Nutanix NDB 2.4 Released

Today, 2022-01-24, Nutanix has release version 2.4 of its DBaaS platform NDB, formerly known as Era. This version will let you manage 600 DBs across two Nutanix cluster from a single Era instance. Great enhancement.

Highlighted New Features

Apart from the scalability improvement already mentioned there are eight major new features in this new version and i’d like to describe some of them in detail here:

Remote Snapshot Restore for Oracle, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL. This means you can run your Database in e.g. Nutanix Cluster 1 and save, via Nutanix Time Machine, snapshots and log files to both Nutanix Cluster 1 and Nutanix Cluster 2 where you might use Nutanix Cluster 2 for e.g. long term retention. If needed the remote files from Nutanix cluster 2 can be used to restore the DB in Nutanix Cluster 1.
Sharing Time Machine among Era defined users. Makes it possible for multiple users to consume the data generated via one DB Server.
Patching of Brownfield, DBs created outside of Era but registered to Era, Oracle DB Server VMs
Rollback of Oracle patches on DB server VMs patched through Era using a software profile and the support includes both Greenfield (DBs provisioned by Era) and Brownfield (see description above) DB use cases. This is supported via CLI.
Other new features:
- Enhance Database Extend Storage Functionality to Support Greenfield Database on Storage Spaces
- Restore SQL Server Database (Standalone and AG) present on Storage Spaces.
- Running a User Defined Rollback Script for Oracle DBs.
- Use same Software Home Install Location from Source Template for Oracle.

Enhanced Functionality

In addition to all new features there has been improvements to existing functionality as well e.g.:

Postgres HA Provisioning Enhancements where you can now select different compute profiles for the PostgreSQL DB Server VMs and HA Proxy VMs meaning you can save compute (CPU and RAM) capacity.
MS SQL Server patching enhancements for AG where you can now define the AG failover behaviour
MS SQL Server DB provisioning enhancements including customization of data disks, data files, log disk, type of disks and tempdb.
Run multiple Microsoft SQL DB registration operation in parallell.
Oracle Pluggable Database (PDB) – Support for Open, Close and Drop.

This gives you an idea of what to expect with Era version 2.4.