Nutanix Prism Reviews

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. 

The most valuable feature is the dashboard, which gives you a single place to view all the Nutanix clusters. From that dashboard, you can see and modify things on each cluster or do one-click upgrades. You can monitor the cluster's patching cycle and capacity.

It's a seamless single-pane-of-glass view, and it's straightforward to use even if a person doesn't have much Nutanix experience. It's an easy process for anyone to gather information or perform infrastructure activities. Their analytics platform is helpful, providing insight into usage, resources, patching, etc.  

Nutanix's no-code process is helpful because you can integrate most things without writing any code. Prism's centralized platform brings simplicity and transparency to your environment. It gives you visibility into your networks for capacity monitoring, and you don't want to miss any of those alerts. You can drill down into any of those activities or items you will use and view them directly from the Prism. We don't have to log into each cluster separately. 

I would like more insights about virtual machines. It would be helpful to have more detailed information about resource allocation and usage, so we can distribute resources and reassign them more efficiently. 

There was a previous issue with multi-sites in which elements are in different regions, but I think this issue has been resolved in the latest release. We have multiple sites throughout North America and some in Europe. It was difficult to manage those sites. Now Prism is multi-region, so you can manage all the assets in different regions from a single console.

We have used Prism for around two years.

Prism is stable. 

Prism is fully scalable. You can add storage when you feel that you need it for your workload. 

I rate Nutanix support a 10 out of 10. They were attentive during the implementation. When we were migrating the workload from our other platform, we needed help developing a standard security template for deployment. We could do these little things with help from the support staff. They set up screen-sharing sessions or provided links to documentation we could not find. 

Positive

We previously had a three-tier architecture using Dell EMC storage and N-Series networking, but that environment reached the end of its support life, so we were looking for a solution that is more transparent for that workload. 

Deploying Prism is a straightforward process, and we had help from the Nutanix team. Nutanix had everything configured in advance, so the process was smooth on our end. We contacted support if we needed help setting something up. We did a POC first, so the final deployment was much easier. It took a few months. After deployment, the solution requires some regular patching and updating.

Previously, we had to spend significant time upgrading those servers twice a month, but we can do that in a few hours with Prism. It has cut the time by half at least, so we see a return on investment from that time savings. Many project activities that formerly took months to complete can be finished in a few hours or days. 

Nutanix Prism is affordable. It depends on the license category you select. They have multiple options, and we selected the one that was suitable for our infrastructure and requirements. The licensing model worked for us.

We evaluated another hybrid environment. Our management team got quotes from various vendors. Ultimately, we narrowed the list down to solutions that would be best for these specific workloads and wouldn't require as much investment. We did a proof of concept, and once we identified a solution that would work, we ordered and installed the platform for our infrastructure.

I rate Nutanix Prism a 10 out of 10. Potential customers should do a POC before making up their minds. You can also check case studies for use cases with similar workloads. A test drive is helpful because you can get an idea of what the platform will look like. 

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.

Prism provides us with insights and the ability to access all the sub-components of Nutanix's hyperconverged platform. The most beneficial feature for us has been the technical management portion of Prism. It allows us to perform both software and firmware updates for the hardware and software components of the hyperconverged platform without any perceived interruption to the service.

The licensing cost has room for improvement.

I have been using Nutanix Prism for four years.

We encountered some issues during a firmware update where a host became unavailable. However, to the best of my knowledge, including the four years I've been working with the product and the five years the company has been using it, we've never experienced a perceivable outage to our end users or any processes related to Nutanix Prism. We did have instances where a host or a cluster went down, but it didn't affect any of the workloads on those clusters.

Scalability with Nutanix Prism has been very good. We've expanded three clusters that were in production as we placed more workloads on them, or the end-user load just got increased, and we needed to meet the demand. Expanding a cluster is pretty straightforward. We've done all of them internally, and they were successful. We've performed some expansions during normal production hours, and some after regular production hours. At this point, we're comfortable enough to do it during production hours as there is no foreseeable impact on the workloads on those systems.

I have contacted technical support many times, and it has always been very helpful, especially early on when I was not as familiar with the product. I remember a case where we encountered an issue while upgrading some firmware on a third-party host. This host is a part of our clusters that run the native AHV hypervisor, while we also have clusters running the VMware ESX hypervisor in Nutanix's platform. Although the problem was actually related to the ESX hypervisor, the support engineer insisted on staying with us and walking us through the resolution, even though it was a VMware issue and not a Nutanix Prism issue. That level of assistance was truly above and beyond.

Positive

The initial setup is extremely straightforward. We had a vendor consultant assist us with the first three cluster deployments, but afterward, we decided not to spend money on the service and do it ourselves. As a result, we currently have seven clusters. The last four were all set up internally. There have been instances where we were able to set up clusters in a day once we had the necessary hardware on-site.

For our first three clusters, we had an integrator consultant's assistance. However, for the last four, we implemented them independently and internally.

Like everyone else, I would prefer Nutanix Prism's licensing to be more affordable. However, I believe in the principle of "you get what you pay for." Currently, I don't think there's a better alternative available for hyperconverged infrastructure. We might be able to find a lower-priced option, but they are positioned in a higher echelon, and the price, I believe, reflects that. Nevertheless, I consider it a worthwhile investment.

I give Nutanix Prism a nine out of ten.

We fumbled a bit with Nutanix Prism's automation, but we haven't found a practical use for it. We already have several third-party tools in place that effectively manage our large-scale deployments. Additionally, we have numerous custom scripts already set up, enabling us to build hundreds of systems. Consequently, we haven't felt the need or desire to reinvent the wheel within Nutanix Prism since our current setup works well for us.

Currently, we are not using Flow as we have not implemented it yet. We are in the process of replacing our underlying physical network switches with multiple vendors. We are waiting to have one specific product across the entire network before we proceed with implementing Flow within Nutanix.

On our roadmap for this current quarter are containers. Looking ahead, AI will be on our roadmap for the next year. Potentially, we'll be working on some AI-related projects in the last quarter of this year in response to compromised endpoints.

We haven't fully explored granting our app development team or our DBAs access to the environment. Since I joined, we've refreshed about 85 percent of all the infrastructure at this organization. Consequently, there have been numerous changes, leaving little time for in-depth exploration. We haven't made much progress in automation, though we would like to. Unfortunately, time constraints have prevented us from doing so. Once we finish that task, we plan to onboard our DBAs and explore the benefits of what they now refer to as the Nutanix Era after a recent name change. It seems highly advantageous for the DBAs, but unfortunately, we haven't had the time to allocate to such projects yet. Our main focus has been on a complete refresh of the organization's infrastructure.

The onboarding experience between Prism and VMware is different, obviously. With Nutanix, we have the ability to go from days and weeks of implementation time, once we have the hardware on-site, to just hours and days. Sometimes, we can get a cluster up and fully running in a single day. Of course, we still have a test validation period, but at this point, we haven't encountered any issues. We can get a cluster up in a day, and it's ready for production, pending vetting and testing. This never happened with VMware vSphere, but it's important to note that VMware vSphere is not a hyper-converged solution; it operates on a three-tier model. Therefore, it's expected that VMware vSphere would take longer. Nevertheless, Nutanix has significantly reduced the implementation time by a factor of seven to ten.

I was involved in deploying everything in our DR site that had not been implemented by the time I started, and I set it up initially. Our Prism cluster went from a single Prism instance to a clustered Prism environment.

As far as the ability goes, we started implementing the second cluster with help from our vendor. After that, we became champions, saying that we were ready to do it on our own. We believed it was easy enough to handle independently. However, we weren't sure if the administration had already established a statement of work in place. Nonetheless, we went ahead and proceeded with the third implementation, working with the service provider. We managed the last four implementations on our own, relying on our team. Our team currently consists of seven people, with all but two having been involved in previous implementations or expansions. Thus, everyone is quite familiar with the process, making it easy for them to handle day-to-day tasks, such as adding guest VMs or snapshotting. While the overall process has been intuitive, we are still continuously learning. There's a lot more to explore and accomplish, but due to the time spent on refreshing our current environment, we haven't delved into everything yet. Realistically, within a couple of weeks after starting, we had our new employee, who joined about a year and a half ago, up and running. He was already familiar with the technology, particularly VMware, which shares some similarities. Learning the system is comparable to understanding and mastering a new language, figuring out how to put everything together systematically, and using the right terminologies. The interface is user-friendly and intuitive. Our new team member had minimal questions and was able to work efficiently within a week or two.

There are feature updates and security updates that we have to apply. Besides that, once we have set up our dashboard with the widgets we want, adding a new cluster to our environment and integrating it into Prism is straightforward. There's nothing much to change. Just upgrades and security patches, which are pretty simple. We just go into the portal, select the upgrade we want to apply, and let it run.

There is a community edition. I'd say, give it a try. We can grab the community edition. The software doesn't care what hardware we run it on, so we could test it on whatever hardware we have available. And, we see, the proof is in the pudding. People should test it out for themselves.

Prism is used to manage Nutanix Clusters. Everything that you can do in VMware, you can do in Prism.

Our workloads are run in a data center on a private cloud. We also do ROBO sites.

On the production side, Nutanix has made everything a lot easier for me. It has definitely improved the efficiency of our IT management.

All of our clusters are encrypted and it's very easy to add encryption to a whole cluster.

In the past, I've used VMware vCenter, but after switching to Nutanix Prism, things are a lot easier. At my previous job we were a very small IT department. I was a sysadmin who did everything from fixing printers to doing the servers, and everything in between. If I didn't have Nutanix, it would be a much harder job. It takes care of everything and lets me do other aspects of my job.

All of it is valuable. With Nutanix, you can run VMware or you can run Nutanix's own hypervisor, called AHV, and the Prism solution lets you manage both from one place. The single pane of glass user experience that Prism provides is pretty intuitive and simple, it's not over-complicated. And the user interface for compute, storage, and networking is very easy because everything is right where you would expect it. Any options that you need are all within the Prism interface. Overall, it has a nice GUI and it's easy to understand and navigate.

And for optimizing performance, it does a pretty good job because there's a feature that lets you drill down into VMs that may be constrained or that are "bully" VMs. You can tell which are the ones where you may need to adjust the memory or CPU.

In addition, it's easy to spin up VMs and makes cluster maintenance easy, especially with the LCM (Life Cycle Manager) that is built-in. That helps do installs of AHV or even ESXi. You can also upgrade the AOS software that runs the Nutanix clusters. And you can upgrade the firmware, which is nice.

And while we don't have it set up, you can turn on self-service so that people can create their own VMs and manage their own machines.

There are some things that you can only do via the command line. Over the years that I've been using Nutanix, they've slowly integrated those into Prism, but they're still trying to catch up with a solution that has been around longer, like VMware.

We have been using Nutanix Prism for seven years.

The stability of Prism is good. I haven't had any issues.

We have multiple ROBO sites across the country, our main data center, and a backup data center, and they all run Nutanix. It's very easy to expand. We've had to do that in the past and it's not hard.

We just bought some more clusters to replace old hardware at some of our ROBO sites and, next year, we're looking into purchasing more to replace old hardware for our VDI.

Nutanix has one of the greatest support organizations that I've ever had to use. They're polite, you get someone on the phone fast, and they always find a solution for you.

Positive

Setting up Nutanix is so much easier than any other system that I've used. For example, we had NetApp storage and Cisco UCS for our hardware in the past, and it took a month to get everything set up and running. But when we switched to Nutanix, it took an afternoon. It was much different.

For the first deployment we had a consultant, but since then, it is so easy that we just do it ourselves. If you're just going to deploy one cluster, you only need one person to do it, and maybe someone from network.

It's very easy to learn. There are a lot of resources out there and their support is great; they'll help you through anything. It's easy to learn on your own.

The maintenance required is updates. They're always coming out with updates.

Nutanix is a little pricier, but the features it has are worth it.

You won't regret installing it. It will make things a lot simpler.

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 use Nutanix to run our entire network. We have 15 virtual Microsoft servers and a number of workstations running on it, as well as our internal cloud based on Nutanix. We use it for everything. We're running it in a data center.

We use it for testing and for workloads, and it has made my life so much easier. It's smooth. It works. It's fantastic. It is so efficient and easy to work with. I have nothing but good things to say about it. It's just great. I love it.

Upgrades are a breeze and our uptime is five-nines-plus, which is fantastic. It has reduced management overhead tremendously.

It also makes it easy to solve problems.

The most valuable features are

• snapshotting
• basic usage.

The ability to do snapshots is fantastic. It does a great job. Not only do snapshots work great, but you can take a snapshot on the fly. The snapshot takes a second to complete. You can then make a change and test it out to see if it works. If you have any problem, just roll it right back.

Overall, Prism is just phenomenal. It is so easy to use.

The single pane of glass experience is great. I love it. I can see what's going on and I can tell if there's a problem and I can pick it up from there.

It also does a great job of optimizing performance with machine learning and AI. It's fantastic.

The network visibility is okay. It's good. It's a little bit tough to drill down to get to everything that I want, but it's all there.

The one caveat that I would have on that is that it doesn't allow you to connect to outside storage, other than cloud-based. That is something I would prefer for disaster recovery, to be able to send things out that way. Even at an ISCSi level, even though you may not be able to run servers off it, connecting to outside storage is my biggest caveat.

But other than that, it's great.

We have been using Nutanix Prism for four years.

I have found Prism to be extremely stable.

The scalability is good. You can always add more nodes or more clusters, so it should be pretty simple. However, it may be costly. 

Currently, we don't have any plans to increase our usage. We oversized it to begin with.

Their tech support is very good, once you get someone. Sometimes it takes a little bit longer than I would like to get someone to call back, but once they're on it, it's guaranteed to be fixed.

Positive

I ran VMware for seven years, on an EqualLogic array and a Compellent array. One of the reasons we switched was the cost scenario. When it was time to upgrade, I crunched all the numbers and Nutanix came out in between "competitive" and "better." It looked like a better product with better numbers, and it was a question of trying it. We always had the ability to run Nutanix on the AHV. That was something that we had thought about and we decided to test out AHV to see how well it ran. There were a lot of promises and it was a leap of faith in the beginning, but I can say that it was a fantastic move.

The initial setup is extremely complex. I am Nutanix Certified, so I had the ability, but there were still things that we weren't trained in. They mandate—not recommend, but mandate—having an approved installer do it, and it was a very painful process. The installer that we took from CDW was not good, in the extreme. I had to go back to Nutanix directly and get all the problems fixed.

I am also VMware Certified and it really is not a big deal to get it to do what you want. To make those changes in Nutanix is extremely complex when it comes to getting it to talk properly to the switches and getting all the extra networking features going.

In terms of learning how to use Prism, within an hour, you should be fully functional after the installation is done, even if you were not trained.

Maintenance is just the upgrades.

We bought it through CDW, and we used them for the installation. I would never use them for the installation again.

We have definitely seen ROI on every penny.

The pricing is comparable to other software initiatives. I don't know if it's that much less. We bought it with the certified Nutanix hardware, which they don't build. It's an outsourced box that they sell you. Price-wise, AHV is free if you have Nutanix.

We compared Nutanix with VMware. VMware seems to have more capabilities. When you get down to the nitty-gritty, there are more things you can do and change. You can definitely connect to outside storage, because it's meant to run on outside storage. You might have more control and more things that you can customize. In the beginning, that was something that we were concerned about. But in the end, we found that it really didn't make a difference. 

With VMware, when it comes time to run upgrades, aside from the fact that you have to manually move the servers off and move everything around, you then have to upgrade the VMware software and the hypervisor, and then you have to go down to the low-level hardware itself. In Nutanix, it's all a one-shot deal. With Nutanix, when you have to run an upgrade, which happens all the time, it just takes care of everything for you. It's a one-click process. I can't say it's always successful, but 95 percent of the time we are successful.

It's going to make your life a lot easier. The installation is very painful but, once it's complete, your life will be so much easier. It's worth the effort, but you have to be ready for the difficulty of the installation

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.  We now have 4 Nutanix clusters

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.

We're a higher education institution with two campuses and we have about 5,000 students that we have to support. We use Nutanix for hyper-converged infrastructure.

We're somewhat hybrid with about 80 percent of our workloads on-premises and about 20 percent on the cloud in Azure. We are running VMware on our Nutanix hardware. We have ERP systems on it and our virtual wireless controllers that run our wireless infrastructure, in addition to our Cisco virtual appliance.

What Nutanix helped us with is that, instead of managing different vendors with different components and hardware, it is a unified, single location for all our management. I don't have to schedule something with various vendors who would probably say, "Well, we don't support this, so you have to contact that vendor." With Nutanix, it is a simple process. We do the one-click upgrade and we're set.

In production, we no longer have to worry about boot-up times and whether there are any obstacles when trying to upgrade the systems. In the past, if we installed a driver, the chances were that there would be some kind of hiccup with the upgrade process or with the boot-up process, and that would hinder our business.

We're a pretty small shop and we wear multiple hats. The system has helped by cutting the cost of hiring a full-time employee to specifically manage the system. With Nutanix, we're able to manage it all in the same spot.

It is a day and night difference, that's how much improvement there has been. We no longer get late-night calls, alerts at 4:00 AM, as we had with our old system. Nowadays, it's very stable and we rarely have any issues. It helps our organization to feel at ease and not worry about what's going to happen at night.

And although our help desk ticketing system is not actually on Nutanix, back then, we had our system create tickets with the help desk. Now, we don't really have the need for it. That has also helped with cost savings.

We're also happy that the Nutanix system is encrypted. Everything that we do on it is encrypted, and that helps us when we need to renew our cyber insurance policy. It gives us more assurance. Our security posture is going up.

There's another benefit because we use Microsoft SQL, and the database performance is horrific. It's slow. But ever since we moved to Nutanix, our queries have been much faster and much more responsive. The overall end-user feedback is that it's fantastic. They're very happy with the system.

• Prism Central is easy to use.
• The one-click upgrade is fantastic.
• There is a single pane of glass for management.

The single pane of glass gives us good analytics across all the nodes in our cluster. The user interface, within Prism Element, for compute, storage, and networking is fairly easy to use.

We use Prism Central to do our runway analysis because it manages both of our clusters. We have two clusters, one on each campus. And it's a simple matter of defining the report and criteria, and it will tell you exactly how it's running and what to expect in the next X months.

The network visibility and microsegmentation of Nutanix Prism are very intuitive. It has its own internal backplane so that there's full redundancy and availability within the system.

It also does a good job when it comes to optimizing performance with machine learning and AI. It's able to identify the VMs that are constrained and not constrained, and which ones are "bully" or not. It gives you a recommendation based on your usage. It learns your user environment.

I would like to see the integration of native, one-click "open support ticket" functionality for errors generated by the system within Prism. Currently, we have to manually open a support ticket in a separate web browser and manually input the error information. This would help expedite the process and help with operations, especially when you have limited staff and wear multiple hats.

I would also like to see what kind of integration can happen between Nutanix and Rubrik for DR and backup solutions, to get the best of both worlds.

I've been using Nutanix since 2017, so roughly five years.

It's very stable. We haven't experienced any downtime.

Their technical support is great, very knowledgeable and friendly.

Positive

We had a really aging infrastructure with legacy hardware that we had to replace. We were on the Dell R510 chassis. We were having failures of hard drives every other week, and performance was not great at all. We did a rip-and-replace with Nutanix HCI.

Nutanix was more cost-efficient with better performance. And, instead of having a rack full of servers, we only have about 6Us.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We had Nutanix professional services come out and show us the process. We were up and running in under an hour, roughly. Our experience with them was very positive. They educated and presented all the information that was required. On our side, it was just me and a colleague involved with the Nutanix employee who came out.

The system doesn't really require any maintenance, aside from updating the operating system on the cluster.

Our energy costs have already helped us with some of the costs. In our old infrastructure, we had so many servers running and they utilized so much energy.  It created a lot of carbon footprint. Now, we don't really have that because it's all in one box, one cluster, across multiple nodes.

We evaluated VxRail from Dell. The main differences were that the user interface was much friendlier in Nutanix and the learning curve was also much better. Also, the way that Nutanix presented it was more confident, compared to Dell. The way Dell was presented was more technical, but it didn't give us much assurance. It seems that you need to have a specialized employee for it.

Schedule a demo and ask for references from other customers that have an environment that is similar to your environment.

We use it for our production environment where we have a lot of applications running on this cluster. We also use it for our testing environment. In the future, we may have machine learning and artificial intelligence on it.

We chose Nutanix for its scalability, flexibility, and performance. In performance, we really see a difference when we compare our whole infrastructure and the Nutanix cluster. It's very different.

It has helped us with real flexibility today and for the years to come. We have used it for three years and we have a lot of performance flexibility, and ease of management. This cluster has reduced the time it takes to manage this project for this infrastructure. In the past, we spent many more hours managing, but today it's efficient. Our management overhead costs have been reduced by about 20 to 30 percent.

We have also seen improvement in the number of help desk calls, a reduction of about 20 percent, but only in terms of performance issues. We have fewer calls from users telling us they are seeing poor performance. With the Nutanix cluster, we don't have those calls anymore.

And our data protection team's efficiency has been improved by about 50 percent. Our security has really been improved by the features of Nutanix, such as Nutanix Flow and snapshot backups.

There are so many valuable features but Nutanix Flow for microsegmentation of the network, and the Life Cycle Manager for dating hardware and software are among the most important for us.

And the user interface for Nutanix for compute, storage, and networking, while it's very new for us, is not very difficult. It's very intuitive. Compared to what we had in the past, it's very new.

The interface is good, but it needs improvements. There are a lot of functions that are only available in the CLI.

In addition, some of the hardware components could be improved. We already had some trouble with disks.

We have been using Nutanix Prism for three years.

It's a 10 out of 10 in stability.

It's very scalable.

We have about 500 users of the solution.

Their technical support is very good.

Positive

Three years ago we wanted to renew our infrastructure and our choice quickly came down to Nutanix. This solution perfectly met our expectations. Before, we had a traditional infrastructure, consisting of different virtualization hosts and a dedicated storage area network. All that infrastructure was difficult to maintain and manage because we had a multitude of different technologies and manufacturers. That is why we chose Nutanix.

We have Nutanix on the same site, but in two different locations. The initial deployment is very easy. It took us about two weeks. It involved me, other people on my team, and the service provider.

Learning to use Nutanix Prism took very little time, only a few days.

Except for upgrades, there is no maintenance.

The ROI we have seen is indirect, in terms of time saved. Overall, it has saved us 40 to 50 percent in time.

It's expensive in comparison to the rest of our infrastructure. But the quality is there.

I absolutely recommend this solution. It has some faults but, overall, it's very good.