Nutanix released new versions of its products, including AOS 7.5, AHV 11.0, and Prism Central – pc.7.5.
This is a really large release, so click “Read More” to read about all the features that were added.
New features in AOS 7.5:
1. VM Startup Policies – Starting AOS 7.5 and Prism Central 7.5, we can control in which order VMs are restarted during high availability events or cluster restarts. It can be useful for example for 3-tier applications where one VM depends on another;
2. Guest Customization Profile for Windows VMs and VM Clone Integration – Guest Customization Profiles can be reused and applied during cloning operations;
3. Support for Authenticated NTP Server;
4. Autonomous Extent Store (AES) and AES Optimized Metadata Support for All-Flash and Hybrid Deployments – AES-optimized metadata is now the default for all new all-flash deployments, which will result in reduced CPU consumptions and improved core data path performance;
5. Elastic VM Storage in Prism Central – With all the newest releases, we can share Nutanix HCI storage with other clusters within the Prism Central Domain, meaning we can deploy a VM using storage from the other cluster;
6. vTPM Integration with External KMS;
7. Nutanix Disaster Recovery: VM Revert Metadata Handling;
8. CVM Secure Access – Starting AOS 7.5, we can disable SSH access to CVM and AHV hosts using v4 APIs, but be careful; SSH is used by On-Demand Cross-Cluster Live Migration and DR Cross-Cluster Live Migration. Check the KB to get more info on that;
9. Enhanced Controller VM (CVM) Security;
10. Accelerated Data Reclamation and Improved Efficiency with Erasure Coding;
11. Enhanced Storage Capacity and Data Protection for Existing All-Flash Nodes;
12. Guest Customization for VM Templates – as for clones, but for templates as well;
13. Home Partition Space Optimization – I believe everyone has faced the situation when /home was full, especially during updates. Now AOS will identify and remove unnecessary files before the upgrade.
14. RDMA RF2/ZTR Support for Mellanox CX7 200G NICs;
15. Recover Prism Central Instance from a Backup Located on any Prism Element Cluster – Check more in the documentation; Looks like a good topic for a blog post;
16. External storage support, including Pure Storage FlashArray. Read more here.
You can find the whole release notes for AOS 7.5 following this link.
What’s new in AHV 11.0?
1. Support for AMD Milan and AMD Genoa for Advanced Processor Compatibility;
2. AHV Deployment on Industry-Standard Compute Nodes using AHV Installer – Check more on the feature in this doc;
3. IPv6 support for AHV hosts.
The full release notes for AHV 11.
And the last is the Prism Central 7.5. Probably the largest release, it includes tons of features:
1. Synchronization of Storage Policies Across Prism Central Instances – Check the doc to get more info on that;
2. On-Demand Cross-Cluster Live Migration with Different Storage Container Names – Finally! Now we can live migrate VMs between clusters, and between storage containers with the different names;
3. Resource Allocation and Consumption – A page including new widgets;
4. External KMS Support for Prism Central;
5. Prism Central Backup and Restore to Generic S3-Compliant Object Store – Starting with pc.7.5, you can now back up and recover your Prism Central instances to a generic S3-compatible object store;
6. Activity Monitoring in the Admin Center – Check for a new Monitoring menu in the Admin Center;
7. KMS Support for Prism Central Backup and Restore;
8. Nutanix Disaster Recovery: IPv6 Support;
9. Nutanix Disaster Recovery: Enhanced Scalability for Flow Network Security Policies;
10. AHV Metro Availability for Volume Groups: Support for Manual Unplanned Failover;
11. Prism Central Backup and Restore Enhancements – This release supports catalogs, images, OVAs, and templates for Prism Central Backup and Restore (PCBR). To restore these entities, contact Nutanix Support;
12. VM Revert Metadata Handling;
13. Cross-Cluster Live Migration Enhancements for Flow Network Security – Migrating the VMs with security policies without any disruption to the traffic across cluster registered to the same or different PC instances;
14. IPv6 Support;
15. Nutanix Disaster Recovery: Ability to Control Reverse Replication;
16. Nutanix Disaster Recovery: Protection and Recovery Scale Improvements – protection up to 10000 entities in the NearSync replication between Nutanix cluster in an AZ pair;
17. Multiple vNIC Support in Prism Central;
18. Cisco Device Intersight Connector Dark Site Upgrade and NCC Checks;
19. AHV Metro Availability for Volume Groups: Support for Multipath IO with Asymmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA) ;
20. User Deactivation in IAM;
21. Support for Multisite Replication – Starting this version, we can create a protection policy that includes multisite configuration one source and two destination sites, or one source and three remote sites;
22. AHV Metro Availability for Volume Groups: Support for Non-Clustered Applications Across Two Prism Central Instances;
23. Dual Stack Support for Microservices Infrastructure – Starting version 7.5, Microservices Infrastructure supports both IPv4 and IPv6 network stacks;
24. Cluster Health Check for the Prism Central Web Console – You can use the cluster health check to monitor the Prism Element clusters that are registered with the Prism Central instance;
25. IAM Usability and UX Improvements;
26. Accessibility Enhancements for IAM Workflows;
27. Two-Level Alert Grouping in Prism Central;
28. Disk Actions in Prism Central;
29. Backup and Restore Enhancements;
30. Nutanix Infrastructure Manager – NIM is an orchestrator that helps you provision, configure, and manage your large-scale Nutanix infrastructure. You can use NIM to build, expand, and upgrade your datacenter in a standardized way that is compliant with Nutanix Validated Designs (NVD);
31. Configurable UEFI Boot Order;
32. Marketplace Supports OpenShift Versions 4.16 Through 4.19;
33. Cloud KMS Support in Prism Central UI;
34. Large and X-Large Single VM Deployments Without Portfolio Services Support 50 Clusters.
Release notes for PC 7.5 can be found here.
