Nutanix Prism

The Nutanix Prism¹ management plane simplifies the management of virtualized datacenter environments by consolidating compute, storage, networking, automation, and disaster recovery into a single, intuitive interface - minimizing operational complexity and eliminating the need for multiple standalone tools. 

With Prism, IT teams can manage the full stack, across  compute, storage, and networking resources, for workloads across on-premises and cloud environments. This enhances visibility, enforces consistent policies, simplifies governance and enables IT to focus on strategic initiatives that drive business value. 

Simplified Management 

Infrastructure Operations Management

Health Monitoring & Diagnostics: Prism provides deep visibility into infrastructure health, performance, and capacity through real-time monitoring and advanced analytics. It proactively tracks cluster health, enabling IT teams to shift from reactive troubleshooting to proactive infrastructure management, thus ensuring reliability, performance, and operational continuity.

• Proactive Health Monitoring: Anticipate and address potential issues with automated alerts and customizable health checks.

• Task and Event Logging: Monitor task progress and access audit and event logs across all managed clusters to track changes and quickly diagnose issues.

• Log Collection: Aggregate and download log bundles for diagnostics. 

Multi-Cluster Management: Prism simplifies the management of multiple clusters through a single console, enabling seamless execution of common administrative tasks such as creating, expanding, or decommissioning Prism Element clusters. This centralized management reduces the complexity of overseeing multiple clusters and resources, thereby easing administrative workload, reducing risk of configuration errors, and accelerating response times.

Lifecycle Management: The Nutanix Lifecycle Manager (LCM) solution enables teams to manage and track the lifecycle and deployment of their Nutanix clusters, including upgrades, patches, and firmware updates for Nutanix AOS software, hypervisors, and other Nutanix software, hardware, and firmware components with zero disruption. Teams also have the ability to manage simultaneous upgrades across multiple Prism Element clusters, also known as Multi-Cluster Lifecycle Management. 

Virtual Machine Management

Prism simplifies workflows through the entire VM lifecycle, from creation to deployment, policy-based management, network configuration, protection, migration, and built-in health monitoring and alerting.

VM Lifecycle Management: Deploy VMs rapidly from templates, images, and OVAs at scale using policy-based initial placement, guest customization, and dynamic hotspot mitigation.

Versatile Storage: Provision and resize VM disks on the fly across virtualized containers spanning physical disks and external storage arrays.

Live Migration: Move VMs across clusters with intelligent migration workflows that automatically handle VM security, networking, and container selection. 

Protection & Recovery: Create application-consistent and crash-consistent protection plans with strict recovery objectives. Automated scheduling ensures business-critical workloads remain protected without manual intervention.

Networking & Security Policies

Prism also provides simple workflows to define and manage the entire lifecycle of networks and network security policies.  

Overlay Networking²: Nutanix Flow Virtual Networking provides multi-tenant isolation, self-service provisioning, and IP address preservation using VPCs, subnets, and other virtual components.

Microsegmentation: Nutanix Flow Network Security enables granular microsegmentation to control east-west traffic between VMs to protect applications and prevent the spread of network threats. Apply and visualize security policies to VMs based on application-centric categories. 

2. While Prism manages the Nutanix Flow networking and security capabilities, it's important to note that Nutanix Flow is available under an additional license. For more information, visit: https://www.nutanix.com/products/cloud-platform/software-options.

Data Protection & Business Continuity

Disaster Recovery Orchestration: Automate failover and failback for seamless application availability during planned migrations or unexpected outages. Built-in replication, recovery plans, and non-disruptive testing enable rapid recovery of critical workloads.

Flexible Backup Options: Configure customizable backups to object storage including the Nutanix Objects Storage solution and AWS S3 storage. Rapid snapshot restoration to any Nutanix cluster minimizes downtime.

Data Encryption: Configure Data-at-Rest Encryption (DARE) and Data-in-Transit encryption across clusters to support compliance and security requirements.

Governance & Access Control

IAM, Categories & Policies, and Projects in Prism allow administrators to automate infrastructure management, enforce controls, and optimize resource usage across multiple clusters. This makes it easy to streamline operations, drive consistency, and maintain strict control across infrastructure. 

Identity & Access Management: Implement IAM and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) control of infrastructure resources, allowing for granular control over user access and permissions. Assign custom or system-defined roles at specific operation and resource levels. Prism also supports SSO using multiple identity providers, including Active Directory, LDAP, and SAML for secure and flexible authentication.

Categories & Policies: Categories allows administrators to organize resources (VMs, hosts, clusters) with user-defined metadata tags. Policies create automated rules that trigger actions such as applying backup schedules, assigning security policies, and providing for proper VM placement.

Projects: Provides logical groups of resources, users, and roles to enforce resource quotas and enable secure collaboration through RBAC for different departments or teams in an organization.

Platform Resiliency & Scale

Fault Tolerance & Replication

Configure data fault tolerance levels and replication policies to meet business requirements. Set up cross-cluster replication for disaster recovery scenarios or data locality needs.

High Availability Architecture

Prism offers flexible deployment options to match infrastructure requirements and availability needs:

Single VM Deployment: Ideal for smaller environments where high availability of the management plane is not critical. Suitable for testing, development, or branch office scenarios.

Scale-Out Cluster (3-VM): Provides enhanced scalability and resilience for production environments. Management capabilities remain available even if one Prism VM fails, providing continuous operations during maintenance or unexpected failures.

Deployment Sizing Options

Prism supports seven VM configuration options, ranging from x-small to x-large. The x-small PC is only valid for single VM deployments. For large and x-large deployments, three additional vDisks are automatically added to every Prism VM during registration to support increased scale demands.

Additional Capabilities

API-Driven Automation

By providing a robust API framework with V4 REST APIs, Prism enables seamless automation, integration, and customization across multiple clusters and enterprise environments. Prism also supports OData features such as resource filtering, sorting, and selection for advanced data querying. This allows for automation of routine tasks, acceleration of application deployments, and integration of the Nutanix platform with third-party tools like ITSM, monitoring, or CI/CD pipelines. 

Intelligent Recommendations 

The Nutanix Intelligent Virtual Agent (NIVA) assistant provides real-time, context-aware guidance within Prism to help discover features that are most relevant to specific use cases. By delivering instant guidance and relevant learning resources, it empowers teams to understand and apply product capabilities, enhancing daily productivity, and supporting broader digital transformation goals. 

Licensing & Deployment

Licensing Model

The Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offering includes Prism with every tier at no additional cost. Deploy Prism as a virtual machine without licensing complexity or hidden fees.

Deployment Flexibility

Prism deploys as a VM on Nutanix infrastructure, with sizing and scale-out options tailored to your environment. Deployment automation drives rapid time-to-value, with full management capabilities available within minutes of initial configuration.

Learn More

Visit https://www.nutanix.com/products/prism or try it out for yourself through Nutanix Prism Test Drive. 

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