Nutanix Prism Reviews

We use Nutanix to run our entire network. We have 15 virtual Microsoft servers and a number of workstations running on it, as well as our internal cloud based on Nutanix. We use it for everything. We're running it in a data center.

We use it for testing and for workloads, and it has made my life so much easier. It's smooth. It works. It's fantastic. It is so efficient and easy to work with. I have nothing but good things to say about it. It's just great. I love it.

Upgrades are a breeze and our uptime is five-nines-plus, which is fantastic. It has reduced management overhead tremendously.

It also makes it easy to solve problems.

The most valuable features are

• snapshotting
• basic usage.

The ability to do snapshots is fantastic. It does a great job. Not only do snapshots work great, but you can take a snapshot on the fly. The snapshot takes a second to complete. You can then make a change and test it out to see if it works. If you have any problem, just roll it right back.

Overall, Prism is just phenomenal. It is so easy to use.

The single pane of glass experience is great. I love it. I can see what's going on and I can tell if there's a problem and I can pick it up from there.

It also does a great job of optimizing performance with machine learning and AI. It's fantastic.

The network visibility is okay. It's good. It's a little bit tough to drill down to get to everything that I want, but it's all there.

The one caveat that I would have on that is that it doesn't allow you to connect to outside storage, other than cloud-based. That is something I would prefer for disaster recovery, to be able to send things out that way. Even at an ISCSi level, even though you may not be able to run servers off it, connecting to outside storage is my biggest caveat.

But other than that, it's great.

We have been using Nutanix Prism for four years.

I have found Prism to be extremely stable.

The scalability is good. You can always add more nodes or more clusters, so it should be pretty simple. However, it may be costly. 

Currently, we don't have any plans to increase our usage. We oversized it to begin with.

Their tech support is very good, once you get someone. Sometimes it takes a little bit longer than I would like to get someone to call back, but once they're on it, it's guaranteed to be fixed.

Positive

I ran VMware for seven years, on an EqualLogic array and a Compellent array. One of the reasons we switched was the cost scenario. When it was time to upgrade, I crunched all the numbers and Nutanix came out in between "competitive" and "better." It looked like a better product with better numbers, and it was a question of trying it. We always had the ability to run Nutanix on the AHV. That was something that we had thought about and we decided to test out AHV to see how well it ran. There were a lot of promises and it was a leap of faith in the beginning, but I can say that it was a fantastic move.

The initial setup is extremely complex. I am Nutanix Certified, so I had the ability, but there were still things that we weren't trained in. They mandate—not recommend, but mandate—having an approved installer do it, and it was a very painful process. The installer that we took from CDW was not good, in the extreme. I had to go back to Nutanix directly and get all the problems fixed.

I am also VMware Certified and it really is not a big deal to get it to do what you want. To make those changes in Nutanix is extremely complex when it comes to getting it to talk properly to the switches and getting all the extra networking features going.

In terms of learning how to use Prism, within an hour, you should be fully functional after the installation is done, even if you were not trained.

Maintenance is just the upgrades.

We bought it through CDW, and we used them for the installation. I would never use them for the installation again.

We have definitely seen ROI on every penny.

The pricing is comparable to other software initiatives. I don't know if it's that much less. We bought it with the certified Nutanix hardware, which they don't build. It's an outsourced box that they sell you. Price-wise, AHV is free if you have Nutanix.

We compared Nutanix with VMware. VMware seems to have more capabilities. When you get down to the nitty-gritty, there are more things you can do and change. You can definitely connect to outside storage, because it's meant to run on outside storage. You might have more control and more things that you can customize. In the beginning, that was something that we were concerned about. But in the end, we found that it really didn't make a difference. 

With VMware, when it comes time to run upgrades, aside from the fact that you have to manually move the servers off and move everything around, you then have to upgrade the VMware software and the hypervisor, and then you have to go down to the low-level hardware itself. In Nutanix, it's all a one-shot deal. With Nutanix, when you have to run an upgrade, which happens all the time, it just takes care of everything for you. It's a one-click process. I can't say it's always successful, but 95 percent of the time we are successful.

It's going to make your life a lot easier. The installation is very painful but, once it's complete, your life will be so much easier. It's worth the effort, but you have to be ready for the difficulty of the installation

The product is a great central interface to manage the hardware and software that Nutanix provides. We have a one-stop shop to manage, report, and provide analytics.

The HTML5 interface is very robust. It's easy to access and easy to use. It is powerful. It has a lot of good features.

Prism is made to do multi-cloud and multi-site tasks. Some of the products are not interoperable for multi-cloud or multi-site tasks. Nutanix Flow doesn’t work well between sites.

I have been using the solution since 2010.

The technical support is pretty good. I rate support an eight to nine out of ten.

Positive

The solution demonstrates ROI by decreasing operation expenses for manpower. We require less staff to do the same task.

We run some workloads on the cloud but mostly on local data centers. We could also have a ROBO office installation, like a remote branch office. Nutanix is used for just the management of the cluster. Nutanix is used for databases and generic virtualization workloads. We even have some desktops. I have all the use cases that various customers and various sectors describe.

Using Nutanix Prism has reduced the complexity of the management of the solution. There's not a lot to configure for Prism to work. It's preinstalled out of the box. It’s good. Our operations are simplified. Nutanix Prism’s user interface is very powerful and very simple.

The single-pane-of-glass user experience is very powerful. Prism Central is very powerful and very simple. We can get a lot done. There are versions of Prism for each node and each cluster. We can manage multiple Nutanix clusters with Prism Central. It can control all the different clusters together.

I do not use Nutanix for automation much. However, we can take advantage of the built-in features if we need them. The network visibility and micro-segmentation of Nutanix Prism works, but it's a limited use case with just micro-segmentation. The same tag we use on-premises can't be reused in the cloud. It's limited.

Nutanix Prism can do some predictive analysis, which is helpful. Especially when we're trying to manage capacity, it can determine workload based on past behavior. The statistical analysis helps us to preplan.

It has helped improve the efficiency of our organization’s IT management. It works to improve the efficiency by simplifying the task at hand. It has decreased our effort by 30 to 40%. Nutanix Prism has helped the productivity of our organization’s application developers. We can provision environments for them faster with less effort. It helps DevOps because the team can get the environment it needs to start working on its projects.

Nutanix Prism is a little behind on some things related to security posture. Prism has a built-in life cycle management, so we feel more enabled to tackle the tasks. Nutanix Prism is a good product. However, there’s still room for improvement.

Overall, I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

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

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

Their technical support is great, very knowledgeable and friendly.

Positive

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I use the solution in my company for all the server authorization, storing of files or as a storage, and all the IT purposes.

The most valuable features of the solution are IT Ops, key, and agent operation.

The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required.

I have been using Nutanix Prism for ten years. My company has a partnership with Nutanix.

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

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

I have experience with VMware and Microsoft. My company started to work with Nutanix Prism since it offered good performance, high stability, more efficiency, and simplicity.

The product's deployment phase is very easy.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises version.

The solution can be deployed in a few minutes.

There are some cost reduction benefits from the use of the product in my company.

I rate the product price as an eight out of ten.

It is a premium solution that can be a bit expensive. Sometimes, additional features are needed.

Nutanix Prism automation capability impacts operational efficiency by improving costs.

The implementation of the product has increased the productivity of our employees.

Nutanix Prism helps with IT operations.

The AI-driven management of the tool contributes to the overall IT infrastructure.

I recommend the product to others who plan to use it.

Simplicity, automation, and efficiency are some good areas associated with the tool.

My company does take care of the maintenance of the product for our customers. Just one person is required to maintain the product.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their technical support is excellent. I love it.

Positive

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

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

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

We run CRM, EDI, all of our internal custom apps and batch processes, as well as ECU and BDI on Nutanix. About 80 to 85 percent of our infrastructure is Nutanix workloads.

All of our workloads are currently in our own private-cloud data centers. We have three data centers. Of our eight clusters, five are running Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor and three are running VMware ESXi. We run them all through Prism Central so we can monitor the performance of all of them through Prism Central.

Having ported everything off of the old three-tier infrastructure, we've gained back a lot of time as well as a lot of insight into what's happening. It's a lot easier to manage relocations, migrations, and expansions.

I don't know how to explain how much time and effort switching to Nutanix HCI has saved us. It's 80 percent more time-efficient and convenient than having to use multiple interfaces to deal with storage and compute in our hypervisor.

Also, the amount of time and effort that my team of seven spends on general maintenance and upgrades has easily been cut down by 75 percent. The amount of insight we get readily through Prism Central, versus having to look at multiple, disparate interfaces, has also increased our productivity. Our return on investment has been pretty impressive with the product. There are probably less expensive options, but I don't know if there's a better option.

And when it comes to the efficiency of our data protection teams, we are just implementing the Veeam third-party direct SQL. That is very much going to help streamline our DBAs' access for self-servicing their own restores. It will also take all that load off of my team. For my team, it's going to be a 100 percent improvement because we will be completely hands-off. Currently, we are doing a multi-hop backup and restore for our database systems. This is going to allow a Veeam backup of our Prism guest straight from the Microsoft SQL backup to our Veeam repositories. So they will be able to self-service their own restores, which they haven't been able to do up until now. It's going to increase the efficiency of DBAs, when they need to do recoveries or replications, by at least 25 percent and probably more.

One of the features we're most thankful for is certainly the one-click upgrades. Being able to schedule our hypervisor for more updates, and monitor the progress and get a report if there's a problem, means we're not having to babysit them. We do all but production clusters during business hours now, whereas before, all of our environments' updates involved after-business-hours work for my team. That's been a godsend.

Also, the network topology feature is similar to what we had with VMware, and it's similar to what we had with our Brocade net manager. It's a familiar interface.

Before the latest version, there were a lot of things that I would have liked to see added, but those have been added in the most recent version. But one thing I would like to see is one-click migration. I know that's on the roadmap, but we don't have it yet. 

We have been using Nutanix Prism for three years and 10 months.

The product has been really great for us. We have never experienced any production downtime. We have had a node go down on occasion when we're doing firmware updates. That, unfortunately, has been related to our third-party hardware having trouble with its own firmware. But we have not ever had a noticeable production performance impact since we brought production onto this platform.

For us to expand a cluster, or to pull a node from a cluster that has additional resources to one that needs them, and repurpose it, is far easier and faster than when we were using the traditional, three-tier setup.

We have three separate data centers. The first only has one cluster with seven nodes. The second, our Portland cluster, is just a single cluster with three nodes. And our Hillsborough site, which is our main data center, has six clusters with around 48 nodes. We have two BDI clusters, a five- and a seven-node cluster. On a daily basis they service about 780 to 820 simultaneous VDI users. Across the board, we have about 1,140 users currently.

Technical support is one of Nutanix's strongest points. In my 28 years in the industry, I don't think I've ever had better overall customer service or technical support from any vendor. 

For example, we do have some clusters that are still running a third-party hypervisor. There was one time when a Nutanix engineer even had me stay on the line, saying, "Oh, no, let's fix this other problem that we see," even though that problem was not with the Nutanix product. I've never had something like that in my 28 years, prior to Nutanix support.

Positive

I did not use a hyper-converged solution. I worked with VMware and KBM for virtualization for many years, prior to hopping onto Nutanix HCI. They're similar but different. The decision to switch to Nutanix was made based on the hope for a better return on investment and lower overhead per guest VM, which we have achieved.

I was not here when the organization first brought in Prism. I was here for the deployment into our second and third data centers, and I converted us from our stand-alone, single Prism to a clustered Prism environment.

The solution does require maintenance, but the ongoing maintenance for hypervisor updates and hardware/firmware updates has been greatly improved from traditional, three-tier, now that we're on HCI. At this point, we're so comfortable with it that we kick it off for the entire non-prod environment during work hours and just wait for it to complete, or, if there's a problem, watch for a notification. We will do production outside of normal business hours, but we don't feel that we need to babysit it anymore. We just fire it off for all of our production clusters and check in on it to make sure everything went well.

The licensing is a little confusing. They just changed it within the last year and we haven't had to renew the licensing yet, so I'm hoping it will be less confusing. 

As far as pricing goes, it's competitive for what you get. There are probably less expensive hyper-converged solutions, but I don't think they're as mature or have the feature set that we get with Nutanix.

We have looked at some other options, but at this point, we're still convinced that we're on the best HCI solution.

We haven't used the automation part of Nutanix very much. We did use it during our migration and it was certainly helpful when we were migrating systems and had to change system configurations, automating that. But for day-to-day tasks, we have not fully ported everything over from traditional, three-tier onto Nutanix. That's why we haven't spent a lot of time on automation within Prism.

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.

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.