Nutanix Prism Reviews

We're using Nutanix as our main computing platform and we're using Prism with it. It's the Nutanix management UI and we're using it to manage the Nutanix cluster comprised of four physical servers. It's a single pane for management, and we're doing upgrades, updates, management, and protection, everything, through Prism. It's a really convenient interface.

We run it in our own server room in our on-prem facility.

The effect of Nutanix on our organization has been day and night. Our organization is a local municipal center. When I joined the city, that's when Nutanix arrived. It was sitting in the shipping room. Prior to my arrival, I was told our uptime was not solid. We would have outages left and right. Servers would go down because it was a three-tier architecture with SAN, a one-gig network, and a hodgepodge of pizza-box servers.

By implementing Nutanix, and consolidating all workloads into its cluster, we have protected those workloads in that one cluster. Storage-wise, network-wise, and compute-wise, we're always on. We haven't had downtime ever since we moved to Nutanix, zero, except for the power outages we had. There has been nothing wrong on the Nutanix side. We get good feedback from the business. They have recognized the high uptime and reliable service IT is providing and it is mainly due to implementing Nutanix.

We're small, so I'm the only sysadmin working in Prism, but it has cut down my management and maintenance time. In terms of help desk operations, it has also worked well. When I get a request to operate on the virtual machines, I can do it through Prism Central or vCenter, which is easy and saves time.

I am also our data protection "team," so I manage backups. Nutanix's data protection, based on snapshot architecture, has been our number-two solution. Our first go-to is the Rubrik backup system against ransomware attacks. The second thing I would fall back on is our Nutanix data protection snapshot. We have at least two layers that help us to sleep better.

The biggest plus that I want to commend them for is definitely their one-click update/upgrade feature. I use Prism for that and it's so amazing. That, by itself, is a selling point.

Another feature I use heavily is the data protection. I log into Prism to schedule a snapshot to be taken of our virtual machines at different intervals. That means we take more frequent snapshots of critical workloads, while less critical are done once a day. I set the schedule to retain the snapshots for a certain amount of time, and then they age out, so they don't take up extra space. All that is done through Prism.

And the user interface of Prism in the single pane of glass is very intuitive. I use it to look at the health aspect of our system. You don't have to go through a manual to figure things out. Their dev team has done a really good job of arranging things in the UI. I like it. It's very simple to use.

Deploying virtual machines is also very easy and intuitive.

We're not using the microsegmentation, but the physical and virtual aspects of the networking are very clear and easy to understand.

There is some room for improvement. I wish the main landing page, the dashboard, could be organized in a way where, when there is an alert because something is wrong, I would not have to click three or four times to get to what actually happened. I wish it were quicker to get to the bottom of the problem.

We have been using Prism for three-plus years.

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

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

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

Positive

We were using single servers and VMware vSAN, and that VMware setup was a disaster. I hated it with a passion. It was going down left and right. Granted, we were on the first generation of vSAN. Hopefully, they improved it. But with the version that we deployed, vSAN was very unreliable, and I just want to get away from it. It was terrible. I would spend hours and hours on the phone with VMware technicians and they still couldn't get it right.

I helped install and configure Nutanix. We went through professional services and it was done within half a day. For us, it was a straightforward, easy setup. We have it deployed in a single location, taking up four Us, one U for each node, and they're connected to the 10-gig switch.

In terms of maintenance, we haven't had to do almost anything.

We used Lanair Technology Group.

In the past three years, it has definitely been worth the money because we haven't put in any extra money to fix or buy anything additional due to something negative about Prism or it lacking in any aspect. 

Also, although we have been running VMware on Nutanix over those three years, Nutanix has proven itself so well that we are trying to get off of VMware. That means we'll be saving the cost of the VMware license once we do so.

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

I looked at their new offering called Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Azure. And I like what I'm seeing, so I have a meeting set up this afternoon to speak with their subject matter expert on that topic. That may be down the road for us. Currently, we don't have their cloud service.

I would advise others to consider Nutanix and give it a try. It's a really good solution, especially for small to medium-sized organizations, and definitely for VDI. 

However, there was a "gotcha" for us. Do understand that the management overhead is pretty big. About 25 to 30 percent is consumed off the bat by their management called CVM. That means that 25 to 30 percent of the memory and CPU that you buy are gone. So make sure you size it properly, with that in mind.

We have a four-cluster environment, two of them are on VMware and two of them are on AHV. My job is to look at the clusters and any related alerts. We have to commission and decommission virtual machines. If there are any upgrades of the BIOS or AOS, that's also part of my job.

Most of our Nutanix stuff is on-premises. We do have Azure, as well, but we have not fully migrated to the cloud yet.

We have database servers on Nutanix as well as application and domain servers.

Nutanix Prism has definitely helped improve the efficiency of our IT management. Before, we had HPE standalone servers with ESXi hosts and it was really cumbersome to manage all the hardware resources, as well as the VMs on it. Since it was a stand-alone host for everything, we had issues with getting alerts. It was not easy to get all the alerts in one spot and monitor them. We had to go to each server and monitor it regularly. Being a data center administrator, it's my job to look at the data center and make sure it is up and running 24/7. That was difficult before Nutanix Prism. Now, we can manage everything from one spot.

We also get reports for future planning, telling us how many resources we have left and how much time we have left before they are full. That means we can plan, accordingly, to add some new Nutanix nodes.

We also get hardware information in one place now, so when we come to a refresh, we get that information right there. That helps us a lot and saves us time.

And because it has its own internal network encryptions, the efficiency of our organization's data protection team has improved. It is protected against ransomware, as well. Even if, somehow, someone gets access, it will not help because it has its own encryption and it's not easy to break. The high level of data security increases our confidence and reliability.

Overall, it has improved our efficiency by more than 50 percent because we are now spending less time on everything than before when we had HPE. And our management overhead costs have been reduced by 50 to 70 percent. Whenever we had maintenance for our HPE stuff, we had to bring it down. There was no ability to migrate the load somewhere else. But with Nutanix, whenever we have maintenance or an upgrade, it migrates things on its own. That means zero downtime for us, and that helps a lot.

The recent life cycle management feature is really helpful to us. Before that, we had to do everything manually, but now it's like a one-stop shop. We can upgrade firmware and all of the software from there. Also, managing storage information and other hardware-related resources is easy using Prism.

In addition, the user experience in the single pane of glass is excellent. It is very easy to manage all the workloads, whether in production, dev, or test. We can check all the alerts. If there is any upgrade or if something goes wrong with a VM, we find out in advance because we have set up alerts. We are running a script so we get alerts, in advance, about multiple things before there is a crash or a disaster situation.

The dashboard has all the information about resources available, as well as any related alerts. You can just click on a hyperlink and it will take you to that location where you can get more information. It's really very helpful.

For compute and networking, it's very safe and secure. It has its own internal network and that keeps our data safe and encrypted, which is really good. The network visibility and microsegmentation are also very helpful. If there is any network-related issue or a bottleneck, whether on our end or at the ISP, we can monitor everything from there. We can see IOPS information and, if something is going on with a specific VM, we can see why the network is high, figure out the issue, and sort it out easily using Prism.

Another helpful aspect is the replication factor, whether it's RF2 or RF3. If there are hardware issues, it automatically migrates the metadata to somewhere else, and we have availability. There is zero downtime.

With the AHV, we can plug something in to add more CPUs or more memory without taking those particular services or that particular VM down, which is great. There are also workload migrations based on resources and utilization. In addition, we can create a template for any VM and use that to very quickly make a clone, more quickly than with VMware. And from a data backup point of view, we have snapshot backup and replications that are faster than VMware.

When we get a request from a user for a file-level recovery, there are self-recovery options, but they only work if the replication is available to that cluster locally. Our company policy is to have 30 days of backup at DR sites and just the last backup at our production site. Whenever we have a request, we just have one copy at the production site. In VMware, we could restore a VM and attach the hard drive to any other server and copy the file easily. But that kind of facility is not available in AHV. 

Either we have to migrate that snapshot to VMware or we have to find the hard drive ID and then turn it into a disk image and then we have to attach that disk to a VM to copy that particular file. That's really time-consuming for us, compared to VMware. If they could improve that scenario, that would be great. Or even if we are not able to attach that hard drive, if they could make the snapshots we have at DR sites available so that we could also see them on the production site, that would be great. That would save time and make our life easier.

We have been using Nutanix Prism since 2017. When I joined, I didn't know anything about Nutanix, but thanks to Nutanix University I learned everything and received the NCP (Nutanix Certified Professional) certificate.

The stability of Nutanix is really very good. Unlike our HPE standalone servers, where we had to shut down all the VMs to do maintenance, Nutanix is the opposite. Now, we don't have any downtime for maintenance.

It is scalable.

The technical support provided by Nutanix for Prism is excellent, compared to HPE. Nutanix has very knowledgeable staff and whenever we need support we get it.

Positive

Before Nutanix, we had an HPE standalone host to manage everything. But that was very cumbersome: which storage area and compute area? Also, individual hardware is difficult to maintain and costs a little more than Nutanix. We were experiencing an issue with HPE's service, so we decided to move to Nutanix.

We are planning to get rid of VMware, but it's taking some time.

I wasn't with this organization for the initial deployment. When I joined, we just had two VMware clusters with 45 nodes in one cluster. We split them into two and created a second cluster on AHV. We have two clusters at our production site and two clusters at our DR sites. One is AHV and one is VMware.

We are located in Canada. Our DR clusters are also located within Canada but at a different site. Both clusters of our production site are in the same data center and have a full load. We have very few standalone HPE and Dell servers that are required by specific groups within our organization. Otherwise, we have gotten rid of all the HPE and Dell servers.

Maintenance of Nutanix consists of upgrading to whatever latest version is available and, if it is stable, we get up to date. Right now we are about to upgrade the AOS and VMware again. The maintenance is around keeping things up to date.

Our return on investment is quite a high percentage. Before, with HPE, we had lots of problems, including with support. Compared to HPE, the return on investment is on the higher side.

The good thing about Nutanix Prism is that we don't have to pay for a hypervisor, but their licensing cost is a little bit on the high side. We tried to implement files and other things in our environment, but the cost of the licensing was a little bit high for us so we did not implement those things. 

Still, we are using Nutanix as a file server, but we have built a VM on it and use it as a file server for use across the Nutanix cluster.

It is very efficient for managing compared to any standalone server, whether it's HPE, Dell, or whatever you are using in your environment. You can easily manage things with Nutanix. It's a one-stop shop. You can use Prism Central to manage all your clusters and there is lifecycle management to deploy your software. I would highly recommend it.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Nutanix Prism user interface is also good.

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

I've been using this solution for two years.

It's stable.

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

There are no costs in addition to the licensing fee.

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

Prism 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.