Prism Central and Prism Pro
Prism Central and Prism Pro
Prism Central and Prism Pro
Prism Pro
Nutanix Tech Note
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
Prism Central and Prism Pro
Contents
1. Executive Summary................................................................................ 5
2. Introduction..............................................................................................6
2.1. Audience........................................................................................................................ 6
2.2. Purpose..........................................................................................................................6
4. Customer Value....................................................................................... 9
4.1. Nutanix Solution.............................................................................................................9
5. What Is Prism?...................................................................................... 10
5.1. Prism Design Fundamentals....................................................................................... 10
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
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9. Conclusion............................................................................................. 39
Appendix......................................................................................................................... 40
About Nutanix......................................................................................................................40
List of Figures................................................................................................................41
List of Tables................................................................................................................. 43
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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.
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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.
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.
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4. Customer Value
4. Customer Value | 9
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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.
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• Memory capacity.
• CPU usage.
• Memory usage.
• Read IOPS.
• Write IOPS.
• I/O bandwidth.
• I/O latency.
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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.
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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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• Inventory: Produces a list of physical clusters, nodes, VMs, or other entities within an
environment.
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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.
Dynamic monitoring is available for both VMs and physical hosts and encompasses multiple data
points within CPU, memory, storage, and networking.
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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.
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number, type, and configuration of nodes recommended for scaling to provide the 180 days of
capacity requested.
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.
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• 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.
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.
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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.
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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.
The search function offers autocomplete to help administrators identify or complete the string that
they want to search for.
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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.
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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.
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List of Figures
Figure 1: Nutanix Enterprise Cloud................................................................................... 7
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List of Tables
Table 1: Document Version History.................................................................................. 6
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