big data, ERP, SQL Databases, Exchange Servers, and file servers. Pretty much everything that can be virtualized is running on Nutanix.

Prism has made it much easier to build and maintain our test, dev, and production environments, all of which run on Nutanix. And there have definitely been a lot of time savings when it comes to updating and managing the hardware itself.

It's also allowed us to standardize. We are pushing a lot of the traditional three-tier infrastructure to Nutanix, mainly because it provides single pane of glass management for all hardware. You don't have to deal with different vendors to upgrade or maintain versions of firmware. You just log in to Prism Element, upgrade everything, and it takes care of the whole upgrade process for you. You don't have to speak to different vendors to find out what's compatible with what. It has made everyone's lives, and mainly mine, easier, particularly when it comes to managing hardware life cycles.

It has helped with our IT management efficiency because we do it all from Prism. You don't have to log in to different consoles to perform upgrades. We've gone through a few terrible products before, so in terms of time, it has probably increased efficiency threefold. There's no research that you have to do. It just works.

In addition, we use Nutanix as a dedicated platform for hosting our security infrastructure. They call it free. You pay for it, but there are free hypervisors. That's one less layer of complexity for managing the security infrastructure.

What I like the most are the self-healing and the ability to see everything at a glance, from metrics to the resiliency status of the hardware. As soon as you log in, that's what you see.

With Prism Element, you can do just about everything from a single console. The user experience of the console in Prism depends on what we are doing, but overall, if we bundle together everything that we could possibly do in it, I would give it eight and a half out of 10.

And as you are building out things like protection domains, it lets you see what's connected to what. It lets you visualize where particular applications or particular VMs sit: in which groups, on which cluster and, ultimately, where they would end up if you were to activate a protection domain or migrate workloads across. And in terms of hardware, there's a diagram view that lets you see which disks and which hosts sit on which boxes, what belongs to which models, and the associated serial numbers as well. It does a pretty good job of helping you visualize.

We're running VMware's ESX hypervisor and a lot of networking isn't done in Prism, it's done at the vCenter level. But for the few proofs of concept that I've done, Prism hasn't been a good experience because there's a lot of command-line work that needs to be done to configure the network. The experience with networking hasn't been great. I'm not a big fan of running things on the command line, just because I know for a fact that it can be done easily in something like VMware. They've done a great job of that. I hope that, one day, Nutanix can replicate that experience.

I have been using Nutanix Prism for about seven years.

It's very stable.

The scalability is one of the best features.

Their support is pretty much the benchmark I use when I deal with other vendors. Nutanix support is one of the few vendors that gives you direct access to what they call level-three support. You're not working with a person doing triage who then escalates to someone else who can help. The first person you talk to is the person who will be able to log in and help you dive into the issue.

They're the best I've seen.

Positive

We were a big Dell shop, and we used HPE and IBMs back then. There was a whole mix of hardware to build up a solution. At the time, Nutanix was very compelling. Our existing hardware, the server switches and the SAN storage arrays, had come to end-of-life.

The Nutanix pricing, at the time, was very competitive. It was almost on par with buying brand-new servers and brand-new storage arrays. And at the same time, the cost savings were in the management of the hardware. With Nutanix, you could do everything from the one console that is Prism Element. The cost savings weren't so much when buying the hardware, they were from the reduced cost due to the time saved when managing it.

The initial deployment is pretty straightforward now, but mainly because I know what I'm doing. But initially, it was confusing, and my advice to new customers would be to always engage with Nutanix for first builds. You can't just power it on and expect it to work straight away. But Nutanix has come a long way since the early days when you had to use the command line to build it out.

The time it takes to deploy depends on how prepared you are. You have to get all the networking done prior to kicking off the deployment. It also depends on how big the cluster is. If we're talking about the most basic, three-node deployment, it would probably take two to three hours. You unbox it, rack it, cable it up, and then you need to image the nodes with a laptop. I was the only one involved in the deployment on our side.

The few members of our staff who know how to use it went on a three-day course to learn the administration side of it. I don't know of anyone who just dives straight in, because we don't want them to break anything.

In Australia, we have about three people who log in to it. In the US, there are about five, and in Europe, there are about three. There are two of us involved in the maintenance and some of the responsibilities include logging in, triggering firmware updates, host upgrades, and hypervisor upgrades.

For the first couple of years, we did see return on investment but, over time, those returns diminished because of the price increases.

The licensing aspect is painful. We are told, "This is when you have to renew. This is the serial number and the part number," et cetera. But it's difficult to know where something belongs unless you dive into the portal and search in multiple areas for a particular serial number. The experience over the years hasn't been great with renewing, and knowing what you're renewing.

Also, there seems to be a year-on-year increase of about 5 percent. It doesn't seem like they really reward loyal customers. New customers don't get that penalty, but as you're renewing each year, you get a cost increase, which we're not happy about.

The network visibility and microsegmentation of Nutanix Prism is a feature we don't use. It's an additional feature that you have to pay for.

We looked at moving things to Azure. We also looked at SimpliVity. The other option was simply to buy brand-new hardware from Dell, IBM, or HPE again. We went with Nutanix because of the price and features.

Always work closely with a technical account manager and the sales engineer. If you're deploying from new, or even as a proof of concept, there is a lot of terminology and a lot of functions and features that are new for someone coming from traditional, three-tier architecture. Work closely with them, familiarize yourself with it, and get into a course.

We run CRM, EDI, all of our internal custom apps and batch processes, as well as ECU and BDI on Nutanix. About 80 to 85 percent of our infrastructure is Nutanix workloads.

All of our workloads are currently in our own private-cloud data centers. We have three data centers. Of our eight clusters, five are running Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor and three are running VMware ESXi. We run them all through Prism Central so we can monitor the performance of all of them through Prism Central.

Having ported everything off of the old three-tier infrastructure, we've gained back a lot of time as well as a lot of insight into what's happening. It's a lot easier to manage relocations, migrations, and expansions.

I don't know how to explain how much time and effort switching to Nutanix HCI has saved us. It's 80 percent more time-efficient and convenient than having to use multiple interfaces to deal with storage and compute in our hypervisor.

Also, the amount of time and effort that my team of seven spends on general maintenance and upgrades has easily been cut down by 75 percent. The amount of insight we get readily through Prism Central, versus having to look at multiple, disparate interfaces, has also increased our productivity. Our return on investment has been pretty impressive with the product. There are probably less expensive options, but I don't know if there's a better option.

And when it comes to the efficiency of our data protection teams, we are just implementing the Veeam third-party direct SQL. That is very much going to help streamline our DBAs' access for self-servicing their own restores. It will also take all that load off of my team. For my team, it's going to be a 100 percent improvement because we will be completely hands-off. Currently, we are doing a multi-hop backup and restore for our database systems. This is going to allow a Veeam backup of our Prism guest straight from the Microsoft SQL backup to our Veeam repositories. So they will be able to self-service their own restores, which they haven't been able to do up until now. It's going to increase the efficiency of DBAs, when they need to do recoveries or replications, by at least 25 percent and probably more.

One of the features we're most thankful for is certainly the one-click upgrades. Being able to schedule our hypervisor for more updates, and monitor the progress and get a report if there's a problem, means we're not having to babysit them. We do all but production clusters during business hours now, whereas before, all of our environments' updates involved after-business-hours work for my team. That's been a godsend.

Also, the network topology feature is similar to what we had with VMware, and it's similar to what we had with our Brocade net manager. It's a familiar interface.

Before the latest version, there were a lot of things that I would have liked to see added, but those have been added in the most recent version. But one thing I would like to see is one-click migration. I know that's on the roadmap, but we don't have it yet. 

We have been using Nutanix Prism for three years and 10 months.

The product has been really great for us. We have never experienced any production downtime. We have had a node go down on occasion when we're doing firmware updates. That, unfortunately, has been related to our third-party hardware having trouble with its own firmware. But we have not ever had a noticeable production performance impact since we brought production onto this platform.

For us to expand a cluster, or to pull a node from a cluster that has additional resources to one that needs them, and repurpose it, is far easier and faster than when we were using the traditional, three-tier setup.

We have three separate data centers. The first only has one cluster with seven nodes. The second, our Portland cluster, is just a single cluster with three nodes. And our Hillsborough site, which is our main data center, has six clusters with around 48 nodes. We have two BDI clusters, a five- and a seven-node cluster. On a daily basis they service about 780 to 820 simultaneous VDI users. Across the board, we have about 1,140 users currently.

Technical support is one of Nutanix's strongest points. In my 28 years in the industry, I don't think I've ever had better overall customer service or technical support from any vendor. 

For example, we do have some clusters that are still running a third-party hypervisor. There was one time when a Nutanix engineer even had me stay on the line, saying, "Oh, no, let's fix this other problem that we see," even though that problem was not with the Nutanix product. I've never had something like that in my 28 years, prior to Nutanix support.

Positive

I did not use a hyper-converged solution. I worked with VMware and KBM for virtualization for many years, prior to hopping onto Nutanix HCI. They're similar but different. The decision to switch to Nutanix was made based on the hope for a better return on investment and lower overhead per guest VM, which we have achieved.

I was not here when the organization first brought in Prism. I was here for the deployment into our second and third data centers, and I converted us from our stand-alone, single Prism to a clustered Prism environment.

The solution does require maintenance, but the ongoing maintenance for hypervisor updates and hardware/firmware updates has been greatly improved from traditional, three-tier, now that we're on HCI. At this point, we're so comfortable with it that we kick it off for the entire non-prod environment during work hours and just wait for it to complete, or, if there's a problem, watch for a notification. We will do production outside of normal business hours, but we don't feel that we need to babysit it anymore. We just fire it off for all of our production clusters and check in on it to make sure everything went well.

The licensing is a little confusing. They just changed it within the last year and we haven't had to renew the licensing yet, so I'm hoping it will be less confusing. 

As far as pricing goes, it's competitive for what you get. There are probably less expensive hyper-converged solutions, but I don't think they're as mature or have the feature set that we get with Nutanix.

We have looked at some other options, but at this point, we're still convinced that we're on the best HCI solution.

We haven't used the automation part of Nutanix very much. We did use it during our migration and it was certainly helpful when we were migrating systems and had to change system configurations, automating that. But for day-to-day tasks, we have not fully ported everything over from traditional, three-tier onto Nutanix. That's why we haven't spent a lot of time on automation within Prism.

I use it for day-to-day management of all of our clusters. I log in every day to verify that there are no alerts or critical issues going on. I use it to log in to our VMs, create new VMs, and delete or decommission old VMs. I also use it for updating our clusters and running lifecycle management checks for inventory.

The clusters are being run at our headquarters within a server room. And our three other clusters at remote offices are in a makeshift server closet. They are mainly used for end-user computing because the three remote offices have a virtual Nasuni filer. End-users at those offices are going to the filer for their home drive, department drive, and our file share. It's mainly end-user servers that run on those remote office clusters. All of our SQL databases reside on our cluster in HQ.

Compared to our VMware environment, it is so much easier to use Nutanix through Prism Central and Prism Element. Everything is so straightforward, especially when I have to update the AOS and AHV versions of our clusters. It literally is a one-click option. You select what you want to upgrade, hit "Upgrade," and it does a pre-check, and then it goes through the process of upgrading one node at a time. It migrates VMs on the specific node being upgraded to a different node, and brings them back after the upgrade is complete. It's just a way easier and simple environment.

It has also helped in the fact that our environment doesn't have any downtime when it shouldn't. Downtime is not an issue. Servers are up.

The overall efficiency of our environments is great.

Prism Central offers a single pane of glass user experience to manage all four of our nodes. If I want to log in to one specific cluster, I always use Element, but I use Prism Central quite a bit as well, and that's mainly for the management of our remote offices.

The Prism user interface for compute, storage, and networking is also very easy. There's a simplicity to it that makes it easy to understand. When building a VM, although there's no step-by-step guide on how to set up the VM, it's all in one small window. As long as you go step by step, it's very easy.

The three clusters we have at our remote offices are just one-node clusters. If there were an easier way to upgrade items such as the BIOS, SATA drives, the BMC, et cetera, on those, that would be helpful.

We have been using Prism since 2017. That's when we implemented our first Nutanix cluster.

It's very stable. We've never had issues of things failing. In the past five years we may have had a couple of drives fail here and there, but they are always replaced. They'll ship one out within four hours. There really never are any stability issues.

The scalability is great. With the environment we have right now, especially for our headquarters, we still have a lot of room to add more servers with fairly significant capacities of memory and cores.

When I do run into issues, and I'm not entirely sure how to fix them, I always involve Nutanix support through their support portal. I never have issues with their support. They are very good at what they do.

Positive

Overall, Prism Element is extremely easy to use and understand. Before we had Nutanix, we were using a VMware environment, and upgrading our nodes within VMware was rather difficult. It was just not as straightforward as when we upgrade our nodes and clusters within Nutanix. It literally is a one-click process to upgrade all nodes. 

We were impressed with Nutanix, overall. Some of the other main drivers for our switch to it were the simplicity of setting up our Nutanix clusters, ease of management, and that their support is very respected. There is an overall ease of use, compared to VMware. I'm sold on their product.

The onboarding of Nutanix and Prism Element and Central was very easy and straightforward. For the original cluster that we built at our headquarters, someone from Nutanix came in and helped set it up. And for two of the three nodes that we set up at remote offices, we had a consulting company come in to help set them up. I set up the last node myself using Foundation.

It was mainly me involved in the setup, along with our network engineer, to ensure that everything was set up and configured on the ports. It may have taken us a couple of hours. It was very fast and straightforward.

Maintenance on our side is required when we have to upgrade the AOS, the version of the AHV, the BIOS and the BMC. But, for the most part, at least on our six-node cluster, it's a matter of selecting the option and hitting "Upgrade." It really does it all by itself. I'm usually there just to monitor it.

The licensing is fairly high in price. If someone can get over the fact that the licensing is fairly expensive, I would say Nutanix is the way to go. It is expensive, but to me, it's worth it.

At the time we evaluated solutions, we were not a very large company, so we looked at Scale Computing and we may have looked at HPE's option. Neither one of them could handle the option of adding GPU cards to our nodes, and Nutanix could. That was a driver for our choice of Nutanix, but the main reason was the overall ease of use of the product.

Prism Central will show when there are inefficiencies between VMs. We don't own the license to allow Prism Central to show those inefficiencies. But overall, we really have never had any issues where our VMs were underutilized or had production inefficiencies with them. Our environments have been working regardless, even though we don't have the proper Prism Central license to give us that detail.

We are also backing up our virtual Nutanix environment on a daily basis. So I'm not too concerned about data protection, as a whole, because if we do have issues, there is an easy way to get things restored. But I will say that, when it comes to updating a server, I always take a snapshot of it beforehand, so if I do run into issues, I can just restore it from that snapshot.

Going into 2023, one of our main goals is security, as a whole. I'm sure there will be things across our infrastructure that we will look at on the security side. We don't use any extra Nutanix security mechanisms right now, but that possibility is in place for next year.

Overall, I'm very impressed with Nutanix. I would highly recommend to anyone who is looking for a hyper-converged infrastructure to look at Nutanix. That's mainly because of the simplicity and overall ease of use of the product, and their support.