Pictured borrowed from Nutanix official web page
Before going into the new features i would like to highlight one very important security improvement which is about data communication. As you know the Database Server VMs have historically connected to Prism Element (the Nutanix cluster) on port 9440. With NDB 2.11 this is no longer required, instead all communications will go via NDB itself where NDB will route all Database Server VM to Prism Element communication.
Database Server VMs still requires connection to the NDB Server and the NDB Agents plus to all other services as with previous NDB versions.
The only exception to the port 9440 enhancement is when iSCSI based disks are used for example with Windows Server Failover Clusters using shared disks (Always On Availability Group and Failover Cluster Instance).
Highlighted New Features & Functionality
Now let’s dive into all the good news….
- Add / Remove Database nodes / Database Server VM to and from SQL Server (WSFC with AG) & PostgreSQL Clusters.
- Up to 9 database nodes with SQL and 5 with Postgres
- Both UI and API is available.
- PostgreSQL Database Disaster Recovery
- NDB adds another database engine to its disaster recovery framework which already includes Oracle.
- Both switchover (planned events) and failover (unplanned events) are supported
- PostgreSQL async streaming replication and WAL archiving.
- WAL Archival with Objects Store for PostgreSQL High Availability
- Put the WAL archive on Nutanix Objects to improve availability.
- Supported for both new deployments and existing Postgres HA deployments can be migrated to this new architecture.
- PostgreSQL Collation configuration
- Options available are LC_COLLATE and LC_TYPE in addition to the previously default en_US.UTF.8.
- Backup and Restore Support for MySQL High Availability
- The same requirements applies for backup and restore regarding components and configuration:
- InnoDB storage engine
- MySQL version 8.4 or higher
- Group Replication with GTID mode enabled
- Single-writer mode only
- The same requirements applies for backup and restore regarding components and configuration:
- Upgrade Readiness for NDB Control Plane and DB Servers
- This is a pre-check which will identify issues and automatically fix them when possible for your NDB Control Plane and Database Server VMs before the upgrade take place.
- MongoDB Sharded Cluster Scale-Out Support
- Horizontal shards and mongos scaling for existing NDB-provisioned MongoDB sharded clusters.
- IP Selection for Oracle Data Guard Disaster Recovery Configuration via UI.
- NDB Audit Management
- NDB can now send audit logs to Prism Central for the following actions:
- Database provisioning & cloning
- Patching
- Deletion
- Registration
- Snapshot creation
- Storage extension
- Time Machine updates
- RBAC changes,
- Profile configuration changes across all supported database engines
- NDB can now send audit logs to Prism Central for the following actions:
Improvements
- Control Plane Operating System Upgrade to Rocky Linux 9 and now has a single NIC configuration only.
- Upgraded NDB environments continue using multi-NIC configurations but any new Nutanix clusters onboarded after the upgrade must use a single-VLAN NDB agent.
- PostgreSQL WAL Archive migration script to enable role awareness for Database Server VMs.
- A one-time migration of WAL archive command scripts which replaces inline archive commands with template-based scripts.
- Nutanix Volume Groups (VGs) is used for SQL Server provisioning.
- MongoDB databases- restore, clone, and refresh clone operations for Transparent Data Encryption (TDE)-enabled
- SQL Server Provisioning from Backup is much faster since NDB has switched to an index rebuild-based data distribution method (controlled via enable_index_rebuild_distribution config)
- Faster Windows Server VM Provisioning
- NDB now uses sysprep.
- NDB Agent VM is no longer required for Windows Server VM creation which improves provisioning time when multiple Windows Server VMs are created on the same Nutanix cluster plus it reduces resource consumption.
- RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10 support for:
- MySQL and MariaDB on RHEL 8.10
- PostgreSQL 17 and PostgreSQL 18 on RHEL 8.10
- Python upgraded form 3.8 to 3.11 and Ansible from 2.8 to core 2.18 on the control plane and all database server VMs.
Supported Software
- AOS versions 7.5, 7.3, 7.0, and 6.10
- AHV versions supported by AOS 7.5, 7.3, 7.0, and 6.10
- vSphere versions 8.0
- Prism Central 7.5, 7.3, 2024.3, and 2024.2
- Objects version 5.3, 5.2, and 5.1
- Flow Network Security Next-Gen 5.0.0
Useful links
Make sure you’re running NDB version 2.9.N or later before you upgrade to 2.11.
Njoy the new NDB version …. 🙂