Nutanix Prism Reviews

We use it for our production environment where we have a lot of applications running on this cluster. We also use it for our testing environment. In the future, we may have machine learning and artificial intelligence on it.

We chose Nutanix for its scalability, flexibility, and performance. In performance, we really see a difference when we compare our whole infrastructure and the Nutanix cluster. It's very different.

It has helped us with real flexibility today and for the years to come. We have used it for three years and we have a lot of performance flexibility, and ease of management. This cluster has reduced the time it takes to manage this project for this infrastructure. In the past, we spent many more hours managing, but today it's efficient. Our management overhead costs have been reduced by about 20 to 30 percent.

We have also seen improvement in the number of help desk calls, a reduction of about 20 percent, but only in terms of performance issues. We have fewer calls from users telling us they are seeing poor performance. With the Nutanix cluster, we don't have those calls anymore.

And our data protection team's efficiency has been improved by about 50 percent. Our security has really been improved by the features of Nutanix, such as Nutanix Flow and snapshot backups.

There are so many valuable features but Nutanix Flow for microsegmentation of the network, and the Life Cycle Manager for dating hardware and software are among the most important for us.

And the user interface for Nutanix for compute, storage, and networking, while it's very new for us, is not very difficult. It's very intuitive. Compared to what we had in the past, it's very new.

The interface is good, but it needs improvements. There are a lot of functions that are only available in the CLI.

In addition, some of the hardware components could be improved. We already had some trouble with disks.

We have been using Nutanix Prism for three years.

It's a 10 out of 10 in stability.

It's very scalable.

We have about 500 users of the solution.

Their technical support is very good.

Three years ago we wanted to renew our infrastructure and our choice quickly came down to Nutanix. This solution perfectly met our expectations. Before, we had a traditional infrastructure, consisting of different virtualization hosts and a dedicated storage area network. All that infrastructure was difficult to maintain and manage because we had a multitude of different technologies and manufacturers. That is why we chose Nutanix.

We have Nutanix on the same site, but in two different locations. The initial deployment is very easy. It took us about two weeks. It involved me, other people on my team, and the service provider.

Learning to use Nutanix Prism took very little time, only a few days.

Except for upgrades, there is no maintenance.

The ROI we have seen is indirect, in terms of time saved. Overall, it has saved us 40 to 50 percent in time.

It's expensive in comparison to the rest of our infrastructure. But the quality is there.

I absolutely recommend this solution. It has some faults but, overall, it's very good.

We use it for managing the cluster and all the hardware that goes with it, as well as for updates, management, and the whole lifecycle of the hardware. That's all done through Prism Element.

We run it in data centers and we use it for big data, ERP, SQL Databases, Exchange Servers, and file servers. Pretty much everything that can be virtualized is running on Nutanix.

Prism has made it much easier to build and maintain our test, dev, and production environments, all of which run on Nutanix. And there have definitely been a lot of time savings when it comes to updating and managing the hardware itself.

It's also allowed us to standardize. We are pushing a lot of the traditional three-tier infrastructure to Nutanix, mainly because it provides single pane of glass management for all hardware. You don't have to deal with different vendors to upgrade or maintain versions of firmware. You just log in to Prism Element, upgrade everything, and it takes care of the whole upgrade process for you. You don't have to speak to different vendors to find out what's compatible with what. It has made everyone's lives, and mainly mine, easier, particularly when it comes to managing hardware life cycles.

It has helped with our IT management efficiency because we do it all from Prism. You don't have to log in to different consoles to perform upgrades. We've gone through a few terrible products before, so in terms of time, it has probably increased efficiency threefold. There's no research that you have to do. It just works.

In addition, we use Nutanix as a dedicated platform for hosting our security infrastructure. They call it free. You pay for it, but there are free hypervisors. That's one less layer of complexity for managing the security infrastructure.

What I like the most are the self-healing and the ability to see everything at a glance, from metrics to the resiliency status of the hardware. As soon as you log in, that's what you see.

With Prism Element, you can do just about everything from a single console. The user experience of the console in Prism depends on what we are doing, but overall, if we bundle together everything that we could possibly do in it, I would give it eight and a half out of 10.

And as you are building out things like protection domains, it lets you see what's connected to what. It lets you visualize where particular applications or particular VMs sit: in which groups, on which cluster and, ultimately, where they would end up if you were to activate a protection domain or migrate workloads across. And in terms of hardware, there's a diagram view that lets you see which disks and which hosts sit on which boxes, what belongs to which models, and the associated serial numbers as well. It does a pretty good job of helping you visualize.

We're running VMware's ESX hypervisor and a lot of networking isn't done in Prism, it's done at the vCenter level. But for the few proofs of concept that I've done, Prism hasn't been a good experience because there's a lot of command-line work that needs to be done to configure the network. The experience with networking hasn't been great. I'm not a big fan of running things on the command line, just because I know for a fact that it can be done easily in something like VMware. They've done a great job of that. I hope that, one day, Nutanix can replicate that experience.

I have been using Nutanix Prism for about seven years.

It's very stable.

The scalability is one of the best features.

Their support is pretty much the benchmark I use when I deal with other vendors. Nutanix support is one of the few vendors that gives you direct access to what they call level-three support. You're not working with a person doing triage who then escalates to someone else who can help. The first person you talk to is the person who will be able to log in and help you dive into the issue.

They're the best I've seen.

Positive

We were a big Dell shop, and we used HPE and IBMs back then. There was a whole mix of hardware to build up a solution. At the time, Nutanix was very compelling. Our existing hardware, the server switches and the SAN storage arrays, had come to end-of-life.

The Nutanix pricing, at the time, was very competitive. It was almost on par with buying brand-new servers and brand-new storage arrays. And at the same time, the cost savings were in the management of the hardware. With Nutanix, you could do everything from the one console that is Prism Element. The cost savings weren't so much when buying the hardware, they were from the reduced cost due to the time saved when managing it.

The initial deployment is pretty straightforward now, but mainly because I know what I'm doing. But initially, it was confusing, and my advice to new customers would be to always engage with Nutanix for first builds. You can't just power it on and expect it to work straight away. But Nutanix has come a long way since the early days when you had to use the command line to build it out.

The time it takes to deploy depends on how prepared you are. You have to get all the networking done prior to kicking off the deployment. It also depends on how big the cluster is. If we're talking about the most basic, three-node deployment, it would probably take two to three hours. You unbox it, rack it, cable it up, and then you need to image the nodes with a laptop. I was the only one involved in the deployment on our side.

The few members of our staff who know how to use it went on a three-day course to learn the administration side of it. I don't know of anyone who just dives straight in, because we don't want them to break anything.

In Australia, we have about three people who log in to it. In the US, there are about five, and in Europe, there are about three. There are two of us involved in the maintenance and some of the responsibilities include logging in, triggering firmware updates, host upgrades, and hypervisor upgrades.

For the first couple of years, we did see return on investment but, over time, those returns diminished because of the price increases.

The licensing aspect is painful. We are told, "This is when you have to renew. This is the serial number and the part number," et cetera. But it's difficult to know where something belongs unless you dive into the portal and search in multiple areas for a particular serial number. The experience over the years hasn't been great with renewing, and knowing what you're renewing.

Also, there seems to be a year-on-year increase of about 5 percent. It doesn't seem like they really reward loyal customers. New customers don't get that penalty, but as you're renewing each year, you get a cost increase, which we're not happy about.

The network visibility and microsegmentation of Nutanix Prism is a feature we don't use. It's an additional feature that you have to pay for.

We looked at moving things to Azure. We also looked at SimpliVity. The other option was simply to buy brand-new hardware from Dell, IBM, or HPE again. We went with Nutanix because of the price and features.

Always work closely with a technical account manager and the sales engineer. If you're deploying from new, or even as a proof of concept, there is a lot of terminology and a lot of functions and features that are new for someone coming from traditional, three-tier architecture. Work closely with them, familiarize yourself with it, and get into a course.

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'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.

Prism is the management dashboard for Nutanix. I'm in there quite frequently; not necessarily every day, but certainly, multiple times a week, whenever I'm checking on the health of the Nutanix environment.

There are a number of other applications that are tied in, Nutanix products, that use Prism for management, like Nutanix Files, which we use. I'm using it to check on that frequently.

I also check alerts and logs with it, and any kind of maintenance or upgrades that we do are all done through Prism. Anytime we do an AOS or foundation upgrade, or upgrades of whatever products are attached to it, they are done through Prism. 

It's pretty much a one-stop shop for most day-to-day management of Nutanix. The only time you would ever really go outside of it is if you're having some infrastructure problem that would require you to touch the hardware physically.

We're all on-prem. We're not using any Nutanix cloud. We have multiple locations with Nutanix. It's our production environment, which includes web servers, database servers, email, and storage. Our entire environment runs on it.

The biggest benefit is the fact that we can ignore it. Seriously. So much of my day is putting out fires or trying to track down problems, performance issues, or errors. The Nutanix platform has been pretty rock-solid in that respect, so I don't have to troubleshoot it as much. But when I do, I don't have to go digging in a bunch of really deep, esoteric log files and look up commands to enter into a CLI to dig out information from the system.

It has a little "heartbeat" icon. If there is something wrong, it's yellow. If there's something really wrong, it's red. It's really simple to see. I check every morning to look at the health of the system. If I ever see a yellow or a red I just click on it to see what the message is. Sometimes it's more involved and I have to reach out to Nutanix support to resolve things. It's hardware, after all, it has failures. That has happened to us. But as far as the Prism aspect goes, being able to track things down and quickly get a resolution, or at least get a support case open for it, is so much easier than most other platforms I've used in the past.

In addition, the network visibility and the microsegmentation of Prism, with Nutanix Flow, is very simple to set up. Once you've done the bulk of the configurations during the initial setup, the day-to-day modifications that you may need to make in your environment to set up new clients are very simple. You click into the Prism menu that brings you to the network area, plug in whatever IP ranges or VLAN segments you need to set up or move clients into, and it's pretty much done. Compared to doing something on a Cisco switch or even in VMware, it's a breeze.

We also use Nutanix's Data-at-Rest encryption. That's very simple to set up. Encryption is typically very onerous and complex to set up in most environments, but the Nutanix implementation of it ties into the single-pane-of-glass approach. You configure a couple of settings in the beginning, and then you go into your storage and decide what you want encrypted. It's pretty much set-it-and-forget-it.

It has made a big improvement to our overall security posture, thanks in large part to the microsegmentation. The Data-at-Rest encryption for storage is also something that we did not have prior to Nutanix.

It has also definitely helped us to reduce management overhead costs. I spend many fewer man-hours working on the hardware environment, compared to what I spent on the equivalent hardware environment that it replaced. And it has definitely helped improve the lives of our support staff in general, the systems administrators and network administrators.

The most valuable feature is the solution's single-pane-of-glass approach to consolidating all of the various metrics and interfaces that I would typically have to access via multiple screens in other products. The ease of use would probably be the single biggest selling point. I just have to go to Prism and, from the main dashboard, I get most of the statistics that I need at a glance. And I can drill down further in the environment through the Prism interface if I need to.

Nutanix's single pane of glass is very good. It's quite convenient. I'm seeing the concept more in other products nowadays, but when we first started using Nutanix, it was more unique. Nutanix was one of the first vendors I saw that was able to really unify so much of their product into that single management pane.

And the Prism user interface for compute, storage, and networking is extremely easy to use. In terms of the network, once it is set up, other than watching traffic, we don't really change things very often. But when it comes to storage, I can create and extend storage pools, and make modifications to storage. Obviously, I can also see how much storage we're using. I can also make changes to our replication factor, the tiering. All those things are very simple to do. Most of them are mouse-click interfaces. I may have to enter a couple of values, but there's no code or command lines. It's all extremely simple, GUI-based management. The compute is the same thing. We can see what we're using, resource-wise, very easily at a glance from the dashboard. We're able to see if there's any unusual activity such as high CPU or memory usage. We can drill down and find out what's going on with that, with relative ease.

The simplicity that Prism provides is something of a dual-edged sword. It can be almost too simple at times. When there is an issue and something is really wrong, it can make it a little more difficult to track it down because the Prism interface is very limited for drilling down into those highly technical or highly complicated errors. That's usually when you have to break out the admin guide, look up the commands, and log in to the backend hardware. You don't get good, in-depth troubleshooting through the Prism interface.

We have been using Prism for about five years.

I don't think I've ever encountered an issue with Prism that was more than cosmetic. It's an extremely stable management interface.

Prism Element, which is the standalone solution, obviously doesn't scale very well. That's tied to the various clusters that you deploy. But Prism Central, which is their paid product, which makes a single pane of glass out of all of the single panes of glass, is pretty good. If you are a large enough organization and you have a number of Prism Element installations spread out, then Prism Central would definitely meet your needs as far as growth and management go.

In our organization, there are nine departments using it with a total of about 200 users.

Their support is pretty good. I've had a few issues related to support, mostly for after-hours stuff, where I believe they changed some call centers that they used. But most of that has been hammered out by now.

They're good. They've always given quick responses, even if they don't necessarily have the answer I want to hear. I can't fault the speed of the support reaching out and continuing the lines of communication. They keep you up to date on the issues pretty well.

Positive

Before we had the Nutanix platform, we used VMware on bare metal hardware.

The initial deployment was a little rocky. The vendor had a solution team come out and do the build of the product and the configuration. That was done incorrectly the first time, so they had to come back out and redo it from scratch. I'm not sure what the problem was; maybe it was a miscommunication at the time of purchase. But once that was straightened out, it was fine.

In terms of learning Prism, within the first week it was easy enough to have a very basic overview of it. Almost anyone, even non-technical people, could read the dashboard pretty easily. Overall, it took two or three more weeks to get a good, comfortable knowledge of the deeper parts of it. In total, it took about a month.

The maintenance required for Prism is the upgrading that we have to perform on it.

The team that came out was a third-party, authorized VAR. They were not Nutanix employees who did it.

I know that what we paid for Nutanix is comparable to, or a little bit less than, what we paid for a similar VMware environment. In that respect, it's worth the money because the simplicity of the management and the setup make it so much easier from an administrative point of view. It has saved us a lot of man-hours and, therefore, money, by not having to manage the product so much.

Pricing is not something I'm involved with, but it is easy to apply the licenses that we acquire.

I've used Prism Central, which is their paid, upgraded version of Prism, and I found it quite helpful. But, ultimately, the price they wanted for the features that we got wasn't worth it for us. But I can see where it would be helpful for some organizations.

We were looking at other hardware platforms besides Nutanix. Prism wasn't something that we were necessarily looking for by itself, but it was a selling point of the Nutanix platform for us.

Prism is tied into the Nutanix environment. If you're looking at Nutanix as a solution, make sure that you look at the hardware that it's running on and that it meets your needs. That is the one place where we ran into issues. We started out on hardware that ended up being too low-spec for us and we ended up having to get more hardware than we had initially envisioned. It wasn't spec'd out properly in the beginning. But that's not related to Prism itself.

To this day, I don't think I've encountered a product that's as easy to use as Prism is, for everything that it does.

We use it as a private cloud for all of our IT infrastructure, including all the virtual machines for every project. We use it for workflow automation for Kubernetes. Nutanix has automation of Kubernetes clusters, and this is a very important use case for us.

It is used in our organization for every system and application: Oracle Database CDB, security systems, and local systems like our antivirus security system, Active Directory, and our finance system.

We have Nutanix in our main office, and two disaster sites. We run our workloads in a data center where there are physical servers and nodes.

We get better performance from Nutanix than we had with VMware. Our applications work very fast now and that is good for the applications team. Our customers are happy.

Among the most valuable features are the

• reporting
• Nutanix Files
• Nutanix Calm
• Nutanix Flow.
  

Also, Prism Central is a single point to manage every cluster. Everything can be managed in one panel. Everything is there on the main page of the dashboard.

It also provides good visibility into our networks.

In addition, because Nutanix has cost management abilities, we can see how to optimize the capacity of our Nutanix products. We know when our storage will run out and when we need to buy more. This is good for the efficiency of our IT organization. The capacity planning is good. I would say it has improved our IT efficiency by 30 percent.

We have a data protection team and Nutanix Data Protector is good. It really helps by taking snapshots in a short time. Our data protection team's efficiency has improved by about 50 percent.

The security of the solution is also good.

The processing of updates and upgrades could be faster.

Also, sometimes the life cycle management function of Nutanix can't find the latest version of the firmware. The lifecycle management product could be more up-to-date.

I have worked with Nutanix for more than five years.

It is very stable. We haven't had any issues with the stability.

It is scalable.

Every system, of course, has some issues, but every ticket we open is resolved by Nutanix support via the Nutanix portal. The support is really good. We don't have any problems with their support or any unresolved issues.

Yearly, we have a maximum of 10 support tickets.

Positive

Previously, we used VMware ESXi and we migrated to Nutanix because it has better performance and functions, as well as new features. We see it as more stable than the VMware products we used, and more secure. The user interface is also simpler. We chose it and we like it.

It also provides a simple migration process from VMware to Nutanix. We used the new Nutanix Move product and it resulted in a simple migration of the virtual machines from the other infrastructure to Nutanix.

The deployment was complex. We have more than one installation for different projects, but the first time, for our blockchain project, it took approximately two weeks. 

However, it is simpler for new staff to learn Nutanix than to learn other products.

The system is used by our network admin, application admin team, and database team. There are 10 administrators.

The price and licensing policies are advantageous. The pricing is better than our previous product. Management uses the portal to track the licenses and for cost management and it is better than our previous product.

I would definitely recommend Nutanix Prism.

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

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

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

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

The solution is very stable. 

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Nutanix Prism for 7 years.

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

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

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

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

The maintenance is very easy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We 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.