Nutanix Prism Reviews

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.

Prism is used to manage Nutanix Clusters. Everything that you can do in VMware, you can do in Prism.

Our workloads are run in a data center on a private cloud. We also do ROBO sites.

On the production side, Nutanix has made everything a lot easier for me. It has definitely improved the efficiency of our IT management.

All of our clusters are encrypted and it's very easy to add encryption to a whole cluster.

In the past, I've used VMware vCenter, but after switching to Nutanix Prism, things are a lot easier. At my previous job we were a very small IT department. I was a sysadmin who did everything from fixing printers to doing the servers, and everything in between. If I didn't have Nutanix, it would be a much harder job. It takes care of everything and lets me do other aspects of my job.

All of it is valuable. With Nutanix, you can run VMware or you can run Nutanix's own hypervisor, called AHV, and the Prism solution lets you manage both from one place. The single pane of glass user experience that Prism provides is pretty intuitive and simple, it's not over-complicated. And the user interface for compute, storage, and networking is very easy because everything is right where you would expect it. Any options that you need are all within the Prism interface. Overall, it has a nice GUI and it's easy to understand and navigate.

And for optimizing performance, it does a pretty good job because there's a feature that lets you drill down into VMs that may be constrained or that are "bully" VMs. You can tell which are the ones where you may need to adjust the memory or CPU.

In addition, it's easy to spin up VMs and makes cluster maintenance easy, especially with the LCM (Life Cycle Manager) that is built-in. That helps do installs of AHV or even ESXi. You can also upgrade the AOS software that runs the Nutanix clusters. And you can upgrade the firmware, which is nice.

And while we don't have it set up, you can turn on self-service so that people can create their own VMs and manage their own machines.

There are some things that you can only do via the command line. Over the years that I've been using Nutanix, they've slowly integrated those into Prism, but they're still trying to catch up with a solution that has been around longer, like VMware.

We have been using Nutanix Prism for seven years.

The stability of Prism is good. I haven't had any issues.

We have multiple ROBO sites across the country, our main data center, and a backup data center, and they all run Nutanix. It's very easy to expand. We've had to do that in the past and it's not hard.

We just bought some more clusters to replace old hardware at some of our ROBO sites and, next year, we're looking into purchasing more to replace old hardware for our VDI.

Nutanix has one of the greatest support organizations that I've ever had to use. They're polite, you get someone on the phone fast, and they always find a solution for you.

Positive

Setting up Nutanix is so much easier than any other system that I've used. For example, we had NetApp storage and Cisco UCS for our hardware in the past, and it took a month to get everything set up and running. But when we switched to Nutanix, it took an afternoon. It was much different.

For the first deployment we had a consultant, but since then, it is so easy that we just do it ourselves. If you're just going to deploy one cluster, you only need one person to do it, and maybe someone from network.

It's very easy to learn. There are a lot of resources out there and their support is great; they'll help you through anything. It's easy to learn on your own.

The maintenance required is updates. They're always coming out with updates.

Nutanix is a little pricier, but the features it has are worth it.

You won't regret installing it. It will make things a lot simpler.

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

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 have a Nutanix cluster with multiple customers running on it. From Prism Central we manage things, see the status, and enlarge the different VMs. We use it for that a lot because we use it for small and medium-sized businesses. For those companies, Nutanix is too expensive, it's for bigger businesses normally, so we are giving these businesses an option to have a "Ferrari" in the garage since they cannot afford it.

We have everything in our data center. We're mostly running databases and virtual machines.

The high availability is very important. When one node or machine breaks down, it keeps on running. That's a major benefit for us because our companies won't notice when something is down or broken.

For the technical guys, it's the patching, updating, and the monitoring that are very easy for them. It takes a lot of the standard operating tasks out of their hands and does a lot automatically. For example, if we add new hardware, we just plug it in and it will install itself. We don't have to do anything manually. It saves a lot of time and that's a positive for us.

Nutanix has helped us a lot with efficiency. For the virtual machines that we run for a couple of customers, we have images for them. It will make an automatic copy of that VM with all the settings.

Also, updating without the downtime helps us a lot. Otherwise, we have to go to the customer and ask them, "Okay, can we shut down that server for five minutes to restart it?" We don't have to do that now, making us a lot more efficient than before.

Our help desk and all our IT people can go into Prism and check things. The help desk can easily check if the CPU of a server is high. They just fill in the server name and they can see if there is high CPU or high memory or if disk space is low. And they can adjust it straight away with the customer and then check, "Is it better now?" The customer will say yes or no. That makes it a lot more efficient for the help desk, but also for our second line. If normal tickets registered by the help desk go to our second line, the second line has to resolve them. Now, the help desk itself resolves things. Customers are happier because they get immediate help and they can work again. And our second line can take care of other stuff. I would say our help desk is 50 percent more efficient.

We're also using HYCU, which is a part of Nutanix, for backups. It works a lot faster than Veeam, which is what we used before. And because we have our own server, our own private cloud, what I have heard from my technical guys is that Nutanix has upgraded it further. They have added extra SQL Database security. According to them, that part is more secure than it was before. I am only estimating, but it may have increased our data protection team efficiency by 25 or 30 percent.

With HYCU, I think it's easier for us to sell Nutanix to our customers because security is a big thing at the moment. It's the SQL Databases that we can say are more secure than before, and our servers are all located in data centers with high-end security.

And we have been able to reduce management overhead costs by 50 percent. There were two managers and now there's only one.

Upgrading of virtual memory, CPU usage, disk space, et cetera is done on the fly so you don't have to reboot anything. That helps us a lot.

Also, because in my role I create a lot of reports, it is very handy to be able to show the customer, "This is your cluster. At the moment, you are using this much CPU, this much RAM, and this much storage." I can give them information on what they're using, how many VMs, and the amount of data they're using. For me, overall, the best feature is the information I can give to the customer.

The part of network visibility that I have at the moment, because we don't have the full set yet, looks good. I see the controller IOPs and the cluster latency. But we mostly look at the storage, memory usage, and CPU usage. We're located in the Netherlands. Our internet lines are very good and stable. We don't have a lot of issues with that.

We're now upgrading our Nutanix licensing and we will also be able to see the network and infrastructure. We will be able to see how much a company is using over the internet. We will have the full networking capabilities, so we will be able to see how far and where a line is going, from which cluster to which switch, and then router; the whole structure.

The single pane of glass means we can see all six clusters in one view. We can see how much memory is used by every cluster, as well as the storage, latency, and CPU usage. Everything is in one view. For me, that's very convenient. There is also a dashboard for people to look at. We have put it on one of our TV screens so that everybody can see what the status is at the moment: Is there something going wrong? Is there a critical warning? That's very helpful.

We can also see how far the high availability goes. If it's green, it's still in high availability. There is a little mark saying, "If you go beyond this, your high availability is gone." That helps us a lot in terms of storage, for example, to see if we need more disks or if we need to upgrade.

Another feature is that you can make your own dashboards and change how you see information. I like the visuals. For example, with storage, you see the blue bar and see resilience data and that the resilience is okay. If it goes past that, and we had that happen one time, it gives a warning and it pops out so you know exactly when to act. Visually, it looks good. And you now have dark mode, that's what IT people like, so they're all happy.

I would like to see a few more options in the reporting. Sometimes, people want more graphics. It has to look nice for our customers. Some customization in that area would be helpful. 

On the technical side, although you don't need a shutdown to upgrade Nutanix, for downgrading you do. If it were possible that when downgrading CPU or memory you didn't have to reboot the VM, that would be very helpful for us.

We were one of the early adopters, so it has been about seven years since we started using it.

What helps us a lot now is that it's very stable. If there's a power outage or a switch goes down, Nutanix will go down, but when the switch is back up, Nutanix fixes it itself and it's running again. That may be part of the AI it has. Crazy things don't happen.

It's very easy to scale.

We have it in three physical locations. We have about 40 customers in Nutanix, ranging in employee count from 15 to 500.

We were early adopters so, in the beginning, we had one major problem and all our customers were down. At that time, we got a lot of help from Nutanix. They stood by us and kept us in the loop and kept monitoring things and helping us.

If you send in a question, within a few minutes you have your answer, and they're looking at it with you. The support is very good.

Positive

We used VMware. The switch had more to do with the features. When you want to add a machine to VMware, you have to do a lot of manual labor to get it there. Also, memory-wise and storage-wise, Nutanix is smarter. It distributes the data more evenly than VMware, from what we saw. Those are some of the reasons we changed to Nutanix.

We have had Nutanix for seven years. After the first five years, we swapped all the hardware and changed the licensing. If I look back at then when we bought it and now how much money we received as a result of having it, we got our investment back after two years.

Prism is part of the package we get but Nutanix is more expensive. We just bought some new hardware and licensing and the new prices were a little bit higher.

The only maintenance involved with Nutanix is the updating.

I would recommend Nutanix, especially because of the stability, ease of use, and easy monitoring.

I use it for day-to-day management of all of our clusters. I log in every day to verify that there are no alerts or critical issues going on. I use it to log in to our VMs, create new VMs, and delete or decommission old VMs. I also use it for updating our clusters and running lifecycle management checks for inventory.

The clusters are being run at our headquarters within a server room. And our three other clusters at remote offices are in a makeshift server closet. They are mainly used for end-user computing because the three remote offices have a virtual Nasuni filer. End-users at those offices are going to the filer for their home drive, department drive, and our file share. It's mainly end-user servers that run on those remote office clusters. All of our SQL databases reside on our cluster in HQ.

Compared to our VMware environment, it is so much easier to use Nutanix through Prism Central and Prism Element. Everything is so straightforward, especially when I have to update the AOS and AHV versions of our clusters. It literally is a one-click option. You select what you want to upgrade, hit "Upgrade," and it does a pre-check, and then it goes through the process of upgrading one node at a time. It migrates VMs on the specific node being upgraded to a different node, and brings them back after the upgrade is complete. It's just a way easier and simple environment.

It has also helped in the fact that our environment doesn't have any downtime when it shouldn't. Downtime is not an issue. Servers are up.

The overall efficiency of our environments is great.

Prism Central offers a single pane of glass user experience to manage all four of our nodes. If I want to log in to one specific cluster, I always use Element, but I use Prism Central quite a bit as well, and that's mainly for the management of our remote offices.

The Prism user interface for compute, storage, and networking is also very easy. There's a simplicity to it that makes it easy to understand. When building a VM, although there's no step-by-step guide on how to set up the VM, it's all in one small window. As long as you go step by step, it's very easy.

The three clusters we have at our remote offices are just one-node clusters. If there were an easier way to upgrade items such as the BIOS, SATA drives, the BMC, et cetera, on those, that would be helpful.

We have been using Prism since 2017. That's when we implemented our first Nutanix cluster.  We now have 4 Nutanix clusters

It's very stable. We've never had issues of things failing. In the past five years we may have had a couple of drives fail here and there, but they are always replaced. They'll ship one out within four hours. There really never are any stability issues.

The scalability is great. With the environment we have right now, especially for our headquarters, we still have a lot of room to add more servers with fairly significant capacities of memory and cores.

When I do run into issues, and I'm not entirely sure how to fix them, I always involve Nutanix support through their support portal. I never have issues with their support. They are very good at what they do.

Positive

Overall, Prism Element is extremely easy to use and understand. Before we had Nutanix, we were using a VMware environment, and upgrading our nodes within VMware was rather difficult. It was just not as straightforward as when we upgrade our nodes and clusters within Nutanix. It literally is a one-click process to upgrade all nodes. 

We were impressed with Nutanix, overall. Some of the other main drivers for our switch to it were the simplicity of setting up our Nutanix clusters, ease of management, and that their support is very respected. There is an overall ease of use, compared to VMware. I'm sold on their product.

The onboarding of Nutanix and Prism Element and Central was very easy and straightforward. For the original cluster that we built at our headquarters, someone from Nutanix came in and helped set it up. And for two of the three nodes that we set up at remote offices, we had a consulting company come in to help set them up. I set up the last node myself using Foundation.

It was mainly me involved in the setup, along with our network engineer, to ensure that everything was set up and configured on the ports. It may have taken us a couple of hours. It was very fast and straightforward.

Maintenance on our side is required when we have to upgrade the AOS, the version of the AHV, the BIOS and the BMC. But, for the most part, at least on our six-node cluster, it's a matter of selecting the option and hitting "Upgrade." It really does it all by itself. I'm usually there just to monitor it.

The licensing is fairly high in price. If someone can get over the fact that the licensing is fairly expensive, I would say Nutanix is the way to go. It is expensive, but to me, it's worth it.

At the time we evaluated solutions, we were not a very large company, so we looked at Scale Computing and we may have looked at HPE's option. Neither one of them could handle the option of adding GPU cards to our nodes, and Nutanix could. That was a driver for our choice of Nutanix, but the main reason was the overall ease of use of the product.

Prism Central will show when there are inefficiencies between VMs. We don't own the license to allow Prism Central to show those inefficiencies. But overall, we really have never had any issues where our VMs were underutilized or had production inefficiencies with them. Our environments have been working regardless, even though we don't have the proper Prism Central license to give us that detail.

We are also backing up our virtual Nutanix environment on a daily basis. So I'm not too concerned about data protection, as a whole, because if we do have issues, there is an easy way to get things restored. But I will say that, when it comes to updating a server, I always take a snapshot of it beforehand, so if I do run into issues, I can just restore it from that snapshot.

Going into 2023, one of our main goals is security, as a whole. I'm sure there will be things across our infrastructure that we will look at on the security side. We don't use any extra Nutanix security mechanisms right now, but that possibility is in place for next year.

Overall, I'm very impressed with Nutanix. I would highly recommend to anyone who is looking for a hyper-converged infrastructure to look at Nutanix. That's mainly because of the simplicity and overall ease of use of the product, and their support.

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.

We have an on-prem hybrid solution and we have been using it for our data storage. We have things running in the cloud and we have a portion that is running on-prem and that is where we're running Nutanix.

We use it for mixed workloads including web servers, front-end servers,  and container-based servers. Those are the on-prem workloads that are running on Nutanix. And the workload on the cloud is our cloud environment.

On the infrastructure side, we had multiple team members that were managing the environment before we started using this solution. We had separate people for storage, hardware, et cetera. Once we got Nutanix, we just needed a few people to focus on different things. Now, each team member can view the single dashboard and see the storage, network, and cluster health. That's where we look for anything that we want to do on a server. As a result, the team size has been decreased.

Because it's a single hardware setup, you can manage storage, network and zones—everything—from the same dashboard, and that has improved our IT management efficiency. We don't have to go to multiple places or request help from, and wait for, a different team. Previously, when we had a deployment, we had to wait for things like storage allocation, and the network piece to get the IPs. There were many different pieces. Now, one person can do all these tasks. It enables end-to-end management and operation of our virtualized platform.

We have also had to submit far fewer incident tickets, compared to what we had before when different team members had to focus on many vendors' products. The storage was different from the network piece which was different from the server. There were a lot of licensing issues that we had to take care of as well. Now, it's just one vendor, Nutanix, that we have to follow up with for the whole environment.

In addition, we have not seen any performance issues or issues related to the clusters. As of now, the application owners and developers are happy.

There is also a significant improvement in automation, which was something we were not able to do in our earlier hardware. Nutanix has different automation scripts available that we have been able to and they have saved a lot of time.

There's a single pane of glass that we use for 

• alerts 
• patching 
• what's going on in the storage
• cluster issues. 

You can go directly to the Prism dashboard and it gives you all the information. It's easy to use. I have worked on other platforms but the single pane of glass that Prism has is very helpful for seeing what's going on in your environment: usage, storage, capacity, and behavior.

It gives you the ability to do a deep dive if you have to do any troubleshooting. It provides central management.

If you have network segmentation enabled for the environment, you can go into the network and view what's going on. When you log in to Prism and see alerts popping up, if some of the alerts are related to the network, you can go to the network piece and see what the issue is.

And in terms of security posture, we have encryption enabled and we have been using Nutanix Flow for managing our environment and seeing the traffic.

There are a few areas related to visibility on the dashboard that can be improved. It's good, but the visibility can be improved in terms of single locations. It's not a show-stopper, but because Prism is one of the most popular products from Nutanix, it is an area that can be improved.

We have been using Nutanix Prism for more than two years.

The stability is very good. 

The only issue there is that they send frequent updates that we have to do every month. But because of the patching, the Prism dashboard is stable.

It's very easy to scale because it's based on the environment. If you have a small environment, you can have one Prism Central. It's based on your workload. That determines how many Prism Central nodes you want to run on.

We have contacted their technical support team multiple times. Every time we reached them they were able to share information. Sometimes they would point us to KB articles and, if that was not able to help us resolve it, we uploaded the logs and then they were able to make suggestions.

Positive

We were using VMware and Dell-supported hardware that went end-of-support.  We replaced Dell equipment with Nutanix. We did not have a hybrid cloud at first and we moved the different pieces of hardware to a hybrid cloud environment in Nutanix.

Prism is the dashboard that gives you that single pane of glass to view your Nutanix cluster. We had a Dell storage dashboard, but it was not even near to what we can see in Prism. We used VMware to see the hypervisor environment and for any kind of hardware-related issues, we had to go to the Dell dashboard. Similarly, the network people had to go to the network switches and the clusters that had been connected. But Prism comes with Nutanix and you can have a single dashboard to see everything within your stack: storage, compute, and network.

We worked with the Nutanix team for the deployment to understand the initial requirements for setting up the cluster and rack sizing, and we had to work with the data center team. We needed an initial understanding of how many servers, cluster sizing, et cetera, all based on our environment. We started with a small environment, based on a recommendation in the KB articles, and followed the steps there.

For us, it was easy. We took around three months to deploy the cluster and then we had to start migrating the workloads from the old platform to the new platform.

It took our staff a few weeks to learn how to use Prism. We had to adapt to the new dashboard, where you can see everything. There are help options available for whatever you are trying to achieve. You can look at the Prism book and there are plenty of KB articles available on the Nutanix side that show you how you can do what you want to do in Prism Central. There is also an option to use the command line, but people who have a good understanding of the Prism Central GUI can do it from there.

There is no specific maintenance needed.

We had a large team before, with different team members focusing on different things. Now, we have a small team that can focus on everything in the Nutanix platform. Previously, a few of our staff were focusing on hardware and compute, others were focusing on the virtualized environment, and a few were focusing on network. The network guy did not work on the storage, the storage guy did not work on the virtualized platform. But since we got the Nutanix platform, one guy knows everything. That's obviously our return on investment. You don't need too many people for managing the environment.

The pricing is one factor that could be better. The cluster licensing and how it works is another.

We evaluated the Cisco UCS platform and the Dell platform. But we finally ended up with Nutanix because, when we tried doing everything, it was easy to manage and everything was flexible in the Nutanix platform.

My advice is to first look at the workload you're trying to move. Use the workload-sizing sheets that are available on the internet. There are plenty of test drives available. We did a couple of test drives, running the Nutanix cluster to understand how it works.

We have some use cases around running IoT devices that we have been testing with our developers. We looked at where they fit better by running them both in the on-prem and the cloud portions. That way, we determine which environment will be better when running new workloads.

Overall, it gives you a user-friendly single-pane UI, a centralized console, with a lot of valuable features for managing the environment.