Nutanix AOS 6.8 eSTS

Yesterday, 2024-05-15, Nutanix released a new version AOS meaning the latest version is 6.8. For some years there has been two release types for AOS including a long term support (LTS) version and a short term support (STS) version. With AOS 6.8 there is one more release type introduced called extended STS (eSTS) and the reason for this is that Nutanix will move away from multiple release types and provide a smooth transition for its customers. Read more about LTS, eSTS & STS here.

This AOS release includes many new and enhanced features such as:

• AHV Metro Availability Support for Volume Groups
• Prism Central Backup and Restore
  • Prism Central can be backed up to as many as three Nutanix on-prem clusters and in addition to one S3 object-based storage.
• Eliminate Default Passwords during Cluster Creation
• Nearsync Replication Support for Volume Group and Consistency Group
• Automatic Cluster Selection for VM Placement
• Smart Rebuild as Default Setting for Cluster Resiliency Preference
• Storage Stats and Usage Reporting Improvements
  • Home Dashboard Storage Summary Widget
  • Storage Summary Widget
  • Storage Details Page
  • Storage Diagram View
  • Storage Table View
  • Storage Container Creation Window
• Disaster Recovery Support for vTPM-enabled VMs on Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)
• Decoupled State Support for Entities Protected with Synchronous Replication Schedule
• Virtual Private Cloud Support for Synchronous Replication and On-demand CCLM
• Disaster Recovery Support for ESXi-encrypted VMs
• Advanced Processor Compatibility in AHV
• Virtual RAID on Card (VROC) Software RAID for M.2 NVMe Hypervisor Boot Drive
• NVMe Software Serviceability
  • hot-plug and partial population on AMD Genoa platforms with a minimum supported hypervisor version VMware ESXi 8.x
• Autonomous Extent Store (AES) Optimized Metadata
• ESXi Metro Availability File Limit Enhancements
• Support Traffic Mirroring to Destination on Remote Host
• LCM Firmware Upgrade and NCC Check Support for Compute-Only Nodes
• HPE Hybrid Dense Node Support
  •  HPE DX4120 Gen11 platform with 525 TB capacity for Nutanix Objects and Nutanix Files
• ESXi 8.0 Support for ESXi Compute-only Nodes
• ESXi 8.0 Update 2 Support
• Release Candidate (RC) version of the Nutanix v4 APIs and SDKs – this requires both AOS 6.8 and Prism Central version pc.2024.1
  • v4 API documentation
  • API and SDK reference documentation
  • As usual, RC and Tech preview features are not supported for production environments

AHV will no longer be bundled with AOS so the software included in this AOS release are:

• AOS 6.8
• Foundation 5.6
• Nutanix Guest Tools (NGT) 4.1
• Nutanix Cluster Check (NCC) 5.0.0
• Life Cycle Manager (LCM) 3.0

As usual check Nutanix Software End Of Life document on a regular basis to keep you up to date.

Important

Before upgrading, make sure to read, understand and take appropriate actions (if required) for Virtual Switch Migration & Clusters with NVIDIA GPUs limitations & requirements. Also, Host-Based Reservation Method Is not supported

Useful links

• AOS 6.8 Download
• AOS 6.8 Release Notes
• Upgrade Path
• Hypervisor json files
• Nutanix Compatibility Matrix
• Software Product Interoperability

Njoy the new version and its capabilities & congrats Nutanix to this release