Nutanix Central Reviews

My main use cases with Nutanix Central are managing updates, including LCM updates. We also manage all of our clusters and servers with it. It tells us the hardware health, VM health, disk issues, and alerts. 

We are currently using Nutanix Central to manage our hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure. We have Nutanix and AWS, and we are currently in the process of migrating everything to AWS. 

The tasks I primarily perform within Nutanix Central include many things, such as performing upgrades and life cycle management. Currently, our biggest task is migration, so we are constantly migrating using the Move tool and monitoring everything, including health and alerts.

Nutanix Central has helped our company with resource utilization by reducing our day-to-day admin tasks with the alert setup. It helps us get ahead of potential problems. 

Additionally, it helps us reduce costs by utilizing one service instead of multiple services for the same purpose.

We have seen a reduction in security incidents. We used to get a lot with VMware, but with Nutanix, we haven't seen any issues related to malware, etc.

It helps us to see everything. It also depends on how it's set up, but for us, it has been helpful in seeing the hardware and the health and monitoring all clusters efficiently.

The features of Nutanix Central that I value most are primarily the hardware portion because it tells us everything available regarding BIOS upgrades and any updates that become compatible, including LCM upgrades. I enjoy troubleshooting and dealing with urgent issues.

It benefits our company by providing warnings in advance. Before an issue becomes critical, it sends us an email notification with warning status information. 

I don't think there's much improvement needed in Nutanix Central. Maybe there are different tools I haven't discovered yet that may bring everyone on the same page. I am still in the process of researching them and providing feedback to Nutanix. For what we use it for, it runs efficiently.

What I think is missing in Nutanix Central to make it the best product ever is compatibility with our backups. One of the biggest challenges we have with Nutanix currently is that our Rubrik backups do not work with the Nutanix API. That would be great to resolve, as it would reduce the time spent resolving the issue.

I have been using Nutanix Central for about over six to seven years now.

The stability and reliability have been excellent. If one node goes down, it automatically alerts us, but we can always count on the other builds running. There haven't been any issues where, unlike VMware, if one goes down, it shuts down the cluster. The stability and reliability have been consistently great.

It scales efficiently with the growing needs of our company. We will always use them. Currently, we are implementing more storage and expanding our Nutanix infrastructure to ensure we can move everything. Our goal is to become exclusively Nutanix.

My experience has been phenomenal. From all the issues we've had, from installation to troubleshooting, it has always been great. They've always resolved issues in a timely manner. There have been some challenges, but they have always greeted us with a smile and are very patient.

Positive

In the past, it's been pretty smooth and easy. There are obviously hiccups. Since they've done their updates in firmware, it's just been a problem. I just started getting involved in their deployment.

I have worked with Nutanix in various companies and support their products. They are very efficient, especially for restores when using their backup solution. Their dashboard and customer service are phenomenal. The only issue is the API backup limitation, but everything else is excellent.

It has helped us with more efficient IT management. Compared to when we used VMware only, Nutanix helps us manage everything more efficiently. When an alert appears, Nutanix provides detailed information and resolution steps, making our job easier. Opening tickets is quick and simple. Personally, I would say efficiency has improved by about 70%.

My experience with the pricing, setup costs, and licensing is limited as I don't manage that part. However, I know it has been within budget and hasn't impacted our financial planning. 

We did consider other solutions before choosing Nutanix Central. It was between renewing our contract with VMware or going with Nutanix. The main difference between VMware and Nutanix is the ease of use. Nutanix is much easier. The interface is better, and the customer service is above and beyond. Regarding alerting, it's much easier to resolve. While VMware is great, it has many issues and false alarms, which Nutanix doesn't have.

Nutanix Central is phenomenal. Many people should explore it and have it installed. There are demos available to take advantage of. You can use different interfaces. In a previous company, we used a different interface. The product itself has extensive capabilities if people take the time to explore it. It may cost more, but it's worth it. 

I would rate Nutanix Central a ten out of ten.

We use Nutanix Central for our hybrid cloud management because we have our on-premises Nutanix clusters and AWS cloud resources.

One of the best features is that it provides a unified control plane, which offers single-pane-of-glass visibility for us. We can see all the service-related console into that, monitoring how our clusters are running and whether any clusters are having service issues. It offers a simplified way of navigation because it is very easy to do deep dive analysis.

It provides a single view of the entire Nutanix environment as well as our public cloud deployments. We can see the status of all clusters, nodes under those clusters, and if we have EC2 instances or storage deployed from the AWS side, we can view those with drop-down menus in a unified way.

The solution has helped us significantly with its performance analysis based on existing data and future trend analysis. We can see how much capacity we would need if the similar trend continues for another year, considering the growth in the last month or year related to applications deployed on those clusters. This allows us to plan our capacity requirements better from the dashboard and analytics. Event correlation helps us during crisis management, and these dashboards help us perform incident correlation.

We are utilizing APIs from our existing tools, such as Splunk and ServiceNow as a ticketing tool or configuration management tool. We have integrated those APIs with Nutanix Central so it can fetch information directly from these tools and provide that data directly onto the Nutanix Central console.

This has reduced the turnaround time for our team because previously they had to navigate through multiple places for cluster-related information. This tool provides a single console where they can access all required information. Since we operate in a hybrid cloud environment, we also get information from our public cloud side from the single console. The centralized administration is performed from this console, which helps the administration team and creates efficiency in their work, allowing them to focus on other creative tasks.

Prior to implementing Nutanix Central, we saved at least 20 to 25% of the bandwidth for our existing people and team. We have re-skilled those people to other tech platforms where they are now contributing. With the same set of workloads and apps, we initially had ten people, now only seven support this while three contribute to different tech stacks, creating 25 to 30% efficiency.

One area of improvement could be from the AI side, as the industry shifts and grows. If we could get workflow mechanisms built into Nutanix Central, we could define workflows to solve known issues or problems without requiring human intervention. This can first be implemented in non-prod workloads or applications, and once we see that they satisfy our business requirements, we can enable these workflows in our prod workloads and applications. This will help us solve more problems and create more efficiency, freeing up bandwidth for our operations and administration teams.

We have been using the solution for the last five years.

The stability rating for Nutanix Central is nine out of ten.

The scalability rating for Nutanix Central is nine out of ten.

The customer service rating for Nutanix Central is eight out of ten.

Positive

The deployment is super easy and takes not more than 60 to 75 minutes.

Every product has unique opportunities, and since we are a Nutanix organization, comparing it with VMware, they have their own set of products, such as VMware automation engine. Nutanix Central has its own capabilities, though I cannot exactly detail how it compares, but it provides the benefits mentioned previously.

The solution requires maintenance. The overall rating for Nutanix Central is 9 out of 10.

We use Nutanix Central for privileged access. It is more for individuals who do not require the ability to connect via VPN and get in there quickly, such as administrators of the platform. We have it very locked down because it gives a lot of access to multiple sites and locations. We are using it primarily for the privileged access side.

We've multiple Prism Centrals and we're primarily in the on-premises side of the space. We will be expanding shortly to the public cloud.

Nutanix Central benefits our company by reducing confusion around managing different Prism Centrals, addresses, and IPs. Some people have difficulty remembering resolvable names. This helped us to send newer team members, particularly from our core infrastructure, to a single site to log in, view the infrastructure at a glance, and perform administrative tasks related to the core infrastructure.

We use Nutanix Central for new server builds. I do VM builds and general administrative tasks such as template deployments and management. We do leverage the capability of managing the IAM as well from Nutanix Central. It kind of helps us to keep things secure at the lower level for the folks that we require to log in over VPN directly to Prism Central. That's been very beneficial.

We are doing a data center migration and comparing current app workloads to what we had before. The ability to go between multiple sites from one location and look at those VMs very quickly helped us to do those comparisons on the go. We are able to run the reports and get that data much quicker than having multiple Prism Centrals and going to multiple different locations and trying to work to get that data aggregated. 

Having a single pane of visibility with Nutanix Central impacts my team's ability to efficiently search and access infrastructure entities. Whether we go directly through the dropdown to each Prism Central or utilize the search function, it has been very useful to get to different objects and entities at a much quicker pace.

We have multiple Prism Centrals - two currently, with more coming in, especially with NC2 and the public cloud. We can log into one portal, one panel, and see metrics, VMs, and perform administration tasks, all from one site.

There has been confusion regarding the initial setup of Nutanix Central. There was a requirement to open a ticket, and they were working on the KBs in the background. The documentation aligning their platform versus their general cloud platform has some overlap, creating confusion about the IAM requirements. We needed to create an additional SAML connection and match through to Prism Central. It was not clear when to use the group ID, vanity name, and other elements. This is an area they could definitely improve upon. Based on my tickets, I may not be alone in this experience. Once it is set up, everything works smoothly, but the initial setup was difficult.

The permissions should be set for the highest level, more akin to cluster admin and Prism admin. There have been occasions where I needed to log into Prism Central directly to complete work due to permissions issues from Nutanix Central. They are very close to a one-for-one equivalence. While their website states it is not meant to replace Prism Element or Prism Central, I would prefer to see it reach the level where I can perform all Prism Central tasks from one location to multiple Prism Centrals.

We have been using Nutanix Central for about eight months now consistently.

Nutanix Central is available 90% of the time with the ability to log in and manage all resources. There have only been a couple of instances where, upon login, it was unable to reach a site or encountered permissions issues. Usually, it is stable, and I can access what I need.

Nutanix Central scales very effectively with the growing needs of our company.

It has been tremendous. They have known where to go and what to examine. They have also provided feedback from other customers, letting me know that I am not alone in reporting these issues. I appreciate that when an issue is reported and reviewed, they provide next steps and work to resolve the issue long term, not just for me as a client or customer. I would give the customer service a perfect score.

Positive

Before choosing Nutanix Central, we were utilizing just Prism Central and Prism Element. We were searching for an ability to manage all resources at once, similar to what we had with Broadcom vCenter, where one location connects to all resources simultaneously. After the announcement about Nutanix Central going GA, we conducted research, spoke to our Nutanix team, and confirmed details about costs and licensing. After receiving all details, we decided to move forward with a PoC, and we now use it in production.

We have vCenter from Broadcom, and we cannot help but compare against competitors. We have a hybrid configuration with ESX on Nutanix, and Nutanix Central has helped us with that as well.

We had a bit of a rough time with the initial deployment. However, creating the tickets and describing the problem was easy. They were quick to help us overcome those issues. Again, it was mainly around the IAM portion and the configuration of the identities. Because we already had initial configurations completed for our team to access Nutanix.com, the support portal, and some other support tools on the site. it kind of created a dichotomy there and a little bit of confusion. They just need to update the KBs a bit so that these are more specific to Nutanix Central, not just their cloud offerings.

The biggest return on investment when using Nutanix Central is not necessarily monetary, but rather the time saved, reduced training requirements, and the ability to access and manage multiple sites and locations in one area. It has created efficiencies for different employees who can access what they need without visiting multiple websites.

I have seen measurable outcomes from using Nutanix Central, such as more efficient IT management. The ability to see multiple VMs at once and easily search and access them directly, regardless of their location, has been very beneficial for management and response.

We had the benefit of already being under Ultimate and Pro for the majority of our licensing models. We do not incur additional costs for using Nutanix Central. Similar to Security Central, this is one of those tools we are adopting, integrating, and promoting because we already have access to it.

We are still working with our FE regarding the solution cost visibility feature of Nutanix Central to get the hooks and ability to see our infrastructure at a glance, beyond that which is just Nutanix.

Overall, I would rate Nutanix Central an eight out of ten.

We are managing two different clusters with it.

Currently, we are not using Nutanix Central to manage hybrid multi-cloud infrastructures. Our clusters are on-premises. We are looking at getting into the cloud space with AWS as our cloud provider. We are also considering shipping some data to storage platforms such as Wasabi.

The specific tasks we primarily perform within Nutanix Central relate to monitoring, upgrades, and policy management. The team members who work for me handle most of the upgrades from this central location.

We recently needed to assess our storage resources. It was easy to access Nutanix Central and find that information. We discovered two or three different VMs that were duplicated as a result of some restore processes. We were able to quickly clean it up and gain that space back.

We have realized time savings with Nutanix Central. It helps prevent resource depletion that could put us in a vulnerable position regarding HA. 

Having a single pane of visibility with Nutanix Central significantly impacts my team's ability to efficiently search and access infrastructure entities. They use it daily for a holistic view of the entire environment.

The ease of use is valuable because we can manage two different clusters or several clusters with it. I appreciate the one umbrella management feel. We can run updates and get different types of analytics.

The update process in terms of using LCM or using Central is sometimes confusing, but I think they are working towards unifying that.

I have been using Nutanix Central for five years.

It is always reliable. We have had one issue with Nutanix Central when trying to upgrade it, as it ran out of disk space. There were some files being held that got cleaned up. Other than that, it just works.

Nutanix Central scales with the growing needs of my company, and we have expanded usage. We completed a three-node expansion, and it was very easy. It worked seamlessly.

Nutanix support is one of the top ones I have dealt with. I have been in the industry for a long time, and they are really quick to respond and assign tickets.

Positive

When considering other solutions before selecting Nutanix Central, we did not evaluate alternatives. Once we were with Nutanix, we automatically proceeded. Prior to that, regarding our virtual infrastructure, we had several VMware clusters and three or four Hyper-V clusters.

Going from VMware or Hyper-V to a hyper-converged infrastructure is significantly different. We were able to put all our heavy loads, heavy databases, and heavy processing loads into Nutanix. It provided a significant increase in speed and ease of use. We had many problems with QoS and large file data transfers inside our Layer 3 network with the other systems that were hard to overcome, and Nutanix Central immediately resolved these issues.

It was super easy. A few clicks and it is done.

We have seen a return on investment with Nutanix Central through time savings. Because we use it frequently, managing without Nutanix Central would require significantly more man-hours. While I cannot approximate percentage-wise or hours for the return on investment, I have seen measurable outcomes from using Nutanix Central through more efficient IT management.

Our experience was fine. We have no complaints. 

Nutanix Central's cost visibility feature helps with resource planning and budget preparation. When we approach budget planning time, it is beneficial to know what the costs will be.

I would rate Nutanix Central a ten out of ten. The ease of use, holistic view of the environment, and being able to manage from one place make it great.

Right now, DR is my primary and only task.

One specific benefit I've realized is that it allows us to test effectively. The test feature will spin up the VMs to make sure that the infrastructure works without messing with production, as we have them in a segregated, isolated network. We don't have to worry about causing any issues, as long as the networking is correct, and this test function is going to be for the entire organization to ensure it works fine, which is really cool, and it cleans itself up when you tell it to.

We are yet to see improvements in our company's compliance posture or a reduction in security incidents. We are just building the testing schedule, and, hopefully, by October, we will exercise them.

Having a single pane of visibility within Nutanix Central impacts our team's ability to efficiently search and access infrastructure entities.

I find the categories in Nutanix Central most valuable because they allow us to group things easily, so we don't have to deal with complications, and that's how we use our DR. The grouping feature in Nutanix Central is helpful because, from my perspective, it's similar to tagging that I've been using in AWS and Rubrik. It allows us to know what groups, such as application groups, servers belong to, so we can group them appropriately in consistency groups for DR purposes.

The API needs work. It's not specifically Central, but just the API as a whole. We've had a recurring issue where the API calls stack up and hang during backups from Rubrik, which has been a challenge, but Nutanix has their API version four coming out pretty soon, or it is available now, and we just can't upgrade yet. We're hoping to see some major improvements there.

Our organization has been using Nutanix Central for a little over three years. I use Rubrik primarily, but we back up Nutanix. I just started getting into Nutanix to help out that side of the field. I'm currently learning.

Once we upscaled it, it has been fine. We haven't seen the issues we did before when it was overburdened.

My experience with Nutanix support has revolved around backup failures related to the API call. First-level support just goes through their standard checklist, but it's been a little frustrating to get to the people who actually know what's wrong. Once we get there, they are fantastic.

Neutral

Prior to adopting Nutanix, my company was using VMware. A significant factor that led to the consideration of a change was Broadcom buying VMware, even though we had already started the process.

My company has probably seen a return on investment in Nutanix, but that's just my guess because VMware is going to get awfully expensive if it hasn't already.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We have multiple Prism Centrals, so we wanted a centralized place to look. 

We have NUS and compute in different Prism Centrals. Originally, it was because we needed a Nutanix Prism Central for replication that we added two for NUS, and then we had a regular one from compute, and we wanted to keep them separate, but now, we have one in every data center, so it's gotten much larger. The fact that we have our products in multiple locations in Nutanix Central helps us because we're doing a project to migrate from ESX to AHV, so it's nice to see where it's at, whether it's ESX or AHV. We have also given some of our end-users access to Prism Central so they can power on or power off their lifecycle services, which gives them the ability to find where everything is and interact with it. 

We use lifecycle management in Nutanix Central to have an idea of where we're at, and we also use it on the portal as well. We also use it to gain more insight into our inventory because we have a lot of hosts in different areas, and we're able to see what's going on there.

The ability to look in one place in Nutanix Central is what I prefer the most. We can see storage but also capacity, and it gives my boss a place to look, so he doesn't ask me questions. Just knowing the lifecycle status online in Nutanix Central helps us with resource utilization, and we also monitor the capacity. We have one environment that is always right at the threshold of having too much, so it's nice for us to see it in an easy-to-read form. 

The primary benefits of using Nutanix Central are the ability for our users to have a better idea of where their servers are when they need to work on them, especially if they can't do it through Microsoft tools. It really allows us to see the high-level view of what we have, where it is, and if there are opportunities to find issues. The visibility we get from Nutanix Central—seeing it all in one spot—primarily gives us significant time savings.

One of the things I'd want to see in Nutanix Central is more utility. It would be nice to go in and say, "This VM doesn't need to be in this data center, and we'd prefer to put it in this one," and have the ability to initiate the migration, even if we have to make changes to networks.

I have been using Nutanix Central for close to a year.

Nutanix Central is always available, so it's quite stable and reliable.

Nutanix Central scales very effectively with our growing needs.

Most days, Nutanix support is very good. When we first started with our products, it wasn't necessarily what I had hoped, but as time has gone on, they've improved significantly. There is a sense that they want to close tickets faster than always getting the resolution right.

Positive

We were just using Prism Centrals to address similar needs, and we tied all of them together so we could see everything. The primary factors that led us to consider a change to Nutanix Central were our migration to AHV and the need for everything to be consolidated. I see Nutanix Central and many other products are tied together, though Nutanix Central still has ways to go before it gets everything in there, but at least it's nice to have everything in one place.

We tie in with cost governance in Nutanix Central, which helps us identify other products and determine whether we need to increase our licensing or reduce it.

I would advise other companies considering purchasing Nutanix Central that it's nice to have, especially if you have multiple Prism Central environments. If you only have one, I don't think it's necessarily needed, but for multiple environments across the U.S. or other countries, it's beneficial.

I would rate Nutanix Central an eight out of ten.