Today, 2022-10-03, a new version of Nutanix Database Service, formerly known as Era, has been released meaning the latest & greatest NDB version is 2.5. Before going into the new features & functionality i’d like to highlight the new NDB control plane (instance) scalability capability which now includes management of up to 1 000 DBs, increased from 600 with Era 2.4, running across three Nutanix clusters. Maximum is 500 DBs per Nutanix cluster.
Highlighted New Features & Functioanlity
The most important new functionality delivered with NDB 2.5 is the Operating System patching for Linux based operating systems running Oracle, PostgreSQL and MongoDB databases. This means you can patch both the database engine and the operating system via a Maintenance Window which in itself is a separate feature. The Maintenance Window functionality allows you to create a schedule to which you associate your DB Server VMs (not DBs) and define if you’d like to apply Operating System and or Database Patches. NDB does not provide an OS patch repo but instead consumes the DB Server VMs repository configuration.
There has been requests for additional operating system support for open source databases and the following new OS:es are supported with NDB 2.5 PostgreSQL, MongoDB and MySQL:
- Ubuntu version 20.04
- Debian Linux versions 9 & 10
Strong focus on security and added many, +50, CVEs to the NDB control plane.
To manage 1 000 DBs per NDB control plane you need to stream the DBs log files fro the DB Server VMs to Nutanix Objects. If not using Nutanix Objects as the target for DB log files you can still manage 600 DBs per NDB control plane
Oracle
- Oracle PDB enhancements:
-
- Customizing database parameters.
- Restore
- Tags
- RAC to RAC cloning support.
- Support for standby databases.
- Patching support for standby databases.
- Specify DB listener port for database server VM.
- Customizable redo log file size and number of redo log groups.
- Support for configurable filesystem.
PostgreSQL
- PostgreSQL version 14 support.
- Peer authentication support.
- Patroni versions 2.0.2 and 2.1.1.
- sudo enhancement – same wrapper as already exists for Oracle.
MSSQL
- Provisioning multi-cluster Windows Server failover cluster.
- FCI provisioning.
- Cloning & refresh for AG databases on storage spaces.
- Expansion of storage space during provisioning operation.
- Expansion of storage space for staging disks of DB server VMs.
MongoDB
- MongoDB version 5.x. support.
- Replica set restore via CLI and API
- TLS connections for MongoDB’s network traffic.
- Storage expansion support via CLI and API.
Tech Preview
as always, do not use tech preview features in production environments
Vertically scaling your DB server VMs meaning add or remove vCPUs and memory. NDB can power off and power on the VM is hot add is not supported (for whatever reason)
This gives you an idea of what to expect with NDB version 2.5.
Useful links
Era 2.5 Download or download via Era UI
Njoy the new Era, sorry NDB, version …. 🙂