Nutanix Prism Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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 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 use Nutanix Prism to manage our on-prem virtualized data center environment.

Nutanix Prism assists in monitoring our customers' workloads, enabling them to predict when they will require scaling out.

The solution offers a single pane of glass that enables individuals without technical expertise to access the dashboard and understand its value.

Nutanix Prism's user interface for computing, storage, and networking is extremely user-friendly. We can effortlessly utilize the same graphical user interface to monitor and create virtual machines as well as create data storage.

We use Nutanix Prism's automation for upgrades.

Nutanix Prism offers our customers visibility into their data environment, helping to reduce the need for resources in troubleshooting and management.

Nutanix Prism has helped our IT management by monitoring the cluster and automating the installation of software updates.

The solution assists our data protection teams by offering the capability to perform data selection and recovery.

Resource monitoring is the most valuable feature.

I would like Nutanix Prism to have improved integration with third-party products.

The stability has room for improvement.

I have been using Nutanix Prism for three years.

I give Nutanix Prism's stability a seven out of ten.

I give Nutanix Prism's scalability an eight out of ten.

The technical support is great.

Positive

We are currently using VMware and Nutanix Prism.

We implement the solution for our customers.

Nutanix Prism's cost is reasonable.

I give Nutanix Prism an eight out of ten.

Some of our customers have multiple sites, while others have just one, so we deploy the solution across various locations. Two to three people are required for the maintenance of the solution.

Nutanix Prism is an intriguing option for certain clients due to its reasonable pricing. However, it does have stability issues with the software, making it suitable for usage in development or UAT environments. I do not recommend using Nutanix Prism for production purposes.

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.

Positive

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.