Nutanix Prism Reviews

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

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

Prism is made to do multi-cloud and multi-site tasks. Some of the products are not interoperable for multi-cloud or multi-site tasks. Nutanix Flow doesn’t work well between sites.

I have been using the solution since 2010.

The technical support is pretty good. I rate support an eight to nine out of ten.

The solution demonstrates ROI by decreasing operation expenses for manpower. We require less staff to do the same task.

We run some workloads on the cloud but mostly on local data centers. We could also have a ROBO office installation, like a remote branch office. Nutanix is used for just the management of the cluster. Nutanix is used for databases and generic virtualization workloads. We even have some desktops. I have all the use cases that various customers and various sectors describe.

Using Nutanix Prism has reduced the complexity of the management of the solution. There's not a lot to configure for Prism to work. It's preinstalled out of the box. It’s good. Our operations are simplified. Nutanix Prism’s user interface is very powerful and very simple.

The single-pane-of-glass user experience is very powerful. Prism Central is very powerful and very simple. We can get a lot done. There are versions of Prism for each node and each cluster. We can manage multiple Nutanix clusters with Prism Central. It can control all the different clusters together.

I do not use Nutanix for automation much. However, we can take advantage of the built-in features if we need them. The network visibility and micro-segmentation of Nutanix Prism works, but it's a limited use case with just micro-segmentation. The same tag we use on-premises can't be reused in the cloud. It's limited.

Nutanix Prism can do some predictive analysis, which is helpful. Especially when we're trying to manage capacity, it can determine workload based on past behavior. The statistical analysis helps us to preplan.

It has helped improve the efficiency of our organization’s IT management. It works to improve the efficiency by simplifying the task at hand. It has decreased our effort by 30 to 40%. Nutanix Prism has helped the productivity of our organization’s application developers. We can provision environments for them faster with less effort. It helps DevOps because the team can get the environment it needs to start working on its projects.

Nutanix Prism is a little behind on some things related to security posture. Prism has a built-in life cycle management, so we feel more enabled to tackle the tasks. Nutanix Prism is a good product. However, there’s still room for improvement.

Overall, I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

I use the solution in my company for all the server authorization, storing of files or as a storage, and all the IT purposes.

The most valuable features of the solution are IT Ops, key, and agent operation.

The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required.

I have been using Nutanix Prism for ten years. My company has a partnership with Nutanix.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

I have experience with VMware and Microsoft. My company started to work with Nutanix Prism since it offered good performance, high stability, more efficiency, and simplicity.

The product's deployment phase is very easy.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises version.

The solution can be deployed in a few minutes.

There are some cost reduction benefits from the use of the product in my company.

I rate the product price as an eight out of ten.

It is a premium solution that can be a bit expensive. Sometimes, additional features are needed.

Nutanix Prism automation capability impacts operational efficiency by improving costs.

The implementation of the product has increased the productivity of our employees.

Nutanix Prism helps with IT operations.

The AI-driven management of the tool contributes to the overall IT infrastructure.

I recommend the product to others who plan to use it.

Simplicity, automation, and efficiency are some good areas associated with the tool.

My company does take care of the maintenance of the product for our customers. Just one person is required to maintain the product.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

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.

We primarily use the solution as a virtual platform. It serves as a server storage solution for creating a virtual platform.

Nutanix Prism offers web scaling, which facilitates easy scaling. However, it is expensive. It provides high performance, which is attributed to data locality. It also supports scale-up storage and RAM, allowing for flexible expansion within the box. Other vendors like VxRail and Azure Stack do not offer this capability. It has comprehensive management and reporting functionalities integrated into the product. Managing virtual machines on Nutanix is much easier than VMware or Hyper-V clusters.

The solution is fairly expensive, especially in comparison to three-tier solutions. There can be some constraints on how it scales, making granular scaling difficult with the product. While purchasing, you must decide on the performance and capacity you want to build into the system. Once you've built it, it's difficult to change, whether increasing performance or adjusting to changed circumstances.

I have been using Nutanix Prism for 7 years.

The solution works with all types of customers, from small to enterprise.

I rate the solution’s scalability a nine out of ten.

I have used VxRail and SimpliVity. We switched to Nutanix for better performance, easier management, and better support.

The initial setup is easy and takes days to a week, depending on what you make.

The maintenance is very easy.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We use Nutanix Prism for building a private cloud solution.

Nutanix Prism has made our organization's administration simple.

The dashboard is very simple, and you don't need much knowledge to use it.

Nutanix Prism can be more stable because it's not as stable as VMware. The playbook or autopilot feature you can set on Nutanix should be decreased. The autopilot feature only runs every hour and doesn't fulfill most customers' requirements.

Nutanix Prism is not that stable. Once you install a VMware, it runs smoothly, and you don't need to upgrade it until two or three years. However, you might have to upgrade Nutanix Prism every year.

Nutanix Prism is a very scalable solution.

Nutanix Prism's technical support team is quite good, and they meet their SLAs.

Positive

A big advantage of VMware is that it runs on everything and is not dependent on the hardware. You can install ESXi anywhere, which is a big advantage with VMware. However, Nutanix Prism needs SCI-supported hardware like an m2 drive.

Nutanix Prism's initial setup is very easy.

The whole deployment was completed in one or two days. Two people are enough to deploy the solution.

Nutanix Prism does not require major maintenance, but the solution may sometimes face software-based issues. Sometimes, the DIMM might degrade, or SSD might go down, but such issues will be resolved in a day.

Nutanix Prism is quite an expensive solution compared to VMware. However, if you get all the products of VMware, then that would be provided on Nutanix at a lesser price.

We use the solution's features like micro-segmentation, NSX, and SRM. The solution has a self-service provisioning system where you can create a separate cloud where people will login and use resources as per their needs and as we provide them. It's like a private cloud experience where you can build a cloud as well.

Nutanix Prism's performance is quite good. One of our customers is using Nutanix Prism, and they also did a case study for the solution describing how much it has improved.

Nutanix Prism offers a single pane of glass user experience for us. The administrators or anyone using a product want it to be simple, and Nutanix Prism is a simple solution.

It's very easy to utilize the Nutanix Prism user interface for compute, storage, and networking. Once you walk through it, it's much easier than any virtual box.

We use Nutanix for automation. The solution's no-code process for visually building automation is a very good feature. Autoscaling the VM, taking snapshots, generating any info, and acting upon that is very easy with Nutanix Prism.

The network visibility and micro-segmentation of Nutanix Prism work quite well, and it's also easy.

Its ability to optimize performance with machine learning and AI is quite good. The capacity planning and forecasting features of the solution are very handy. Capacity planning can be used, and you can see all the forecasts of what is happening with the resources and how many resources we might need in the future. It would recommend how much more resources would be needed if the workloads were increased.

Nutanix Prism has helped improve the efficiency of our customer's IT management environment.

It has helped improve the efficiency of our organization’s help desk operations.

Nutanix Prism has helped improve the efficiency of our organization's data protection teams. The local snapshot is really good in Nutanix Prism and can be used as a backup. VMware's snapshot is not a backup, but Nutanix Prism's snapshot is a backup, which is quite useful.

Nutanix has released many security patches, but attacks usually come on the ESXi environment. We haven't faced any kind of security vulnerability risk on Nutanix Prism. Every time something comes up, we check it, and there might be some vulnerability on ESXi that we need to patch. Nutanix should work on its security more because, often, the attacks on any server system would be on the ESXi.

The best thing would be for users to first try out what they need before getting the solution.

Overall, I rate Nutanix Prism a seven out of ten.

We are running our workloads or applications on the data center. It's very effective.

It saved our time. It has improved the efficiency of our organization’s IT management by 40% to 50%. It has also improved the efficiency of our organization’s data protection teams, but it hasn't improved the efficiency of our organization’s help desk operations.

It has improved the productivity of our organization’s application developers by 40%.

It has reduced the management overhead costs through self-service. It also has had an effect on our security posture.

It hasn't offered a single-pane-of-glass user experience.

Its scalability is valuable. It's scalable and fast.

The Nutanix Prism user interface is also good.

The VM backup could be better, and its licensing could be better. We have had some licensing issues with Nutanix Files. The default license should be 1 TB or more. Currently, for Nutanix Files sharing, we can only use 500 Gigabytes.

I've been using this solution for two years.

It's stable.

Its scalability is good. We are currently using it at one location. We have plans to increase its usage.

They are helpful. When we open a ticket, they respond very fast. If needed, they send us RAM or hard disk, and we then change it. I'd rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We used Microsoft Hyper-V. We moved to Nutanix because of more flexibility and stability. 

The onboarding experience of Nutanix Prism is better than our previous solution. Nutanix is also fast. We can create a virtual machine in a second. It's a very fast solution.

Its configuration took two to three days. It does require maintenance. Without maintenance, it wouldn't work.

It was installed by another organization. There were two engineers involved in its deployment. One was from the network side, and the other one was from the systems side.

Microsoft Hyper-V is free, whereas Nutanix isn't. Nutanix isn't so expensive. VMware is more expensive than Nutanix, but with VMware, there aren't many licenses, whereas, in the case of Nutanix, we need to upgrade the license periodically. It could be every three years or five years. It depends on your license.

There are no costs in addition to the licensing fee.

I'd recommend this solution. I'd rate it a nine out of ten.

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.