What is Nutanix Prism?
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Data is essential for managing today's complex hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) and virtualized data center environments. On top of collecting information from various sources, you also need the ability to analyze it so that you can create a real-time, holistic view of your IT infrastructure to support accurate decision-making.
However, using multiple management software systems increases the complexity of the process and reduces the IT team's productivity. The confusion and errors can delay response time, impact the ability to deploy resources in a cost-efficient way, and diminish the value of the data you have at your disposal.
To do it all properly, you need a tool built for the job. While different options may make sense for different organizations, Nutanix Prism is one way to leverage data to support effective infrastructure management.
What Is Nutanix Prism?
Nutanix Prism is an automation and analytics solution designed to support Nutanix Acropolis, the operating system for Nutanix's HCI platform.
Nutanix Prism automates data movement and provides predictive analytics functions. It delivers an end-to-end solution for virtualized data center environments while consolidating administrative and reporting tasks. It leverages machine learning (ML) technologies to analyze a large amount of data and automate routine workflows. It also generates insights and provides recommendations for optimizing virtualization, infrastructure management and operations.
Prism Element (PE) is designed for single cluster management, maintaining a uniform interface across various supported hypervisors. It allows administrators to configure storage services, monitoring, upgrades and more all in one place. Prism Central, also called Prism Pro, is a multi-cluster/multi-site centralized management interface. Besides basic automation, it allows users to run "what if" scenarios to support growth and planning. It also serves as the starting point for deploying other Nutanix software, such as Calm.
Key Features of Nutanix Prism
Nutanix Prism offers infrastructure management, operational insights, and planning and monitoring support.
The following represent some of its key features.
Nutanix Prism for infrastructure management
Nutanix Prism provides administrators with hypervisor and virtual machine (VM) management capabilities through a user-friendly, uncluttered interface to streamline workflows (e.g., VM creation, VM migration, virtual network setup and hypervisor upgrade).
Prism allows you to deploy clusters for storage and virtualization in minutes. You can streamline and manage the entire VM lifecycle via a graphical user interface (GUI), command-line interface (CLI) and REST API. Its intuitive single-pane-of-glass view facilitates storage management, deployment and scaling. Meanwhile, the self-service portal empowers end-users without compromising access or resource control. Prism also provides a VM-centric operational view of your network to simplify the monitoring, troubleshooting and remediation of common network issues.
Nutanix Prism for operational insights
Nutanix Prism uses powerful machine learning technologies to collect and analyze a vast amount of system data. You can see all the information on a customizable dashboard, which gives you the actionable business intelligence you need to optimize infrastructure performance.
The platform delivers a "search-first" user experience that flattens the learning curve so users can become productive right away. You can compose and schedule reports with the appropriate operational insights and have them sent to stakeholders automatically to enhance visibility into performance data across the organization.
Nutanix Prism for planning
Thanks to its advanced capacity planning functions, Prism's predictive algorithms can provide actionable recommendations for optimizing your provisioning capabilities. It can forecast the capacity needs of the applications that run on a Nutanix cluster and provide the insights you need to plan for infrastructure demand.
The Capacity Optimization Advisor analyzes usage across all applications and provides recommendations to help you improve capacity usage and prevent capacity runway. Furthermore, the just-in-time forecast feature processes past, current and projected workload demands to suggest a capacity expansion schedule based on your infrastructure needs.
Nutanix Prism for monitoring
Nutanix Prism's purpose-built machine learning engine learns the performance behaviors of VMs and workloads in real time. It then leverages the knowledge to detect anomalies automatically. Its predictive monitoring feature uses behavioral analysis instead of static thresholds to detect performance issues. You'll be alerted to problems that could have potential performance impacts so you can proactively fix them before they impact the workloads.
Nutanix Prism also helps improve VM performance with its bottleneck detection capabilities. It provides recommendations for optimizing VM resource allocation based on its machine learning-generated insights and behavioral analysis to increase operational cost-efficiency.
Experience the benefits of Nutanix Prism
With Nutanix Prism, you can consolidate and manage your entire hardware stack from a centralized dashboard to streamline workflows and improve productivity. Its machine learning technology gives you a holistic view of your IT infrastructure and provides you with data-driven, actionable insights for optimizing virtualization and infrastructure usage.
Ready to see what Nutanix Prism can do in action?
Visit our Nutanix Prism/AHV Lab to see how the dashboards work, how you can check overall system health, how to create new VMs, how to manage data storage, how to create snapshot and replication — and much more.