Nutanix Operating System 4.0.1 released

Yesterday, 2014-07-02, Nutanix released version 4.0.1 of the Nutanix Operating System (NOS) and at least two of the new features will be much appreciated among IT architects and customers:

• Availability Domains – This is about “data placement” and the idea is to place the virtual machine data copies in different fault domains. This current release treats a Nutanix block, which is a 2U chassis as a fault domain. In case of multiple Nutanix nodes failures in the same Nutanix block the Nutanix cluster can continue to run since the Nutanix cluster configuration data exists on other Nutanix blocks. The failed virtual machines can be restarted and continue to run because its data and metadata exists on other Nutanix Blocks.
• Tunable redundancy – Replication Factor (RF) 3 is introduced as a tuneable redundancy feature and is all about “data copies”. Two copies of the running virtual machine data is kept to ensure that a 2 Nutanix node failure can be handled without virtual machine downtime. The exception would be if the Nutanix node where the virtual machine is running fails, in that case a mechanism such as e.g. vSphere High Availability (HA) must restart the virtual machine on another Nutanix node. However, in case of a vSphere HA scenarion,  the virtual machine data would be available immediately upon virtual machine startup.
  

I for sure think these features are really good and something i can see myself use in the near future in my Nutanix GSO consulting role.

There are a lot of other new features and some of them includes:

• Ability to monitor and manage multiple Nutanix clusters through a single web based Prism Central user interface (UI).
  
• Nutanix cluster uppgrading to NOS 4.0.1 via the “Upgrade Software” dialog in the Prism Central from previous NOS 4.0 version. This is what’s described as the “One-click Operating System Upgrade” feature.
  
• Disaster recovery support for Windows 2012 R2 Hyper-V hypervisor.
• Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) support for Hyper-V hosts.
• MapReduce Deduplication which offers deduplication for the capacity tier, also known as on-disk deduplication, is implemented and this addition to existing deduplication features can help increase the virtual machine density per Nutanix node.
  
• General performance and stability improvements.
• Configurable remote syslog forwarding enables you to send logs to a remote server using the TCP/UDP protocols. Log files are located in each Controller Virtual Machine (CVMs) directory /home/nutanix/data/logs/ and prefixed with the name of the module generating the log file.

One more thing, although this is a tech preview i still like to mention that NOS 4.0.1 makes it possible to backup and restore your virtual machines to and from your on-premise Nutanix Cluster to an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Cloud 2 (EC2) server. The feature allows differential based snapshots where only changed blocks are replicated to the cloud and takes reduplication and compression into account which will lower the wire usage.

These are just a few of the enhancements made in the NOS 4.0.1 version so i suggest you check out the Nutanix official documentation for more information.

So now you can expect a new blog post where i show the Upgrade Software / Single click upgrade in addition to my previous Upgrade Nutanix Operating System to version 4.0 blog post.