Nutanix Certified Professional – Cloud Native (NCP-CN)6.10 is ready to leave the beta state and exam is now open for scheduling with exam appointments starting on Tuesday, April 22
For those, who do not know, what NCP-CN is, it is the certification that measures your ability to deploy, configure, optimize, and perform administrative tasks on a Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP).
The best way to start preparing is to check the blueprint guide. You can find the blueprint guide here.
To schedule the exam, use the My Certification section on Nutanix University. Next, find the Nutanix Certified Professional – Cloud Native 6.10 certification and click schedule. You will be forwarded to the PSI page, where you can select a suitable date and time.
In addition, I highly recommend checking the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform Administration (NKAP) free online course to get the knowledge on the NKP solution. Also, if you have an opportunity, I recommend visiting this course live, because it includes a lot of hands-on labs, and it really can boost your knowledge on NKP, especially if you have a poor practice experience.
Veeam released the new version of Backup and Replication software 12.3.1.1139, which includes new features and addresses major security vulnerabilities.
First is CVE-2025-23120 with the critical severity level (9.9 score) – A vulnerability allowing remote code execution (RCE) by authenticated domain users.
This vulnerability only affects domain-joined backup servers, which is against best practices, by the way.
This issue affects Veeam Backup & Replication 12.3.0.310 and all earlier v12 builds. Consider updating ASAP.
Now let’s move to the new features and fixes. I will not show everything, because the list is too big, but I will point out a few I really love.
Platform support:
VMware vSphere 9.0 readiness. The official support will be confirmed with the full testing of the GA build when it becomes available. This means that after vSphere 9.0 is out, it is better to wait for Veeam to officially support this release before upgrading the vSphere environment.
Nutanix AHV – Removed the experimental support designation for malware detection, guest file indexing, and application-aware processing, except database log file shipping, which will still be considered experimental.
Proxmox VE – Updated ProxmoxVE plug-in enables the usage of non-root users to register Proxmox, support for Open vSwitch (OVS) networking, Object Storage API (SOSAPI), Nested Pools for backup jobs scope, and brings further backup performance improvements.
Enhancements:
One I really love for vSphere is – Instant VM Recovery engine improvements deliver a 5x increased number of simultaneous instant VM recoveries: up to 1000 VMs per backup server and up to 200 VMs per vPowerNFS server.
TLS connection support for the PostgreSQLconfiguration database has been added for improved security when hosting the database on an external server.
New ISO-based update distribution reduces downtime by accelerating update installation and eliminates the additional disk space requirement on the backup server, which was previously needed for unpacking the update before its installation.
New REST API capabilities include changing existing password records, rescanning all backup repository types, downloading metadata for Unstructured Data backups, and performing backup deletion.
New PowerShell capabilities include connection to Veeam Vaults, querying, and restoring protected Microsoft Entra ID conditional access policies.
There are more than 40 additional features, enhancements, and resolved issues, make sure you read the corresponding KB.
In addition, consider updating ASAP if CVE-2025-23120 addresses your installation.
Update: The NCP-US and NCP-DB beta exams have reached capacity and are now closed.
The year begins with the updated Nutanix certifications! Nutanix Certified Professional – Unified Storage (NCP-US) and Nutanix Certified Professional – Database Management (NCP-DB) were updated to version 6.10.
Nutanix Certified Professional – Unified Storage (NCP-US) – certification related to the Nutanix Storage Services: Files, Objects, and Volumes. Blueprint Guide; Nutanix Certified Professional – Database Management (NCP-DB) – as you can guess from the name, the certification is all about Nutanix Database Services (former ERA). Blueprint Guide.
As usual, both exams are in a beta state and available totally free for the first 250 participants; just use the discounts during checkout: NCPDB610BETA for NCP-DB and NCPUS610BETA for NCP-US exam. You can find those certifications on the PSI cert lists. The last test date to test is March 2, 2025.
Nutanix released a new anticipated training and certification related to the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform, or NKP.
First, the new course, Nutanix Kubernetes Platform Administration (NKPA), is available for free online at Nutanix University! The course is based on AOS 6.10, Prism Central 2024.2, and Nutanix Kubernetes Platform 2.12, and teaches you how to deploy, configure, and manage the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP).
For now, the certification is in a beta state and available totally free for the first 250 participants, just use the discount during checkout: NCPCN610BETA. You can find this certification on the PSI certs lists. The first test date is January 28, 2025, and you have time to prepare. The last test date is March 10, 2025.
Keep in mind, that during the beta state, you won’t get your results immediately after completing the exam. Usually, it takes a month or two after beta is over, and I can guess that the results of the exam could be at the end of April or in May.
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;
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)
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.
Today, a new version of VMware vSphere 8.0 has been released. It is a major update that contains tons of new features in different areas, including live patch management, partial maintenance mode, embedded vCLS, and more and more.
I do not want to copy all well-written info here but to share a few links.
On May 21, Veeam Backup & Replication 12.1.2 has been released.
This update contains important security bug fixes for the Enterprise Manager, including CVE-2024-29849 with a score of 9.8 and CVE-2024-29850 with a score of 8.8.
Please note, that CVE-2024-29849 allows an unauthenticated attacker to log in to the Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager web interface as any user. So, consider to update ASAP.
In addition to the security bug fixes, there are many new improvements and features. I won’t post all of them here, but a few are interesting for me:
Improved VMware NBD (Network Transport Mode) transport mode performance by up to 2x;
AlmaLinux 9.3 and Rocky 9.3 are supported for use as Linux-based backup repositories and backup proxies;
VMware Cloud Director 10.4.1 and 10.4.1.1 support;
Veeam Agent for Linux 6.1.2.1781 – AlmaLinux 9.3 & 9.4, RHEL 9.4, Rocky 9.3 & 9.4, and Ubuntu 24.04 Linux distributions support.
In total, there are about 100 improvements and fixes. So even if you don’t use the Enterprise Manager, consider installing this update to add support for new systems’ versions and bug fixes.
