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reviewer2053056 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
One-click update means we don't have to deal with and coordinate multiple vendors' products
Pros and Cons
  • "It also does a good job when it comes to optimizing performance with machine learning and AI. It's able to identify the VMs that are constrained and not constrained, and which ones are "bully" or not. It gives you a recommendation based on your usage. It learns your user environment."
  • "I would like to see the integration of native, one-click "open support ticket" functionality for errors generated by the system within Prism. Currently, we have to manually open a support ticket in a separate web browser and manually input the error information."

What is our primary use case?

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

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

How has it helped my organization?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is most valuable?

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

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

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

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

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

What needs improvement?

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

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

Buyer's Guide
Nutanix Prism
May 2025
Learn what your peers think about Nutanix Prism. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2025.
857,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and support?

Their technical support is great, very knowledgeable and friendly.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

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

How was the initial setup?

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

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

What was our ROI?

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

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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

What other advice do I have?

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

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
IT Systems administrator at a government with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Improved our uptime: storage, network, and compute are always on; and helps us manage snapshots for protection
Pros and Cons
  • "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."
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using Prism for three-plus years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and support?

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

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

We used Lanair Technology Group.

What was our ROI?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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

What other advice do I have?

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.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Nutanix Prism
May 2025
Learn what your peers think about Nutanix Prism. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2025.
857,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.
reviewer2049372 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Support Supervisor at a local government with 201-500 employees
Real User
Requires very little troubleshooting, and single pane of glass makes it easy to update network or encrypt data
Pros and Cons
  • "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."
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using Prism for about five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and support?

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.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

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

What was our ROI?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Data Center Admin at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Gives us one place to manage all hardware resources and VMs, and reporting helps with capacity planning
Pros and Cons
  • "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."
  • "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... 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."

What is our primary use case?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

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.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is scalable.

How are customer service and support?

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.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What was our ROI?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
ICT Coordinator at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Top 20
Gives us a single point of touch for our resources, making them easier to manage
Pros and Cons
  • "Nutanix Insights... 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."
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using Nutanix Prism for one year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It's very stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's fully scalable.

How are customer service and support?

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.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We did not have a previous solution.

How was the initial setup?

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. 

What was our ROI?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Sysadmin at a healthcare company with 201-500 employees
Real User
We see a real difference in performance when compared to the rest of our infrastructure
Pros and Cons
  • "There are so many valuable features but Nutanix Flow for microsegmentation of the network, and the Life Cycle Manager for dating hardware and software are among the most important for us."
  • "The interface is good, but it needs improvements. There are a lot of functions that are only available in the CLI. In addition, some of the hardware components could be improved. We already had some trouble with disks."

What is our primary use case?

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

How has it helped my organization?

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

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

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

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

What is most valuable?

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

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

What needs improvement?

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

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

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using Nutanix Prism for three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It's a 10 out of 10 in stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's very scalable.

We have about 500 users of the solution.

How are customer service and support?

Their technical support is very good.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

How was the initial setup?

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

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

Except for upgrades, there is no maintenance.

What was our ROI?

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

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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

What other advice do I have?

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

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Shahriyar Atayev - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Administrator at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Top 20
Better performance than VMware, and provides good visibility into our networks
Pros and Cons
  • "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."
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have worked with Nutanix for more than five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is scalable.

How are customer service and support?

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.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

What other advice do I have?

I would definitely recommend Nutanix Prism.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Infrastructure Professional Service Team Lead at G-Able
Reseller
Top 5Leaderboard
Helped our IT management by monitoring the cluster and automating the installation of software updates
Pros and Cons
  • "Resource monitoring is the most valuable feature."
  • "The stability has room for improvement."

What is our primary use case?

We use Nutanix Prism to manage our on-prem virtualized data center environment.

How has it helped my organization?

Nutanix Prism assists in monitoring our customers' workloads, enabling them to predict when they will require scaling out.

The solution offers a single pane of glass that enables individuals without technical expertise to access the dashboard and understand its value.

Nutanix Prism's user interface for computing, storage, and networking is extremely user-friendly. We can effortlessly utilize the same graphical user interface to monitor and create virtual machines as well as create data storage.

We use Nutanix Prism's automation for upgrades.

Nutanix Prism offers our customers visibility into their data environment, helping to reduce the need for resources in troubleshooting and management.

Nutanix Prism has helped our IT management by monitoring the cluster and automating the installation of software updates.

The solution assists our data protection teams by offering the capability to perform data selection and recovery.

What is most valuable?

Resource monitoring is the most valuable feature.

What needs improvement?

I would like Nutanix Prism to have improved integration with third-party products.

The stability has room for improvement.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Nutanix Prism for three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I give Nutanix Prism's stability a seven out of ten.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I give Nutanix Prism's scalability an eight out of ten.

How are customer service and support?

The technical support is great.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We are currently using VMware and Nutanix Prism.

What about the implementation team?

We implement the solution for our customers.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Nutanix Prism's cost is reasonable.

What other advice do I have?

I give Nutanix Prism an eight out of ten.

Some of our customers have multiple sites, while others have just one, so we deploy the solution across various locations. Two to three people are required for the maintenance of the solution.

Nutanix Prism is an intriguing option for certain clients due to its reasonable pricing. However, it does have stability issues with the software, making it suitable for usage in development or UAT environments. I do not recommend using Nutanix Prism for production purposes.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Hybrid Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Reseller
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Nutanix Prism Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: May 2025
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Nutanix Prism Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.