New major versions of Nutanix AOS and AHV were released with a lot of new features. In addition to those major releases, a new version of Prism Central pc.2024.3 was also released.
AOS 7.0:
- Cloud KMS support;
- Optionally Disable CPU Hotplug on VMs – Check the documentation, and why it can be important;
- Optionally Disable the SCSI Controller on VMs;
- NVMe Software Serviceability;
- One Node and One Disk (1N&1D) Cluster Fault Tolerance – I recommend to read more about this feature in the documentation;
- Increased Maximum Supported Memory on AHV Hosts up to 8TB – By the way, you can find configuration maximums here;
- Centralized Password Management for AHV System Accounts;
- WSL2 Intra-Cluster Live Migration Support;
- Support for Skylake server on ESXi 8.0 Update 3;
- Support for Storage Policy for Volume Groups on ESXi.
AHV 10.0:
- Added Support for the Intel Saphhire Rapids CPU instructions;
- Semantic Versioning format for AHV;
- PCIe Passthrough for Guest VMs;
- Change Interface Ring Buffer Size on AHV;
- Support of Repair Host Boot Disk and SS Repair functionality in Prism Element for Compute-Only and Storage-Only nodes;
- Support for boot device order configuration from aCLI;
- Support for NVIDIA A2 Tensor Core GPU card;
- Support for NVIDIA H100 NVL GPU card.
Although both releases include a bunch of resolved issues.
Read release notes for AOS 7.0 here and for AHV 10.0 here (Requires authentication).
Prism Central pc.2024.3:
- VM-VM Anti-Affinity Policies in Prism Central;
- Multiple Cluster Configuration Through Prism Central;
- Support for Flow Network Security Next-Gen with vLAN Policy Scope in Nutanix Disaster Recovery;
- Cloud KMS Support;
- Revamped Tasks Dashboard;
- Centralized Password Management for AHV System Accounts;
- Metro Availability with Nutanix Witness Service out of the Prism Central Instance: Automated Recovery of VMs and Volume Groups on Cluster Failure Across Prism Central Instances;
- Multicloud Snapshot Technology (MST) DR with Zero Compute Deployment;
- Node Maintenance Mode Management from Prism Central;
- Protection and Recovery Scale Improvements for Nutanix Disaster Recovery;
- Support for Flow Network Security Next-Gen in Nutanix Disaster Recovery ;(Clusters Registered to the Same Prism Central Instance)
- Cisco Intersight Device Connector Integration;
- Objects Lite;
- Registration Dependency Removed Between Prism Central and the Hosting Cluster for Services Enablement;
- Microservices Infrastructure Cluster Upgrade.
Read Prism Central pc.2024.3 release notes here.
You may have noticed that I didn’t mention the release type, STS or LTS. This is because the release model since AOS 7.0 has been changed and is now called the Unified ‘NCI Release Model’.
And this is not just a naming change, I recommend reading more here.
With the beginning of AOS 7.0, the new support cycle for release is 15 months of maintenance from GA, followed by 9 months of Support and we can expect two Unified releases per year.
Please note, that AOS 6.8 (eSTS) and AOS 6.10 (LTS) are under the Legacy Release Model and the End of Maintenance (EOM) and End of Support Life (EOSL) for AOS 6.10.x and pc.2024.2.x have been extended to align with the new NCI Release Model.
