Today, 2018-04-16, Nutanix released a new version of its Acropolis Operating System (AOS) meaning the latest and greatest version is 5.6.
The following products and features were also updated:
- Prism Central is now version 5.6
- Acropolis File Services is now version 3.0.0.1
- AHV is now version 20170830.115
- Nutanix Cluster Check (NCC) is now version 3.5.1
- Metro Availability Witness is now version 5.6
Below is an important statement from the official Nutanix web site which you can find here.
Important: WARNING: 5.6 is a new AOS Feature Release, which is not Long Term Supported (LTS). If you upgrade to this version, the support will only be for 6 months after the Release Date, within which period you will have to upgrade to the next feature release. If you are interested only in bug fixes and not new features, please do not upgrade to this release. The next LTS Maintenance Release, 5.5.2 is expected to be released in April 2018
There are some really good features added to this release and the most important once from my perspective are:
- Micro Segmentation, part of Nutanix Flow, is now GA, has been tech preview for some time now. This means you protect a VM, group of VMs by leveraging security policies. Quite common use cases would be to block east west traffic between VMs but there are more advanced configurations available as well. Will create a blog post about this pretty soon.
- RHEL 7 STIG alignment within the Controller Virtual Machine (CVM)
- Volume Group (VG) vDisk Load Balancing meaning splitting up the vDisks in same VG on multiple CVMs. Will give you better performance.
- Nutanix API v3
- SNMP Trap for Resolved Alerts
Some additional improvements includes
- A Nutanix Node now supports up to 80 TB storage using 10×8 TB disks
- Categories Support in Prism Central
- Managing Prism Central VMs
- Scale Out Prism Central
- Guest VM-initiated Power Operations
- Deprecation of TLS 1.1, TLS 1.0, SSLv3 and any non-Ephemeral Cipher Suites
- Erasure-Coding (EC-X) in-place overwrite.
- Two-node Cluster
- This will required the witness VM to be used meaning now the witness VM can be used for both Metro Availability purposes and two-node cluster purposes.
Prism Central version 5.6 was, as I previously mentioned also released and provides the following updates (some already mentioned above in AOS):
- Categories Support in Prism Central
- Scale Out Prism Central
- Managing Prism Central VMs
- Microsegmentation Policies in Prism Central
- Nutanix API v3
- Exceptions to Alert Policies are Renamed to Overlapping Policies
Remember to upgrade Prism central before an individual Nutanix cluster. This is as usual clearly stated in the release notes.
Acropolis File Services (AFS) 3.0.0.1 was also release today and it includes following enhancements:
- NFS v4 Support
- Linux and Unix clients can easily take advantage of AFS
- Hypervisor agnostic
- File Activity Monitoring
- Share and Export Statistics Now Available
- Third-party Backup Integration
- AFS Cluster Network Change (Re-IP AFS)
Other updates includes:
- AHV which is now version 20170830.115
- Nutanix Cluster Check (NCC) version 3.5.1
- Metro Availability Witness servers 5.6
Useful links
- AOS 5.6 Download
- AOS 5.6 Release Notes
- Prism Central 5.6 Download
- Prism Central 5.6 Release Notes
- AFS 3.0.0.1 Download
- AFS 3.0.0.1 Release Notes
- AHV 20170830.115 Download
- Nutanix Cluster Check 3.5.1 Download
- Nutanix Cluster Check 3.5.1 Release Notes
- Metro Availability Witness 5.6 Download
- Metro Availability Witness 5.6 Guide
- Hypervisor json files
Have fun with all the new good stuff in the latest releases.