Nutanix Prism Reviews

We're using Nutanix as our main computing platform and we're using Prism with it. It's the Nutanix management UI and we're using it to manage the Nutanix cluster comprised of four physical servers. It's a single pane for management, and we're doing upgrades, updates, management, and protection, everything, through Prism. It's a really convenient interface.

We run it in our own server room in our on-prem facility.

The effect of Nutanix on our organization has been day and night. Our organization is a local municipal center. When I joined the city, that's when Nutanix arrived. It was sitting in the shipping room. Prior to my arrival, I was told our uptime was not solid. We would have outages left and right. Servers would go down because it was a three-tier architecture with SAN, a one-gig network, and a hodgepodge of pizza-box servers.

By implementing Nutanix, and consolidating all workloads into its cluster, we have protected those workloads in that one cluster. Storage-wise, network-wise, and compute-wise, we're always on. We haven't had downtime ever since we moved to Nutanix, zero, except for the power outages we had. There has been nothing wrong on the Nutanix side. We get good feedback from the business. They have recognized the high uptime and reliable service IT is providing and it is mainly due to implementing Nutanix.

We're small, so I'm the only sysadmin working in Prism, but it has cut down my management and maintenance time. In terms of help desk operations, it has also worked well. When I get a request to operate on the virtual machines, I can do it through Prism Central or vCenter, which is easy and saves time.

I am also our data protection "team," so I manage backups. Nutanix's data protection, based on snapshot architecture, has been our number-two solution. Our first go-to is the Rubrik backup system against ransomware attacks. The second thing I would fall back on is our Nutanix data protection snapshot. We have at least two layers that help us to sleep better.

The biggest plus that I want to commend them for is definitely their one-click update/upgrade feature. I use Prism for that and it's so amazing. That, by itself, is a selling point.

Another feature I use heavily is the data protection. I log into Prism to schedule a snapshot to be taken of our virtual machines at different intervals. That means we take more frequent snapshots of critical workloads, while less critical are done once a day. I set the schedule to retain the snapshots for a certain amount of time, and then they age out, so they don't take up extra space. All that is done through Prism.

And the user interface of Prism in the single pane of glass is very intuitive. I use it to look at the health aspect of our system. You don't have to go through a manual to figure things out. Their dev team has done a really good job of arranging things in the UI. I like it. It's very simple to use.

Deploying virtual machines is also very easy and intuitive.

We're not using the microsegmentation, but the physical and virtual aspects of the networking are very clear and easy to understand.

There is some room for improvement. I wish the main landing page, the dashboard, could be organized in a way where, when there is an alert because something is wrong, I would not have to click three or four times to get to what actually happened. I wish it were quicker to get to the bottom of the problem.

We have been using Prism for three-plus years.

The stability of Prism is very good. I give it a nine out of 10.

We started out with three nodes and scaled out by adding a fourth. That process was pretty painless. The scalability is very good.

Their tech support is good. They're technical and knowledgeable.

Positive

We were using single servers and VMware vSAN, and that VMware setup was a disaster. I hated it with a passion. It was going down left and right. Granted, we were on the first generation of vSAN. Hopefully, they improved it. But with the version that we deployed, vSAN was very unreliable, and I just want to get away from it. It was terrible. I would spend hours and hours on the phone with VMware technicians and they still couldn't get it right.

I helped install and configure Nutanix. We went through professional services and it was done within half a day. For us, it was a straightforward, easy setup. We have it deployed in a single location, taking up four Us, one U for each node, and they're connected to the 10-gig switch.

In terms of maintenance, we haven't had to do almost anything.

We used Lanair Technology Group.

In the past three years, it has definitely been worth the money because we haven't put in any extra money to fix or buy anything additional due to something negative about Prism or it lacking in any aspect. 

Also, although we have been running VMware on Nutanix over those three years, Nutanix has proven itself so well that we are trying to get off of VMware. That means we'll be saving the cost of the VMware license once we do so.

The pricing was decent, average. It wasn't a Black Friday sale, but it was good.

I looked at their new offering called Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Azure. And I like what I'm seeing, so I have a meeting set up this afternoon to speak with their subject matter expert on that topic. That may be down the road for us. Currently, we don't have their cloud service.

I would advise others to consider Nutanix and give it a try. It's a really good solution, especially for small to medium-sized organizations, and definitely for VDI. 

However, there was a "gotcha" for us. Do understand that the management overhead is pretty big. About 25 to 30 percent is consumed off the bat by their management called CVM. That means that 25 to 30 percent of the memory and CPU that you buy are gone. So make sure you size it properly, with that in mind.

We use it as a private cloud for all of our IT infrastructure, including all the virtual machines for every project. We use it for workflow automation for Kubernetes. Nutanix has automation of Kubernetes clusters, and this is a very important use case for us.

It is used in our organization for every system and application: Oracle Database CDB, security systems, and local systems like our antivirus security system, Active Directory, and our finance system.

We have Nutanix in our main office, and two disaster sites. We run our workloads in a data center where there are physical servers and nodes.

We get better performance from Nutanix than we had with VMware. Our applications work very fast now and that is good for the applications team. Our customers are happy.

Among the most valuable features are the

• reporting
• Nutanix Files
• Nutanix Calm
• Nutanix Flow.
  

Also, Prism Central is a single point to manage every cluster. Everything can be managed in one panel. Everything is there on the main page of the dashboard.

It also provides good visibility into our networks.

In addition, because Nutanix has cost management abilities, we can see how to optimize the capacity of our Nutanix products. We know when our storage will run out and when we need to buy more. This is good for the efficiency of our IT organization. The capacity planning is good. I would say it has improved our IT efficiency by 30 percent.

We have a data protection team and Nutanix Data Protector is good. It really helps by taking snapshots in a short time. Our data protection team's efficiency has improved by about 50 percent.

The security of the solution is also good.

The processing of updates and upgrades could be faster.

Also, sometimes the life cycle management function of Nutanix can't find the latest version of the firmware. The lifecycle management product could be more up-to-date.

I have worked with Nutanix for more than five years.

It is very stable. We haven't had any issues with the stability.

It is scalable.

Every system, of course, has some issues, but every ticket we open is resolved by Nutanix support via the Nutanix portal. The support is really good. We don't have any problems with their support or any unresolved issues.

Yearly, we have a maximum of 10 support tickets.

Positive

Previously, we used VMware ESXi and we migrated to Nutanix because it has better performance and functions, as well as new features. We see it as more stable than the VMware products we used, and more secure. The user interface is also simpler. We chose it and we like it.

It also provides a simple migration process from VMware to Nutanix. We used the new Nutanix Move product and it resulted in a simple migration of the virtual machines from the other infrastructure to Nutanix.

The deployment was complex. We have more than one installation for different projects, but the first time, for our blockchain project, it took approximately two weeks. 

However, it is simpler for new staff to learn Nutanix than to learn other products.

The system is used by our network admin, application admin team, and database team. There are 10 administrators.

The price and licensing policies are advantageous. The pricing is better than our previous product. Management uses the portal to track the licenses and for cost management and it is better than our previous product.

I would definitely recommend Nutanix Prism.

We have been using Nutanix Prism to manage a whole cluster to manage old VMs and the object inside the Nutanix and it has been very easy since we have a very beautiful dashboard that gives quite a lot of information about the CPU replacement or storage use. 

The main dashboard itself has been very helpful. If we ever have any issues, we are able to get back on the dashboard to take a look. The management is very easy with Nutanix. With such a dashboard where you have all the visibility you need - including access to alerts or issues, you have great control. 

The setup is simple. 

The solution is scalable. 

It is stable and reliable. 

The pricing could be improved. We'd like it if they offered some sort of discount for returning users. 

I've been using the solution for six or seven years at this point. It's been a while since we began using it. 

The solution is very stable and reliable. The performance is good. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

The product is scalable. It's no problem if you want to expand it. 

We have about six users on the solution. They are from the IT department. 

Technical support is good. Once you initiate contact, they will work with you and sort out the issue. They are responsive and knowledgeable. 

Positive

Beforehand, we used VMware. We had been using VMware for nine years or somewhere around that length of time. Then, we shifted from VMware to Nutanix.

It is a straightforward setup. It's not overly complex or very difficult to manage. 

We had some engineers manage the process. Having it done by a professional engineer ensures everything runs quite smoothly. 

For the deployment, there was only one or two staff involved. We now have five staff members who are well trained on Nutanix we are able to do some daily management duties every day. They are engineers. 

We did have outside help from an integrator during the setup process. 

We did buy the software with that integrator. We had the installation and configuration, et cetera, handled with their help.

I don't have any details in regard to any ROI. 

We pay for the solution on a yearly basis. 

I'm a customer and end-user. 

We are using the latest version of the solution. 

I'd recommend the solution to others. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Nutanix Prism for about seven years.

It's very stable.

The scalability is one of the best features.

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

They're the best I've seen.

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nutanix Prism is used in a virtualized environment with high-performance requirements where people can have the VMs and run the databases with infrastructure as a given service, that has five nines or four nines uptime environments.

Nutanix Prism is popular in the Indian market, particularly in enterprises where they need a DR type of environment, and where they look for less than finite RPO and RTO. If you have this environment on-premises, and if you can just rent out some portion to any of the service providers, then you can easily set up a DR environment to give you a finite list versus RPO and RTO.

Nutanix Prism needs more flexibility commercially and more flexibility with its licensing. Currently, they're very fixed on their licensing model, for example, it's based on terabyte calculation.

I've been using Nutanix Prism for two years now.

Nutanix Prism is a very stable solution.

Nutanix Prism is a scalable solution. It also has hyperscale availability.

We contacted the support team for Nutanix Prism during the initial setup. There were some configurations we were not able to understand, but their support team was very helpful.

We used VMware predominantly. We also used Cisco HCI before using Nutanix Prism. We didn't need to switch, but we wanted to have different flavors in our environment to cater to more customers.

Nutanix Prism has a very straightforward initial setup. They provided very helpful guidance during the setup process. If one knows the basic setup criteria of the network, the solution can be easily deployed in any environment.

Implementation of Nutanix Prism took a few weeks. We set up the environment in-house without using a consultant or integrator, but we had help from the Nutanix support team.

The license we bought for Nutanix Prism is perpetual, so once you have it, you can keep on using it. It's a three-year license that you pay once for. The license we have covers the three-node cluster, but then you need to have the basic networking gear for the infrastructure to work in the type of environment we're in. For example, the only additional thing we need to do apart from getting the license is to plan the network connectivity.

I use Nutanix Prism. It's a three-node solution for virtualization. It's an on-premise solution. I don't remember which version I'm using.

The solution is being used within our organization, but we also have customers hosted on top of that, so I don't remember exactly how many people are using Nutanix Prism. For deployment and maintenance of the solution, you'll need two people: one system administrator and one network L2 or L3.

I can recommend Nutanix Prism to others who want to start using it, but my advice is for them to get the POC done first. They have to understand the environment, use cases, and what they're looking for, then they can make their call.

I'm rating Nutanix Prism nine 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.

We use it for hyperconverged storage only. Prism is a gateway to Nutanix Elements and the latter shows me the storage. We run it on-premises in the data center in our building and it helps run education related applications like student management, databases,and time-tabling.

It gives me a centralized console for all my hosts. It's a single window to sign into and explore whatever has been configured.

From my point of view, it has just added complexity, to be honest, but I like the way the extra layers have been added. It makes it complex, but it gives you the advantage of extra security. It's able to segregate spare storage from each host into a common pool, which can then be used in production.

And it has definitely helped the management of storage. Overall, it has helped improve the efficiency of our organization’s IT management by 40 percent. We haven't been adding capacity to the storage because it's giving us quite good insights into how much we've been utilizing and through the availability forecast.

One of the good features is that I tried a few firmware patches and updates and there was no downtime. There was one case where it prompted that it would cause an outage on the host, but I was able to just click and update everything else and it happened in the background without any impact on the production loads.

It provides a single pane of glass and the graphics and the presentation are quite good. It's quite exciting for me. I would rate it 10 out of 10. The user interface is pretty easy to use for compute and storage.

Prism is also quite comprehensive when it comes to reports. You can pretty much schedule and run reports of whatever you want. The reporting is already quite mature.   

In our environment we are using it alongside VMware, so some integration with that would be nice. VMware has SHD (Skyline Health Diagnostics) which diagnoses health and gives suggestions. A plug-in for taking information out of it would be helpful.

I have been using Nutanix Prism for less than four months. Our organization has been using it for years.

One element has a full tolerance of two nodes, and two nodes were already in a failed state for quite a long time. Either we were lucky enough or it's been stable enough. So I would rate it at 50 percent for stability.

I assume we can add hosts on the fly without impacting anything. It must be scalable, but I haven't looked into it.

There are another 20 ITOs/ITPs that are going to be merged into our wider organization. The intention is that we keep Nutanix and expand it to other organizations.

Their technical support is excellent. I love it.

Positive

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, but we have it in a single location and it is used by multiple departments with about 1,000 users.

So far it has all been working beyond my expectations. Nutanix is disabling some of the backend SSH, so authentication and authorization are changing. It's definitely going to be in line with what most other vendors are doing. I see Microsoft disabling basic authentication and going into other kinds. It's keeping pace with the latest and emerging trends and technologies.

It's capable of auto-maintenance, but it does require some maintenance on my part. Over the past couple of weeks, when I log in to Prism, I have seen alerts, most of them automated messages about high utilization, but some of them have needed human intervention. We have a team of four involved in maintenance of the solution. I lead the team and the others have yet to dive into it. The entire team is pretty new.

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

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

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

It's all run in our data center.

We have greater visibility.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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