Nutanix Prism Reviews

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.

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

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

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

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

The solution is very stable. 

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Nutanix Prism for 7 years.

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

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

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

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

The maintenance is very easy.

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

Our company's customers usually ask us about simplification of their virtual environments, and they don't want to go for an external storage option or have a three-tier data center architecture. Our company's customers want small boxes that can handle the complete workload, including the storage, owing to which they prefer the HCI infrastructure. Nutanix Prism is basically used to monitor and manage specific areas of Nutanix HCI.

Usually, my company attempts to provision or propose Nutanix Prism when our customer asks for simplicity in their infrastructure. Simplicity and unified management are options or advantages when it comes to Nutanix Prism. Nutanix Prism is a complete infrastructure solution as it offers reduced complexity and gives users the option to use its unified management capabilities. With the product's features, a user can extract different kinds of reports and what is going on in their environment and infrastructure while having the option to look into how it can be optimized and how troubleshooting can be carried out better. The aforementioned details are the reasons my company prefers Nutanix Prism.

The UI offered by the solution is okay. Some of our company's customers who use the product ask for some granular level reports which make up for an area where improvements are required. If users want to check the top five high-performance virtual machines in their environment, then the tool should provide them with granular-level reports. In relation to the product's reporting capabilities, some features need to be improved.

Currently, there are different products in Nutanix, especially in the area of databases. Nutanix is also working on the AI part presently. The tool should try to consolidate all applications in one single platform and give the customers a good view of all the applications that are being managed by OpenShift or any containerization platform while differentiating them from the applications that are monolithic. The product currently fails to provide a complete view to customers. From an improvement perspective, provision for a complete view might help the product's customers to improve their experience with the tool.

I have been using Nutanix Prism for five to six months.

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

The product's scalability features are good. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Our company deals with certain customers who use HCI solutions from Nutanix and not specifically Nutanix Prism alone. Some government and non-government entities prefer Nutanix products. My company also deals with customers from the healthcare and education sectors who use Nutanix products. Nutanix offers some VDI solutions. Some banks, like Commercial Bank of Dubai, use products offered under Nutanix.

The solution's technical support is helpful and responsive. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

Being a system integrator, I have experience with HPE, VMware, and Nutanix. From an infrastructure perspective, my company deals with HPE. My company prefers to use HPE hardware on the software offered by Nutanix.

I don't really engage myself in deployment, so I may not be able to discuss if I faced any difficulties during the deployment process, but from an engineer's perspective, its deployment phase is quite smooth.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model. In one of the sister companies, the solution is deployed on the cloud. Some of our company's customers who use hyperscalers are considering moving to the cloud solutions offered by Nutanix.

Though I am not a part of the deployment team, the engineers who deploy the product say that it is an easy process. Depending on the infrastructure, which may consist of a small node or a cluster of nodes, the time frame to deploy the product can be a subjective matter, especially since it also depends on different kinds of parameters. Sometimes, the deployment takes time if something is related to the customers' end, where they may want some certain connectivity, but they don't have it. If discussing the product's installation part alone, the deliverables are present to meet the deployment requirements. In general, it takes less than a day to get the product up and running.

It is an expensive software. One of the challenges I have seen is that the subscription-based licensing model comes across as a recurring cost, which makes it an area of concern for our company's customers. There are some SKUs for which, depending on the requirements of our customers, we propose ideas.

I rate the product's price a seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is expensive and ten is cheap.

Our company does have plans to opt for the maintenance services for the solution, but presently, we are in the process of hiring a technical team that can take care of the post-sales area, along with the management and maintenance of the new clusters in Nutanix.

Our company has a team in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. There are four to five people in Abu Dhabi and around four to five people in Dubai. Overall, our company has a team of ten to fifteen engineers to take care of the product. As my organization is a huge company in the UAE, we have different entities working on different solutions. Along with MDS Dubai, another entity works on different solutions from Dell, so our company has engineers from Dell as well. Combined, our company has a good amount of resources when it comes to the technical team.

I rate the overall tool a seven and a half out of ten.

We use Nutanix Prism for building a private cloud solution.

Nutanix Prism has made our organization's administration simple.

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

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

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

Nutanix Prism is a very scalable solution.

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

Positive

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

Nutanix Prism's initial setup is very easy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Nutanix Prism user interface is also good.

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

I've been using this solution for two years.

It's stable.

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

There are no costs in addition to the licensing fee.

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

Prism 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.

I'm the assistant vice president and we are Nutanix partners.

Prism has a user-friendly UI with a centralized console. It offers a lot of features and software. 

Performance metrics and analytics could be improved. 

I've been using this solution for two years. 

We have not faced any stability issues from the Nutanix side. 

The solution is easily scalable, we have around 200 IT users. 

We have engagement with the India support team, which is a dedicated team and we have a weekly scheduled call with the ITM. We go over any tech issues or additional services they suggest and can apply. This helps us with our regulatory reporting. 

The initial setup was simple because we had an ESX deployment at the hypervisor level. It was simple because of DVR and we use a private cloud environment that is a VRA. We now have around 60 nodes in our production setup.

We compared Nutanix with VMware. VMware has the VRA as an automation tool and Nutanix has an ERA cloud automation tool. Nutanix offers a lot of software including the automation cloud tool and networking tools as well. It's good for Microsoft segmentation and very competitive with VMware.

I rate the solution nine out of 10.