What needs improvement with Nutanix Prism?

There is a need for more migration tools, especially for migrating a solution from non-Nutanix environments to a Nutanix environment, particularly for systems with shared disks.

The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required.

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 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.

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.

Prism is made to do multi-cloud and multi-site tasks. Some of the products are not interoperable for multi-cloud or multi-site tasks. Nutanix Flow doesn’t work well between sites.

I would like more insights about virtual machines. It would be helpful to have more detailed information about resource allocation and usage, so we can distribute resources and reassign them more efficiently. There was a previous issue with multi-sites in which elements are in different regions, but I think this issue has been resolved in the latest release. We have multiple sites throughout North America and some in Europe. It was difficult to manage those sites. Now Prism is multi-region, so you can manage all the assets in different regions from a single console.

The licensing cost has room for improvement.

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.

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'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.

The network visibility is okay. It's good. It's a little bit tough to drill down to get to everything that I want, but it's all there. The one caveat that I would have on that is that it doesn't allow you to connect to outside storage, other than cloud-based. That is something I would prefer for disaster recovery, to be able to send things out that way. Even at an ISCSi level, even though you may not be able to run servers off it, connecting to outside storage is my biggest caveat. But other than that, it's great.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Before the latest version, there were a lot of things that I would have liked to see added, but those have been added in the most recent version. But one thing I would like to see is one-click migration. I know that's on the roadmap, but we don't have it yet.

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.

They don't have many organized documents for troubleshooting problems. If you look at the support portal or the website, you will not get detailed information about problems or redirection to more information. They should continue working on the software solution but enlarge the documentation.

Performance metrics and analytics could be improved.

PaaS services are a bit complex to implement so should be strengthened and developed. We struggled to integrate so did not have the courage to implement PaaS services. The process should be easier to understand. The solution does not support creating hybrid disc clusters that include SSD disc configuration servers with hybrid disc configuration servers in the same cluster.

The process of converting and importing virtual machines to the Nutanix environment is quite complicated. The interface could also be improved, and there's an issue that some features can't be managed from Prism Central, meaning you have to switch to Prism Element.

The replication we have does not have any backup systems built-in. We have to separate license records for backup, like onboard. We would like to have this in a future release.

There is a bug with the HTML5 interface. I don't know if it is recorded to my laptop or the application, but sometimes we have to restart the CVM.

We definitely have some issues with Nutanix Prism. Our main issue is that we cannot operate the database. It would seem that less configuration would be desirable, because between Nutanix and the Oracle database on Windows, there tends to be problems. When we took our initial problems with the database to Nutanix support, they gave us some configurations to try out, but these did not solve anything. So the problems remain, and that is why we are only using Nutanix Prism for our application. We didn't have the time to find a working configuration for the database, and thus we migrated the database to another solution. Their support seems to have some problems, too, because when we opened a ticket the one time, the lower level of support connected to take the ticket and the technician said that it was a false positive, meaning that they could not reference the error. However, Prism clearly stated to us that there was an error, despite the technician checking the system and telling us, "No, there are no more errors." I wanted the technician to clarify what had happened, but he merely told me the fault is inaccessible.

Prism is not very user-friendly, particularly in its upgrade process, compared to vSAN. They don't really provide support for long-term services but offer upgrades very frequently, which means we don't always have the time to update to the newest version. Both configuration and manageability are complicated too.

Nutanix Prism needs more flexibility commercially and more flexibility with its licensing. Currently, they're very fixed on their licensing model, for example, it's based on terabyte calculation.

Nutanix Prism could improve by having more features or configurations in the web interface. We should not have to use the command-line interface(CLI). For some clients using the CLI can be difficult.

The solution should offer the ability to change network settings without removing the network card from the virtual machine. I don't know the solution very well. I need more time to really explore it. What I need may already be available.

One problem I faced when creating a VM and adding a hard disk is that Nutanix Prism did not allow me to reduce that VM's hard disk. This is an issue because I could not find a solution. Also, in a session I had with Nutanix Prism today, I was told that they are going to include Kubernetes deployment in the next release. That is a good approach from my perspective. It's important for solutions to stay on the cutting edge.

In terms of what could be improved or simplified, they have an active software as a business continuity using Acropolis Hypervisor with the Syncro Disaster recovery, and they have made a good improvement with live upgrade with the LCM, but I would say there should be additional improvements on the live upgrade. In the next release, I think it should have the integration monitor from a server component because I have some issues with the integration with the third party monitoring tool. I would also like to see additional improvements in the dashboard.

The life cycle management or LCM feature is the most complicated. It takes really long and is unpredictable for our use cases. They should provide more detailed information about the kind of LCM to go for, various errors, and different kinds of tasks. For analytics for certain configurations, we require more details with the report. Sometimes, not all elements are present for support, management, and configuration. For troubleshooting, it would be very easy and useful if we can analyze log files directly from Prism, that is, not from the command line but directly from Prism.

The only issue with Nutanix is that when you want to take a snapshot, you have to power down and then back up, which creates a short period of downtime. This is a negative point for Nutanix because, in our environment, downtime is not something that we get easily. VMware does not have this issue. I would like to have more control from Prism so that you can control everything from there, as it does with vCenter. Nutanix does not support all of the Linux distributions, so we have to use VMware in some cases.

I would like to see the capability to use FC SAN storage. Currently, this technology is not supported.

I'm still learning about the solution. I haven't explored the entire solution just yet. The life expectancy of the solution should be improved. It would be ideal if there was more of a community around the solution so that it would be easier to learn things about the solution from other users. We've had hardware compatibility issues.

We've been waiting a long time for micro application using a company's provider, that would be a good improvement. The cost of the solution is quite high and I'd like to see that lowered.

It seems to me that everything is in gear as it should be, every time an update or new package appears it never ceases to amaze me as it helps us with a 100% stable technology, to add something would be to have clear the new needs of the human being. Each era every year, new economies arise and ways to develop the platform to improve both the interface with the end-user and to make the main load more flexible to the specialized user of the platform. Nutanix is ​​at the forefront and changes the paradigm with other providers because it allows simplifying daily work.

I would like to have some cluster management tools included.

The solution could be improved if you combined Nutanix with AHV, because when you install Prism to manage AHV, there are a lot of commands. It might be better to integrate the commands with Prism and that would enable Prism to manage AHV. This is not currently in the command line.

Although this solution has very good analytics capabilities, it can be even more granular.

The solution could be a bit more user-friendly. The dashboard and configuration should be much easier to use. The migration from Nutanix to other platforms, like VMware and hypervisor, needs improvement. That is a difficult task right now, because we cannot run the two separately. It's a bit tricky.

I think perhaps they can improve on the price but it is a good product.

I think that the Nutanix Prism Pro the terms it uses, it's not very user-friendly. Those terms should be a little more user-friendly. What terms they use should be more user-friendly.

If I am comparing it with VMware, it is still not as compatible. I am not comfortable in working with the automation in Nutanix Prism or the SAN side. The automation needs to be improved, as there are several challenges.

The main area where an improvement could be made would be the pricing. Aside from that, it's a very good product. An additional feature that could be included would be to make an easy connection to closed systems such as Azure.

In the next release, I would like the ability to browse data stores directly from the Prism interface instead of using third party product.

Perhaps the interface can be more intuitive. It's easy, but it is very slow at the beginning.