Nutanix Prism
Nutanix Prism is the proprietary management software used in Nutanix Acropolis hyper-converged appliances. Nutanix Prism provides an automated control plane that uses machine learning to support predictive analytics and automated data movement. This is beneficial to users because it allows them to centrally manage the entire hardware stack including storage, compute and virtual machines (VMs).
The main management features of Nutanix Prism include:
- Ability to manage, scale and non-disruptively upgrade clusters
- Management of virtual networking
- VM-level management, including the ability to set per-VM policies for compression, deduplication, redundancy, disaster recovery, snapshots and clones
The main monitoring and analytics features of Nutanix Prism are:
- Customizable dashboards that provide views into application performance and resource utilization.
- Instant search feature that allows users to use search terms to quickly call up information and perform actions.
- Predictive capacity and CPU behavior trends.
- Optimization recommendations that are able to pinpoint VMs or snapshots that could be deleted to free up capacity, as well as provide scale-up recommendations for specific workloads.
There are currently two versions of Nutanix Prism: Prism Starter and Prism Pro. Prism Starter is included as no extra cost on all Acropolis hyper-converged systems and provides only the single-site and multi-site management capabilities. To obtain the planning and analytics features Acropolis users can purchase an add-on subscription for Prism Pro.
Prism was launched in June 2015.