Nutanix Prism Reviews

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 Prism to manage our three sites through a single pane of glass, mainly for data center infrastructure management. I'm the chief information officer and program leader, and we are customers of Nutanix. 

The auto-update option is a good feature that we've found to be very valuable and has saved us a lot of capital. It enables the running of tools to upgrade Nutanix clusters from a single pane of glass. The system automatically manages the VMs on top of the clusters. It will patch each of the nodes and once updated it will automatically move the VMs back into the load balancing session. Traditionally, this was a time-consuming manual process. 

One of the main pain points of Nutanix is that it doesn't integrate very well with any backup solution. For backup of the VMs, a specialized solution is required. There are solutions available, that can be purchased separately but they generally don't integrate very well with Nutanix. I'd like to see a native backup solution capability embedded into Nutanix Prism.

I've been using this solution for nearly four years. 

The solution is very stable. 

Nutanix clusters are scalable products. Scaling is a matter of buying another node and plugging it into the system. It's automatically scanned and you get your CPU memory disk.

The product comes with a very good support contract. If there is anything wrong in your cluster or any of your systems, the system automatically sends an alert to the support team, and they take action to fix the issue before you're even aware that something is wrong. It's great.

Positive

We previously used vCenter which you can't compare head to head with Nutanix because vCenter is limited to certain management parts whereas Prism actually covers multiple aspects including their application. 

The initial setup is automated, so it's easy. Just power on the nodes, and they will automatically configure. It's a matter of indicating how much memory you want to allocate for the CVM. You can have the cluster up and running in two hours. 

For an infrastructure our size with storage and SAN, I would need three people to carry out the work. With Nutanix I can do it easily with one person. With a traditional infrastructure, I'd need someone to manage the storage in the network and create zones every time I need to add or remove storage. It would also require management of servers. With Nutanix one guy from a single dashboard can do all of that.

Purchase of the product comes with a support subscription. The license can be bundled with your main cluster node for three or five years. Alternatively, you can buy the hardware and license of the VM for the first year, and then when you renew the license, you can renew your support contract. Prism is extra software so it's bundled with the base licensing. It's expensive compared to other options on the market but it's at the top of its product level so it delivers value. If you buy a competitive product from VMware, you also have to buy multiple products and manage them. From that perspective, Nutanix provides value for money.

This is a brilliant product and I rate it nine out of 10. 

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.

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.

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 use Nutanix Prism for our on-premises cluster management and computing. We use Prism Central to allocate resources, create virtual machines, and do analysis on our resource consumption in our Nutanix clusters.

We are using it for test, development, and production environments, using three different clusters. It provides us with easy management of our resources. It gives us a single point of touch for those resources, and our resources are huge. The management interface makes it easy to use.

Before, we were using standalone servers and vCenter, and other solutions for compute and storage resources. Now, Prism Central has made management of both hardware and software, plus the licenses, very easy. Prism Central is a very good solution.

With Nutanix Prism, we don't have to worry about a single VM failure or a single hardware failure and having to manually trace the issue. If there is any problem regarding our resources, by logging into Prism Central we can easily see things. I would estimate it has improved our IT efficiency by 80 percent.

Another advantage is that it gives you data protection options. You can schedule your snapshots as you want. And even if you want to connect the data centers by using the cluster, you can connect to DR sites, or you can take local snapshots by easily scheduling and grouping the virtual machines. It gives you full flexibility to back up any of your systems through local snapshots and data replication to remote DR sites. It has helped improve the efficiency of our organization’s data protection teams by almost 100 percent.

We have also seen a reduction in management overhead costs, through self-service, of almost 50 percent.

And the solution has helped the productivity of our application developers. We are developing an ERP for the bank, SAP HANA, and unfortunately, it went down because of some problems. I tried restarting a number of times and it still went down. So I got a snapshot from the data protection domain and restored it within an hour, and the project continued easily.

All of the features are very interesting, especially Nutanix Insights. It does analytics on resource usage for all virtual machines to determine if they are using the allocated resources efficiently or if they are wasting them. It gives us insights into which virtual machines are using the resources over the past months or weeks or days, and which ones are not using them. That way, we can rearrange resource usage for the virtual machines.

I also appreciate the software and firmware patching. It gives us a single-click option to update both. I strongly applaud the way they treat customers, with software and firmware updates, and everything they do to make management of software and hardware resources easy.

We also get a single-pane-of-glass user experience that is well-aligned and helpful.

The usage is very easy and descriptive. They have made improvements to the interface that are very interesting. It's very good. When they released a new version they gave it a nice look, making it easier to use and manage.

The microsegmentation is a very interesting concept here. Nutanix deploys the network very well and in a very interesting way. Even someone who has no network knowledge, but has a little technical knowledge, can easily use and manage it, because the solution uses real language to describe the resources and the elements inside. Nutanix microsegmentation is very easy and good for the user.

Also, the solution's machine learning and AI do a lot when it comes to optimizing performance. Obviously, the only things needed from this kind of software are management and insight. They help reduce the burden. Because Prism Central sees everything related to your resources, it's very good.

They don't have many organized documents for troubleshooting problems. If you look at the support portal or the website, you will not get detailed information about problems or redirection to more information. They should continue working on the software solution but enlarge the documentation.

We have been using Nutanix Prism for one year.

It's very stable.

It's fully scalable.

The support is very good. Usually, the guys are very intelligent and very good at support. Sometimes, I get someone who complains that my request is not something I can ask him and that it's my duty to resolve it. About 95 percent of the system engineers are good. They share your worries and help you a lot. But sometimes I get someone who says, "This is your responsibility. You shouldn't ask us this question." The rest of the support engineers are very knowledgeable about support, and I really appreciate them.

If there is a hardware failure in the environment, we can easily use their help desk to log the failure and get a replacement within seven days or 14 days, maximum. And with software, we can have a short session with system reliability engineers and specialists from Nutanix and get a solution within an hour. So support has helped a lot.

Positive

We did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup is a bit complex, but not highly complex. At times, we needed experts to solve problems, which took time. We deployed three clusters, and it took a month from racking to data collection, installation, and until we got to day one of operations.

We had five people involved in the deployment. Two were racking and cabling and giving management IPs, as well as doing networking tickets. Two were coordinating resources. And one was an engineer from an implementation company.

We have 10 departments in our company and about 150 employees.  The resources are fully managed by our infrastructure team. They locate resources for different departments as per their requests, while the hardware, software, and licensing are managed by us in IT. 

On the resource side, with the introduction of group or cluster computing, none of the resources have the problem of a single point of failure. We don't have failure worries at all. That means the server is very redundant, and we can access resources that are kept as standby in case of failure. Our return on investment is that we are profitable by more than 50 percent.

Costs are increasing a lot globally now, in general. We are in Ethiopia, East Africa, so we are far from America and there are transportation problems. That means that everything is costly. The cost for the licenses was a bit expensive.

As of now, I'm quite satisfied. I really appreciate the efforts of the engineers and architects who are developing the solution's features and software for us.

I would recommend Nutanix Prism. 

Nutanix Prism is awesome. It's a simple upgrade. There is no downtime and all. There is never any worry about upgrading the solution. It's a very good product.

The Clone and Snapshot features are two of the most valuable aspects of the solution for our organization. Rather than simply one-click automation the Snapshot and reverse Snapshot are great. 

The performance flow chart is excellent. I can find out about the performance levels and all the metrics are right there for us. If we were to go to VMware we would have to deploy the vrOPs etc. You're able to see the chart and utilization screen and performance monitoring, all those things. So this is good, rather than VMware vSAN technology.

The solution offers good production.

The solution could be a bit more user-friendly. The dashboard and configuration should be much easier to use.

The migration from Nutanix to other platforms, like VMware and hypervisor, needs improvement. That is a difficult task right now, because we cannot run the two separately. It's a bit tricky.

I've been using the solution for six to eight months.

The solution is stable. It's been quite reliable for us. We haven't had any issues with it.

The solution is scalable. We don't have any issues with that.

We've only had one issue previously and it was a hardware failure. We made a support ticket and they were able to assist.

The initial setup is not complex. It's quite straightforward. 

Deployment took us one day. We were done with the installation quite quickly.

We handled the installation ourselves, along with the assistance of a Nutanix partner engineer.

Nutanix's partner was there at the data center along with us. I went through some Nutanix training as well. This was about five days and by the end, I was well-versed in deployment and other processes. We didn't face any difficulty. We knew how to face configurations and charts, etc. 

Before choosing this solution we looked avSAN technology and HPE SimpliVity. We were also looking at Dell VxRail as well.

We aren't using the latest version of the solution. It might be the latest minus one. The bank always goes for a minus version and not the latest version because of some compliance-related issues related to bank policies.

I'd recommend the solution. It's quite good. As an alternative, VxRail is also a good option.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. I'm very happy with this product. My workload is currently running on production on a Nutanix box, and it is working absolutely fine. There are no issues. It offers good performance and optimization. It's resilient.