TN-2043 Prism Central and Prism Pro

Prism Central and
Prism Pro
Nutanix Tech Note
Version 1.5 • April 2018 • TN-2043

Prism Central and Prism Pro
Copyright
Copyright 2018 Nutanix, Inc.
Nutanix, Inc.
1740 Technology Drive, Suite 150
San Jose, CA 95110
All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual
property laws.
Nutanix is a trademark of Nutanix, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other
marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.
Copyright | 2
Contents
1. Executive Summary................................................................................ 5
2. Introduction..............................................................................................6
2.1. Audience........................................................................................................................ 6
2.2. Purpose..........................................................................................................................6
3. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Overview...................................................... 7

3.1. Nutanix Acropolis Architecture...................................................................................... 8
4. Customer Value....................................................................................... 9
4.1. Nutanix Solution.............................................................................................................9
5. What Is Prism?...................................................................................... 10
5.1. Prism Design Fundamentals....................................................................................... 10
6. Prism Central Architecture...................................................................11
7. Prism Central......................................................................................... 13
7.1. Entity Explorer............................................................................................................. 13
7.2. Entity Tagging..............................................................................................................17
7.3. Alerts............................................................................................................................ 18
7.4. User-Created Alerts..................................................................................................... 20
7.5. Tasks............................................................................................................................21
7.6. Alert-Driven Root Cause Analysis............................................................................... 22
7.7. Analysis........................................................................................................................22
7.8. User Management and Authentication........................................................................ 23
7.9. Localization.................................................................................................................. 24
7.10. Self-Service................................................................................................................24
8. Prism Pro............................................................................................... 27
8.1. Licensing...................................................................................................................... 27
3
8.2. Customizable Operations Dashboards........................................................................ 27

8.3. Reporting Capabilities..................................................................................................29
8.4. Dynamic Monitoring..................................................................................................... 30
8.5. Capacity Runway.........................................................................................................31
8.6. Finding Waste and Right-Sizing VMs..........................................................................32
8.7. Capacity Planning........................................................................................................33
8.8. Multiple Cluster Upgrades........................................................................................... 36
8.9. Search..........................................................................................................................37
9. Conclusion............................................................................................. 39
Appendix......................................................................................................................... 40
About Nutanix......................................................................................................................40
List of Figures................................................................................................................41
List of Tables................................................................................................................. 43
4
1. Executive Summary
The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform delivers the industry’s most popular hyperconverged
solution, natively converging compute, storage, virtualization, systems management, and
operations management into a turnkey appliance that can be deployed in minutes to run any
application out of the box. Nutanix also offers powerful virtualization capabilities, including
core virtual machine operations, live migration, VM high availability, and virtual network
management, as fully integrated features of the infrastructure stack rather than as standalone
products that require separate deployment and management. The Nutanix solution has two
key product families—Nutanix Acropolis and Nutanix Prism. Acropolis is the distributed data
plane that provides storage, virtualization, backup, and DR services, and Prism is the centralized
management solution for Nutanix environments.
1. Executive Summary | 5
2. Introduction
2.1. Audience
This document is intended for IT administrators, architects, and business leaders who want to
understand the operation management experience that the Nutanix solution provides.
2.2. Purpose
This technical note describes the Prism Central and Prism Pro functions and how to use them
to manage, monitor, and scale Nutanix clusters. It explains and highlights simplified cluster
administration methods and operational insights.
Table 1: Document Version History
Version
Published Notes
Number
1.0 March 2016 Original publication.
1.1 June 2016 Updated for AOS 4.7.
1.2 December 2016 Updated for AOS 5.0.
1.3 May 2017 Updated for AOS 5.1.
1.4 December 2017 Updated for AOS 5.5.
1.5 April 2018 Updated for AOS 5.6.
2. Introduction | 6
3. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Overview

Nutanix delivers a web-scale, hyperconverged infrastructure solution purpose-built for
virtualization and cloud environments. This solution brings the scale, resilience , and economic
benefits of web-scale architecture to the enterprise through the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud
Platform, which combines three product families—Nutanix Acropolis, Nutanix Prism, and Nutanix
Calm.
Attributes of this Enterprise Cloud OS include:
• Optimized for storage and compute resources.
• Machine learning to plan for and adapt to changing conditions automatically.
• Self-healing to tolerate and adjust to component failures.
• API-based automation and rich analytics.
• Simplified one-click upgrade.
• Native file services for user and application data.
• Native backup and disaster recovery solutions.
• Powerful and feature-rich virtualization.
• Flexible software-defined networking for visualization, automation, and security.
• Cloud automation and life cycle management.
Nutanix Acropolis provides data services and can be broken down into three foundational
components: the Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF), the App Mobility Fabric (AMF), and AHV.
Prism furnishes one-click infrastructure management for virtual environments running on
Acropolis. Acropolis is hypervisor agnostic, supporting three third-party hypervisors—ESXi,
Hyper-V, and XenServer—in addition to the native Nutanix hypervisor, AHV.
Figure 1: Nutanix Enterprise Cloud
3. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Overview | 7

3.1. Nutanix Acropolis Architecture

Acropolis does not rely on traditional SAN or NAS storage or expensive storage network
interconnects. It combines highly dense storage and server compute (CPU and RAM) into a
single platform building block. Each building block delivers a unified, scale-out, shared-nothing
architecture with no single points of failure.
The Nutanix solution requires no SAN constructs, such as LUNs, RAID groups, or expensive
storage switches. All storage management is VM-centric, and I/O is optimized at the VM virtual
disk level. The software solution runs on nodes from a variety of manufacturers that are either
all-flash for optimal performance, or a hybrid combination of SSD and HDD that provides a
combination of performance and additional capacity. The DSF automatically tiers data across the
cluster to different classes of storage devices using intelligent data placement algorithms. For
best performance, algorithms make sure the most frequently used data is available in memory or
in flash on the node local to the VM.
To learn more about the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, please visit the Nutanix Bible and
Nutanix.com.
3. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Overview | 8

4. Customer Value
4.1. Nutanix Solution

Nutanix offers a complete infrastructure system delivering enterprise-class storage, compute, and
virtualization services for any application. As a fully integrated IT solution, Nutanix eliminates the
cost and complexity of legacy datacenter products that are individually deployed and managed
separately. Nutanix brings together web-scale engineering and consumer-grade design to
make infrastructure invisible and to elevate IT teams so they can focus on what matters most—
applications.
At the heart of the Nutanix solution are two product families: Nutanix Acropolis and Nutanix
Prism. The Acropolis Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF) delivers enterprise storage services,
and the highly available and scalable App Mobility Fabric (AMF) within Acropolis enables
workloads to move freely between virtualization environments without penalty. Nutanix Prism, the
comprehensive management solution for Acropolis, provides unprecedented one-click simplicity
to the IT infrastructure life cycle.
For maximum flexibility, enterprise professionals have the choice of using VMware vSphere,
Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, or the natively integrated hypervisor, AHV, to run their
applications on Nutanix. AHV is built on proven open source technology and has been hardened
for security.
Together, AHV and AMF decouple applications from the underlying infrastructure, giving
enterprise IT the flexibility to choose whichever runtime environment is best for their applications
and services. Acropolis works with Nutanix Prism to give administrators consumer-grade
simplicity in managing their entire virtual datacenter.
4. Customer Value | 9
5. What Is Prism?
Nutanix Prism provides central access for administrators to configure, monitor, and manage
virtual environments in an efficient and elegant way. Powered by advanced data analytics and
heuristics and rich automation, Prism offers unprecedented simplicity by combining several
aspects of datacenter management into a single, consumer-grade solution. Using innovative
machine learning technology, Prism can mine large volumes of system data easily and quickly
and generate actionable insights for optimizing all aspects of virtual infrastructure management.
Prism is a part of every Nutanix deployment and has two core components:
• Prism Element
Prism Element is a service built into the platform for every Nutanix cluster deployed. Prism
Element provides the ability to fully configure, manage, and monitor Nutanix clusters running
any hypervisor.
• Prism Central
Because Prism Element only manages the cluster it is part of, each Nutanix cluster in a
deployment has a unique Prism Element instance for management. As organizations deploy
multiple Nutanix clusters, they want to be able to manage all of them from a single Prism
instance, so Nutanix introduced Prism Central.
Prism Central offers an organizational view into a distributed Nutanix deployment, with the
ability to attach all remote and local Nutanix clusters to a single Prism Central deployment.
This global management experience offers a single place to monitor performance, health, and
inventory for all Nutanix clusters. Prism Central is available in a standard version included
with every Nutanix deployment and as a Pro version that is licensed separately and enables
several advanced features.
5.1. Prism Design Fundamentals

Nutanix designed Prism based on the idea that designing complex software is hard, but
designing simplicity is genius. As a result, Prism is elegant, intuitive, and inviting. We prioritized
streamlining what the user needs to do and offloaded common decisions to the software. This
approach means that users have fewer knobs to turn and choices to make. These design
fundamentals have produced a user experience that is consistent across the entire product.
5. What Is Prism? | 10
6. Prism Central Architecture

Prism Central is an application you can deploy in a VM (Prism Central VM) or a scale-out cluster
of VMs (Prism Central instance), either manually by importing a VM template or via one click
from Prism Element. You can run Prism Central VM in a small or large VM; the difference is the
amount of CPU and memory assigned to the Prism Central VM to manage the VMs. You can
initially deploy a Prism Central instance as a scale-out cluster or, if you are running it as a single
VM, easily scale it out in one-click fashion via Prism Element. The design decisions that need
to be accounted for in this architecture are dramatically simpler than legacy solutions. You only
need to answer two questions before deploying:
• How many VMs do you need to manage?
• Do you want high availability?
Because we understand that a decision today may not account for unplanned events in the
future, the architecture allows users to scale an instance up and out to account for changing
conditions. The following diagram shows the two different architectures with the number of VMs
each can manage.
Figure 2: Prism Central Architectures
This architecture is extensible because it allows you to enable value-added features and
products, such as Prism Pro, Calm, and Flow networking within the Prism Central application,
as shown in the diagram below. These additional features operate within a single Prism Central
VM or clustered Prism Central instance and do not require the design or deployment of separate
products. This strategy enables a simplified experience throughout the phases of a project and
includes one-click upgrades that allow users to benefit from regular innovations.
6. Prism Central Architecture | 11

Figure 3: Prism Central Value-Added Features
6. Prism Central Architecture | 12

7. Prism Central
The standard edition of Prism Central is available to all license levels on Nutanix platforms and
includes an entity explorer, entity tagging, alerts, user-created alerts, tasks, alert-driven root
cause analysis, analysis, user management and authentication, localization, and self-service.
7.1. Entity Explorer

Prism Central serves as a single management point for multicluster and multisite Nutanix
environments. In multicluster environments, you need easy access to information in a simple
summary. The entity explorer, accessed via the explore view in Prism Central, provides this
overview.
Prism’s analysis features can report on and allow you to view a number of entities within a
Nutanix cluster. The entity explorer focuses on a subset of entities that provide administrators
with access to configuration and inventory data:
• Virtual machines
• Nutanix clusters
• Hosts
• Disks
• Containers
When you select an entity to view, Prism immediately returns a list of all of the items within the
selected entity. If you select VMs, for example, you see a list of every VM on each of the clusters
a Prism Central instance is managing. You can view the entity list in one of three formats: a list
view, tile view, or circle view. Each view provides a unique look into the data provided.
When viewing a set of entities, such as VMs, there are two options for the type of data Prism
presents. The first option delivers a general data set, which in this example includes common
VM-related details such as the host and cluster the VM is running on, IP address, and hypervisor
version. Alternatively, there is a performance-based view; in this example, this view reports VM
memory usage along with several other vital storage performance metrics. You can set the table
that contains the selected data points to display 10–60 rows in increments of 10.
7. Prism Central | 13
Figure 4: Entity Explorer in Prism
In the explore view, there are several ways to group and filter entity data points to make the
information easier for administrators to consume. When viewing VMs, you can apply a color to
each entity to show the vCPU count, VM health, or power state. The group function displays VMs
that you can group by cluster, hypervisor, power state, health, or vCPU count. Once you have
filtered the data in the desired manner, you can choose multiple items by selecting the check box
for each item that you want, or by holding down Shift and clicking the first and last items to select
a contiguous range.
In addition to the general and performance-focused views available in the entity browser,
administrators can create custom views. To create new custom views, select the Custom option
from the Focus drop-down menu. This option prompts you to name the new custom view and
select from a list of columns that provide a variety of data points. The figure below provides
an example of creating a custom view for VM data. Administrators can create multiple custom
views, including custom views for any of the five entities available in the entity browser, with each
providing a unique set of data points relevant to the selected entity.
Figure 5: Custom Views in Prism
When you select VMs running on AHV in the entity explorer, you can execute VM actions on a
single VM or a group of selected VMs. This capability allows you to implement traditional VM
management for distributed environments from a centralized point. These actions are:
• Power actions
• Clone VM
• Launch console
• Pause VM
• Resume
• Snapshot
• Migrate VM
• Update VM configuration
• Delete VM
You can quickly find a specific entity, a subset of entities, or a range of entities by applying a filter
to the results provided in the explore list. You can apply multiple filters to a single view to further
reduce the total number of results and drill down to a focused set. Each of the filters provides a
count of the number of entities that it applies to.
Figure 6: Filters in the Entity Explorer
The filters for each type of entity are different; the filters that can be applied to a list of VMs are:
• Filter based on host name.
• Filter based on cluster name.
• Hypervisor type.
• Health.
• Memory capacity.
• CPU usage.
• Memory usage.
• Read IOPS.
• Write IOPS.
• I/O bandwidth.
• I/O latency.
7.2. Entity Tagging

The entity explorer allows you to tag virtual machines with one or more labels. When the entity
explorer displays results, it represents your labels with a symbol; it also offers labels as an
additional method by which to filter results.
Labels can have a number of uses, including tagging VMs that belong to a single application,
business owner, or customer.
Figure 7: Entity Tagging
7.3. Alerts
The alert features in Prism Central apprise administrators of informational, warning, and critical
alerts for all clusters under management. The alerts view presents all notifications and events in
an easy-to-consume table format. Prism Central displays each alert with the color-coded severity
level, a description of the alert, the timestamp, and which entity the alert involves.
Figure 8: Alerts in Prism Central
To ensure that these informational, warning, and critical alerts do not overburden the
administrator, you can apply Prism’s filters to surface exactly the desired data. You can filter
alerts based on the following choices:
• Categories (availability, capacity, configuration, performance, system indicator).
• Severity (critical, warning, info).
• Resolved (yes or no).
Figure 9: Alert Filters
There can be a significant amount of variance between organizations, and if alert policies are too
rigid to accommodate these differences, they become a hindrance. Prism Central lets you update
and customize alert policies with different values to suit your particular organization’s conditions.
The Prism Central instance applies such policy changes to all clusters under management.
When a different value should be applied to different clusters in the environment, you can
configure each alert policy with exceptions.
Figure 10: Updating an Alert Policy
With centralized control for alert policies and SMTP email alerts, organizations can set their
alerting policies from Prism Central and the policies for all managed clusters automatically
update to match. This feature saves time in configuring and updating policies and ensures that
each cluster is compliant.
7.4. User-Created Alerts

Along with customizable platform-level alerts, administrators can create alert policies to satisfy
more specific monitoring requirements for an entity (VM, cluster, host, container) or group of
entities. Each policy focuses on a selected metric, and you can configure it with a warning and
alert value. To prevent false notifications, you can configure the policy such that the value does
not trigger an alert until that value has been sustained for a certain amount of time.
Figure 11: Create Alert Policy
7.5. Tasks
Within a multicluster environment, it is particularly helpful to understand the actions performed
over time. Prism Central records these and presents them as tasks in the tasks view. A table
format displays all tasks and lists what actions were performed, the entity each action was
performed on, and the cluster, status, running time, and duration of each action.
From the task view, organizations can easily see recent actions and get a comprehensive
sense of the current status. The task view is also a helpful resource when looking back to a
specific time period when researching an issue’s root cause or finding the source of configuration
changes.
Figure 12: Task View in Prism
7.6. Alert-Driven Root Cause Analysis

To help administrators remediate alerts, Prism offers a summary of probable causes for each
alert. Because knowing what caused an alert is only half the problem, Prism also provides the
most likely resolution, helping administrators correct issues faster. Each possible root cause
Prism suggests includes recommended steps for correcting the issue along with items to review,
logs to examine, and any other applicable actions.
Some root cause corrective measures also provide a performance metric chart for the
administrator to review. To help identify whether a performance issue caused the problem, a bell
on the chart marks the time when the alert was created. This marker allows the administrator to
see if the suggested metric was in violation at the time of the event.
Figure 13: Root Cause Analysis
7.7. Analysis
Prism Central’s analysis feature builds on the Prism Element analysis feature, adding the ability
to report on all managed clusters. This ability allows administrators to bring all of the relevant
analytics for the entire environment or any single entity into one view. This analysis view stacks
all the charts together and lines them up in time sync. Above the stack of charts, Prism adds all
alerts and events, represented with colors and counts.
This visual layout lets an administrator click on a chart at any point in time, placing a vertical
line stretched through all charts for easy correlation. By focusing on a specific point and syncing
all metrics, administrators can reduce the effort it takes to identify possible root causes. The
rightmost column of the screen provides a summary of any alerts and events, so you don’t need
to leave the analysis page.
Figure 14: Prism Central Analysis View
The analysis view allows users to add analytic charts to their screens and to remove them. Prism
Central users can fully customize the number and size of the graphs they see.
7.8. User Management and Authentication

Prism Central offers two types of user accounts for authentication. You can create and manage
the first type, local accounts, within Prism Central. The second type of account is LDAP-based
authentication. Organizations can configure Prism Central to use Microsoft Active Directory or
OpenLDAP as an authentication source, which allows them to utilize existing user accounts and
groups to control access to Prism Central.
7.9. Localization
Prism now offers Unicode (UFT-8 encoded) support for characters not contained in ASCII.
Unicode support allows administrators to use supported characters in names of entities such as
containers, VMs, clusters, and so on. Because Unicode support is native through every layer,
service, and access point within the Nutanix platform, everything from command line access to
system services can use this expanded character set.
From the 4.7 release onward, when users change their preferred language in Prism, the date,
time, and number formats update to display correctly for the language selected. Prism now also
supports Simplified Chinese.
Figure 15: Prism Language Settings
7.10. Self-Service
The self-service portal (SSP) is an integrated service on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS. The
SSP offers application owners or operations staff the ability to consume and manage resources
without the need for administrator-level access. The SSP feature is currently only available on
clusters running Nutanix AHV as the hypervisor.
Administration Experience
The streamlined SSP administration experience closely follows Prism’s familiar look and feel.
Nutanix simplifies administration into the simple management of projects, roles, users, and
catalog items.
Within the SSP, a project is the construct that allows you to assign resources and privileges for
a group of users to consume. To manage the amount of resources that a particular project can
consume, you can assign quotas for CPU, memory, and storage capacity; you can also leave
these resources unlimited.
Roles and users assigned to projects provide role-based access controls (RBACs). Roles give
you fine-grained permission control to precisely define what actions a user can perform within
each project. The SSP is LDAP-enabled and connects to Windows Active Directory.
The single global catalog within the SSP is available to every active project in a cluster. Catalog
items can include VM templates that allow you to modify resources before deployment. Another
kind of catalog item could be a disk image that presents ISO media to users for OS and
application installs; there could also be a disk image that contains an OS instance or data from
an application.
Figure 16: SSP Project Creation
Consumption Experience
From the user’s point of view, the SSP focuses on creating, managing, and consuming VMs.
Prism greets the user with a simple view of existing VMs that they have created or for which they
have been assigned access rights. When you select an existing VM, you can see options for
controlling the power state, updating VM configuration, launching a console, or deleting the VM (if
permissions allow).
These functions allow allocation owners and operations staff to create and manage their own
resources without requiring costly manual intervention from infrastructure teams. The process for
creating a new VM is sufficiently straightforward that users at any skill level can follow it. Upon
clicking Create VM, the user selects the catalog item to deploy, provides a name, then accepts or
modifies resources. The figure below provides an example of what this looks like.
Figure 17: SSP VM Creation
8. Prism Pro
The features discussed so far in this technical note are all part of the Prism Central standard
edition that is included with all license levels for Nutanix clusters. All customers can thus take
advantage of the centralized management that Prism Central offers.
Prism Pro is a set of additional features that are unlocked when licensed. These features include
capacity planning, custom dashboards, and advanced search capabilities.
8.1. Licensing
Prism Pro licenses are available on a per-node basis through a yearly subscription. All nodes
managed by a Prism Central instance with Pro features enabled must be licensed.
8.2. Customizable Operations Dashboards

The custom dashboard feature allows you to build a dashboard based on a collection of widgets.
You can arrange the widgets on the screen to create exactly the view into the environment
that works best for you. A dashboard’s contents can range from a single widget to a screen
full of widgets. Prism Pro comes with a default dashboard providing a view of capacity, health,
performance, and alerts that should be ideal for most users and a good starting point for others.
Prism Pro includes a number of fixed and customizable widgets that you can add to dashboards.
The customizable widgets allow you to display top lists, alerts, and analytics.
8. Prism Pro | 27
Figure 18: Customizable Operations Dashboards
The custom dashboard feature also allows you to create multiple dashboards, including
dashboards that focus on data. Organizations can create separate dashboards for different
physical sites, business units, administrators, or any number of other functions.
Figure 19: Capability for Multiple Dashboards
8. Prism Pro | 28
8.3. Reporting Capabilities

The reporting feature within Prism Pro allows you to create both scheduled and as-needed
reports. Prism Pro includes a set of customizable predefined reports, or you can create new
reports using a built-in WYSIWYG editor. In the editor, simply select data points and arrange
them in the desired layout to create your report. The ability to group within reports can help you
get a global view of a given data point or allow you to look at entities by cluster.
Figure 20: Report Builder
Once you have created them, you can run reports either on an as-needed basis or by setting
them to run on a schedule. Each report is configured to retain a certain number of copies before
the system purges the oldest versions. To access reports, choose the report, then select the
version you wish to view. You can either view the report within Prism or via email, if you have
configured the report to send copies to a recipient list.
Reports can provide information to the organization that is useful at all levels, from operations to
leadership. A few common good use cases include:
• Environmental summary: Provides a summary of cluster inventory entities and resource
utilization.
• Cluster efficiency: Details possible capacity savings at the VM or cluster level.
8. Prism Pro | 29
• Inventory: Produces a list of physical clusters, nodes, VMs, or other entities within an
environment.
Figure 21: Report Sample
8.4. Dynamic Monitoring

Dynamic monitoring builds on the VM-level resource monitoring previously available in Prism Pro
by using VM behavioral learning powered by X-FIT technology. The system learns the behavior
of each VM and establishes a dynamic threshold as a performance baseline for each resource
assigned to that VM. Each of the resource charts represents the baseline as a blue shaded
range. If a given data point for a VM strays outside the baseline range (higher or lower), the
8. Prism Pro | 30
system detects an anomaly and generates an alert. The anomaly is noted on the performance
charts for easy reference and follow-up.
If the data point’s anomalous results persist over time, the system learns the VM’s new behavior
and adjusts the baseline for that resource. With behavioral learning, performance reporting
delivered via Prism Pro helps organizations better understand their workloads and have early
knowledge of issues that traditional static threshold monitoring would not otherwise discover.
Figure 22: Resource Chart Sample Baseline
Dynamic monitoring is available for both VMs and physical hosts and encompasses multiple data
points within CPU, memory, storage, and networking.
8.5. Capacity Runway

Capacity planning is available as part of Prism Pro licensing and focuses on consumption from
three resource buckets: storage capacity, CPU, and memory.
Capacity results are illustrated as a chart that shows the historical consumption for the capacity
metric along with the estimated capacity runway. The capacity runway is the number of days
remaining before the resource item is fully consumed. The Nutanix X-FIT algorithms perform
capacity calculations based on historical data. Prism Pro initially uses the 90 days of historical
data from each Prism Element instance, then continues to collect additional data to use in
calculations. Prism Pro retains capacity data points longer than Prism Element, allowing
organizations to study a larger data sample.
The X-FIT method considers resources consumed and the rate at which the system consumes
additional amounts in the calculations for runway days remaining. Storage calculations factor
the amounts of live usage, system usage, reserved capacity, and snapshot capacity into runway
calculations. Storage capacity runway is aware of containers, so it can calculate capacity when
multiple containers that are growing at different rates consume a single storage pool. Container
awareness allows X-FIT to create more accurate runway estimates.
8. Prism Pro | 31
Figure 23: Capacity Runway Planning
8.6. Finding Waste and Right-Sizing VMs

Within a virtualized environment, resources can become constrained globally or on a per-VM
basis. Administrators can address global capacity constraints by scaling out resources, either
by adding capacity or by reclaiming existing resources. The VM efficiency features in Prism Pro
recommend VMs within the environment that are candidates for reclaiming unused resources
that you can then return to the cluster. Individual VMs can also become constrained when they
do not have enough resources to meet their demands.
Prism Pro presents the VMs it has identified as candidates for VM efficiency in a widget,
breaking the efficiency data into four different categories for easy identification: overprovisioned,
inactive, constrained, and bully. The overprovisioned and inactive categories provide a high-level
summary of the amount of potential resources that could be reclaimed from each VM.
8. Prism Pro | 32
Figure 24: Recommendations for Reclaiming Resources
The list of candidates presents the total amount of CPU and memory configured versus the peak
amounts of CPU and memory used for each VM.
• Overprovisioned: VMs identified as using minimal amounts of assigned resources.
• Inactive: VMs that have been powered off for a period of time or that are running VMs that do
not consume any CPU, memory, or I/O resources.
• Constrained: VMs that could see improved performance with additional resources.
• Bully: VMs identified as using an abundance of resources and affecting other VMs.
8.7. Capacity Planning

The capacity runway feature is helpful in understanding how many days of resources a customer
has remaining. When you want to prepare for extending the number of runway days, or you want
to explore how expanding an existing workload or adding new workloads to a cluster may affect
resources, the capacity planning function can help.
When you can’t reclaim enough resources, or when organizations need to scale the overall
environment, the capacity planning function can make node-based recommendations. These
node recommendations use the X-FIT data to account for consumption rates and growth and
meet the target runway period. If the runway period is set to 180 days, Prism Pro calculates the
8. Prism Pro | 33
number, type, and configuration of nodes recommended for scaling to provide the 180 days of
capacity requested.
Figure 25: Node-Based Recommendations for Adding Capacity
Just-in-Time Forecasting
As part of the capacity planning portion of Prism Pro, you can model adding new workloads
to a cluster and how those new workloads may affect your capacity. Scaling cluster capacity
is an important operational function that ensures that existing and future applications enjoy a
delightful experience. Historically, organizations have made these scaling decisions in legacy
environments based on back-of-napkin math and guesswork.
With Prism Pro, the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud uses data from X-FIT and workload models that
have been carefully curated over time through our Sizer application to inform capacity planning.
The add workload function allows you to add a number of different applications for capacity
planning.
The available workload planning options are:
• SQL Server: Size database workload based on different workload sizes and database types.
• VMs: This method allows you either to manually specify a generic VM size to model against or
to select existing VMs on cluster to model growth against.
# Helpful when planning to scale a particular application already running on the cluster.
• VDI: Provides options to select broker technology, provisioning method, user type, and
number of users.
• Splunk: Size based on daily index size, hot and cold retention times, and number of search
users.
8. Prism Pro | 34
• XenApp: Similar to VDI; size server-based computing with data points for broker types, server
OS, provisioning type, and concurrent user numbers.
• Percentage: This option allows for modeling an increase or decrease in capacity demand for
the cluster.
# Example: Plan for 20 percent growth of cluster resources on a specified date.
To plan for adding a workload to a cluster, select the cluster and choose to add a workload. From
the drop-down menu at the top of the dialog box, pick a workload and complete the specific data
points for it. Once you have provided the workload characteristics, simply supply the date on
which it should be added to the cluster and click Add Workload. The figure below captures an
example of this part of the modeling process.
Figure 26: Adding Workload Modeling
Once you have added a workload to a cluster for modeling, the planning feature adjusts the
cluster runway to reflect the addition. Depending on the date you entered for adding the new
workload, your runway time may immediately shorten. To adjust for your target runway, Prism
Pro recommends additional nodes for the scenario. We show the newly recommended cluster
expansion in the figure below, with the new nodes highlighted in the red box.
8. Prism Pro | 35
Figure 27: Recommended Node Expansion
Environments with multiple clusters under Prism Pro management can model a newly defined
workload expansion against different clusters. Once you have created a scenario and defined at
least one workload, you can switch between the different clusters under management to easily
understand how adding this workload would affect them. This capability provides intelligent
guidance, not only for understanding how new workloads would affect a cluster, but also for
deciding which cluster would be the best location for the workload.
8.8. Multiple Cluster Upgrades

Upgrading Nutanix clusters has long been a delightful experience delivered via one-click
upgrades. The one-click process hides a lot of complexity by using advanced automation and a
consumer-grade design experience. Historically, each cluster had to be upgraded one at a time.
While the process itself was simple, this constraint still extended the length of time required to
complete upgrades for multicluster environments.
Prism Pro offers the ability to upgrade multiple clusters from one Prism Central instance. With
this functionality, an administrator can select multiple clusters, choose an available software
version, and push the upgrade to these clusters. If the multiple clusters you’re selecting are all
within one upgrade group, you can decide whether to perform the process on them sequentially
or in parallel.
This centralized upgrade approach provides a single point from which you can monitor status and
alerts as well as initiate upgrades. Currently, multiple cluster upgrades are only available for AOS
software; hypervisor and firmware upgrades are still executed via one click at the cluster level.
8. Prism Pro | 36
8.9. Search
Prism Central provides a simplified user experience, as highlighted through the entity explorer,
dashboards, and analysis features already described. To streamline access to these features,
Nutanix lets you quickly search for data points and reduces the clicks required to find information
through the search function.
Prism Pro delivers a web-like search engine experience for your Nutanix environment.
Administrators can simply enter common tasks and entities into the search bar to perform
searches. The interface displays the returned results in four vertical columns, each representing
a different type of result relating to the search query.
The four columns present a list of entities, top analytics about the entities, related alerts, and help
topics that relate to the entities. The help topics provide links to online Nutanix documentation
that can help explain features and clarify how to configure them or perform corrective actions.
Figure 28: Search Function in Prism Central
The search function offers autocomplete to help administrators identify or complete the string that
they want to search for.
8. Prism Pro | 37
Figure 29: Search Bar Autocomplete
8. Prism Pro | 38
9. Conclusion
Nutanix embodies a radically new approach to enterprise infrastructure—one that simplifies
every step of the infrastructure life cycle, from buying and deploying to managing, scaling, and
supporting. The Nutanix solution’s web-scale technologies and architecture let you run any
workload at any scale. With Nutanix Acropolis and Nutanix Prism, administrators get powerful
virtualization capabilities that are fully integrated into the converged infrastructure stack and can
be managed from a single pane of glass.
9. Conclusion | 39
Appendix
About Nutanix
Nutanix makes infrastructure invisible, elevating IT to focus on the applications and services that
power their business. The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS leverages web-scale engineering and
consumer-grade design to natively converge compute, virtualization, and storage into a resilient,
software-defined solution with rich machine intelligence. The result is predictable performance,
cloud-like infrastructure consumption, robust security, and seamless application mobility for a
broad range of enterprise applications. Learn more at www.nutanix.com or follow us on Twitter
@nutanix.
Appendix | 40
List of Figures
Figure 1: Nutanix Enterprise Cloud................................................................................... 7
Figure 2: Prism Central Architectures............................................................................. 11
Figure 3: Prism Central Value-Added Features.............................................................. 12
Figure 4: Entity Explorer in Prism................................................................................... 14
Figure 5: Custom Views in Prism....................................................................................15
Figure 6: Filters in the Entity Explorer.............................................................................16
Figure 7: Entity Tagging.................................................................................................. 17
Figure 8: Alerts in Prism Central..................................................................................... 18
Figure 9: Alert Filters....................................................................................................... 19
Figure 10: Updating an Alert Policy................................................................................ 20
Figure 11: Create Alert Policy......................................................................................... 21
Figure 12: Task View in Prism........................................................................................ 21
Figure 13: Root Cause Analysis......................................................................................22
Figure 14: Prism Central Analysis View.......................................................................... 23
Figure 15: Prism Language Settings............................................................................... 24
Figure 16: SSP Project Creation..................................................................................... 25
Figure 17: SSP VM Creation...........................................................................................26
Figure 18: Customizable Operations Dashboards...........................................................28
Figure 19: Capability for Multiple Dashboards................................................................ 28
Figure 20: Report Builder................................................................................................ 29
Figure 21: Report Sample............................................................................................... 30
41
Figure 22: Resource Chart Sample Baseline.................................................................. 31
Figure 23: Capacity Runway Planning............................................................................ 32
Figure 24: Recommendations for Reclaiming Resources............................................... 33
Figure 25: Node-Based Recommendations for Adding Capacity.................................... 34
Figure 26: Adding Workload Modeling............................................................................ 35
Figure 27: Recommended Node Expansion................................................................... 36
Figure 28: Search Function in Prism Central.................................................................. 37
Figure 29: Search Bar Autocomplete.............................................................................. 38
42
List of Tables
Table 1: Document Version History.................................................................................. 6
43

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Prism Central and

Version 1.5 • April 2018 • TN-2043

3. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Overview...................................................... 7

6. Prism Central Architecture...................................................................11

8.2. Customizable Operations Dashboards........................................................................ 27

Table 1: Document Version History

3. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Overview

Figure 1: Nutanix Enterprise Cloud

3. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Overview | 7

3.1. Nutanix Acropolis Architecture

3. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Overview | 8

4.1. Nutanix Solution

5.1. Prism Design Fundamentals

6. Prism Central Architecture

Figure 2: Prism Central Architectures

6. Prism Central Architecture | 11

Figure 3: Prism Central Value-Added Features

6. Prism Central Architecture | 12

7.1. Entity Explorer

Figure 4: Entity Explorer in Prism

Figure 5: Custom Views in Prism

Figure 6: Filters in the Entity Explorer

7.2. Entity Tagging

Figure 7: Entity Tagging

Figure 8: Alerts in Prism Central

Figure 9: Alert Filters

Figure 10: Updating an Alert Policy

7.4. User-Created Alerts

Figure 11: Create Alert Policy

Figure 12: Task View in Prism

7.6. Alert-Driven Root Cause Analysis

Figure 13: Root Cause Analysis

Figure 14: Prism Central Analysis View

7.8. User Management and Authentication

Figure 15: Prism Language Settings

Figure 16: SSP Project Creation

Figure 17: SSP VM Creation

8.2. Customizable Operations Dashboards

Figure 18: Customizable Operations Dashboards

Figure 19: Capability for Multiple Dashboards

8.3. Reporting Capabilities

Figure 20: Report Builder

Figure 21: Report Sample

8.4. Dynamic Monitoring

Figure 22: Resource Chart Sample Baseline

8.5. Capacity Runway

Figure 23: Capacity Runway Planning

8.6. Finding Waste and Right-Sizing VMs

Figure 24: Recommendations for Reclaiming Resources

8.7. Capacity Planning

Figure 25: Node-Based Recommendations for Adding Capacity

Figure 26: Adding Workload Modeling

Figure 27: Recommended Node Expansion

8.8. Multiple Cluster Upgrades

Figure 28: Search Function in Prism Central

Figure 29: Search Bar Autocomplete

Figure 2: Prism Central Architectures............................................................................. 11

Figure 3: Prism Central Value-Added Features.............................................................. 12

Figure 4: Entity Explorer in Prism................................................................................... 14

Figure 5: Custom Views in Prism....................................................................................15

Figure 6: Filters in the Entity Explorer.............................................................................16

Figure 7: Entity Tagging.................................................................................................. 17

Figure 8: Alerts in Prism Central..................................................................................... 18

Figure 9: Alert Filters....................................................................................................... 19