Nutanix Prism Reviews

We use it to manage our clusters. We have it across eight Nutanix clusters, to manage and carry out the day-to-day activities. We use Prism Element as well as Prism Central. 

All our applications are run on-prem. In terms of databases, they include SQL database, MySQL database, and some MongoDB. We also have SAP and Java virtual machines. All of these are used on top of our Nutanix cluster.

Nutanix has improved our efficiency. Before, we had a legacy infrastructure, but using Prism on Nutanix clusters has decreased the footprint. Before, to get a given amount of resources, we needed to provision two or three racks. Now, those resources can be achieved through eight or 10 nodes, which do not even utilize a whole rack. 

Another improvement is the dependencies. Earlier, we had several devices including many for servers and storage. We needed a lot of manpower for each of these components: the physical servers, virtualization, networking, and storage. But with Nutanix HCI, everything is in the same box. A single administrator or two can manage all these things and that has decreased the dependencies. I estimate it has improved our efficiency by about 60 percent.

It has also helped with our data protection efficiency, increasing that by about 40 percent. Everything can be automated. When doing manual reporting and intervention, the risk increases. Now, we have decreased the amount of administration and that helps increase security.

Another major benefit is the cost. The cost of HCI versus a three-tier legacy infrastructure is much less. That is true not only for the OpEx but for the CapEx. It is reducing the footprint and the carbon emissions are also coming down. And management overhead costs have been reduced by about 55 percent.

We use Prism as a single-pane-of-glass console for all our alerts. My company started with one Nutanix cluster, but as we added more, we needed a central place to manage all of them. It's running in a hybrid environment, but we have some non-mechanical workloads that are completely on-prem.

The primary users are members of the infrastructure team, but our application folks have workloads running on that platform. They reach out to us with any troubleshooting or performance-related portions issues. We don't use Nutanix for automation. We have different tools for automating VM deployment and other tasks.

Having a centralized platform with information about our infrastructure has helped us with capacity planning. It's easier to estimate what we'll need in the next six months. We have a better understanding of what's happening in the environment. For example, we can see that we were at 40 percent capacity last month, and suddenly, we're at 60 percent. We can find the root cause. Maybe one VM had an increase in data usage, so we can narrow it down and address the issue.

Before implementing Prism, we had an issue with too many alerts for similar issues, so it was difficult to maintain them. The alerts kept coming, and we had a hard time keeping track of everything. We had multiple alerts about CPU, RAM, and storage. Prism helps us identify and eliminate false alerts because most of them were redundant. 

The help desk is more efficient because we aren't being bombarded with tickets generated by duplicate alerts or false positives. We've reduced false alerts by 35 to 45 percent. It takes additional time to investigate each alert to determine if it's real. Our staff can spend time on other project tasks.  

Also, you don't need to spend much time on deployment. Previously, it took weeks to deploy new environments or VMs, but now it can be completed in hours or days, reducing the number of staff needed to complete those activities. Our management overhead has been reduced because we're more efficient, and we don't need to invest time in upgrading or managing multiple servers. We can do that in a single console.

Our application owners and developers are happy with the performance, efficiency, and reliability. The crucial advantage is that we don't need long maintenance windows during upgrades because we can do it with one click on one system at a time. There's no need to shut down all the VMs because you can do them one by one, so it's seamless. There's no disruption to the business. That has made our internal customers happy. 

Implementing Nutanix hasn't affected our security posture much because we were already using multi-factor single sign-on. Prism has those features, too, so we're continuing to use them. 

My organization is a bank, and we are using Nutanix Prism for our banking environments, such as managing virtual machines. 

Additionally, Nutanix now provides a Kubernetes platform for a virtualized environment on Nutanix itself. 

We are also deploying solutions on Nutanix for email, enterprise resource planning, and all use cases across our bank.

The automation part for Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) is great. All processes are fully automated, and the work done through Prism is very interesting and innovative. 

The solution is cost-effective as Nutanix handles the software life cycle management excellently. It simplifies firmware and software updates, making it hassle-free for IT engineers.

We mostly use Nutanix Prism for monitoring and management. It serves as a unified dashboard for all our Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure, providing a single point of access and control.

All of our workloads are hosted on our private cloud, and we have set up one cluster for the proof of concept in Azure's public cloud.

The single pane of glass user experience has been really good. The dashboard, as it comes out of the box, has proven to be sufficient for our needs, and we haven't felt the need to make significant modifications or add extra widgets. The core of what we want to monitor and receive alerts on is already available in the default dashboard in Prism. Therefore, we use the dashboard as-is daily, and it provides all the statistics we are interested in and concerned about, right from the start.

Everything has been quite intuitive. It has been four years now, and originally, we struggled a bit to understand some of the more advanced networking concepts. However, apart from that, everything has been pretty user-friendly. Even when coming on board without any prior knowledge of the product, it was quite easy to pick up. In fact, it was far easier to grasp than competitors' products that I've worked with in the past, especially when it comes to the intuitive use of the interface.

The network visibility has been really good.

The two biggest improvements or benefits for us are related to our team and the infrastructure. The first significant improvement is the ease of deployment, which allows us to swiftly implement new clusters or projects once we have the necessary hardware. In the past, this process used to take days, weeks, or even longer, but now it only takes hours or days. The second advantage is the increased efficiency and accuracy in deploying. This has been a tremendous benefit for us, as it allows us to deploy more effectively and with greater precision. Furthermore, the ongoing and substantial benefit of Life Cycle Management. LCM has saved us countless man-hours and provided us with the capability to perform software updates even in a production environment, without the need for scheduled downtime during regular working hours or weekends.

Nutanix Prism has significantly enhanced the efficiency of IT management within our organization. It has reduced the man-hours required for patching updates by approximately 75 percent, in my estimation. Undoubtedly, this has been our most significant return on investment. Additionally, we have not experienced any adverse effects on end users or production processes since the implementation of these clusters, which occurred nearly a year before I joined the team, making it almost five years since their deployment. This level of performance is truly impressive.

Nutanix Prism has significantly improved the efficiency of our data protection teams. Although we aren't utilizing Nutanix for backup purposes, we continue to rely on Veeam and Spectrum Protect for our backup needs. However, we do make use of protection domains for specific environments, enabling us to achieve almost immediate recovery to a different cluster site.

Our primary use case is for our virtual machines, specifically for our production. We are running about twenty to thirty production VMs, which are critical.

Nutanix Prism is mainly used for our daily operations, similar to VMware. Despite the lack of extraordinary features, it efficiently manages our daily operations now that we are managing our VMs. 

One of the most useful features is the disaster recovery setup, which includes two clusters, one for our production server and another for our recovery site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have not faced any issues since I started using the tool. I like the solution. It has many features. We are okay with the tool’s performance. Everything is available within one console. We can see how many clusters we have. We need not move from one place to another. We can control all the hardware and software from the same screen.

We faced an issue with Nutanix that we did not face with SimpliVity. We are using Veeam Backup. When we take backups, we can see an additional tape in Veeam. It reflects on Nutanix, too. The snapshot consumes 5.6 TB. I have opened a ticket for this issue to understand why the snapshot takes 5.6 TB.

It was not so when we took backups from Veeam to SimpliVity. Generally, the snapshot is taken during backups, but once the backup is complete, the snapshots are released. If we take backups for around 30 VMs, the snapshot takes around 5.6 TB. I do not want 5.6 TB to be used for the snapshot.

Nutanix Prism does not have a built-in backup tool. Other solutions like HPE SimpliVity and Sangfor have built-in backup features. We have to use a third-party solution like Veeam to perform backups in Nutanix. The vendor must add a built-in backup tool in Nutanix. It must work on the tape level. We shouldn’t have to use a third-party tool for our needs. Main features like backup, CPU, and storage must be available within the product we buy.

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

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