Nutanix NOS 4.1.4 Features

If you are Nutanix customer, you know that we release new version of our NOS platform on a very frequent basis. Release timing varies, but every 2-3 months you will see releases pop up. Some are major with a boatload of new features, and some are more bug fixes with a few minor features. I’m proud to announce that NOS 4.1.4 is now shipping! This is a minor update, but does have the following features: In NOS 4.1.x metro availability is synchronous replication between two sites, with no more 5ms latency between sites. NOS 4.1.4 brings some enhancements to metro availability:

• Ability to take snapshots of a metro protection domain
• Snapshot creation is driven from primary and performed on both primary and secondary
• Only protection domain metadata replication is performed to complete the snapshot (minimal data transfer)
• Interoperability with conventional async tertiary site.
• User can create a schedule to replicate to async site from GUI
• Metro configuration is a starting point for 3-site DR, with tertiary replication as an add-on

Over the last year Nutanix has released a number of new models, to satisfy certain requirements such as compute heavy, cold storage IOPS heavy, all SSD (AFA), etc. We don’t stand still, and constantly listen to customers. So with NOS 4.1.4 will debut support for the Nutanix NX-1065s.

• Replacement/Upgrade from NX-1020
• Single CPU Socket (E-2630v2 or E5-2680v2)
• Ivy Bridge CPU
• 3.5″ 2TB, 4TB, 6TB drives
• SSDs can be 480GB, 800GB or 1.2TB
• Supports self-encrypting drive
• Up to 256GB DDR3 RAM
• 2x 10Gb NICs (or 2x 1Gbps)
• SATADOM upgraded to 6Gbps

There is also an enhance to our Acropolis hypervisor.  When an Acropolis host enters maintenance mode, VMs are moved to a temporary host. After the host exits maintenance mode, the VMs are automatically returned to the original host, eliminating the need to manually move them. Restore VM Locality also occurs when a failed node is restored on a cluster that was configured with Best Effort High Availability (HA).

This version also includes a number of security updates, to address several CVEs, such as TLS issues, DoS, and memory corruption.

NOS 4.1.3 and later support the NX-6035c platform mixed with other blocks in a cluster running the Acropolis, Hyper-V, and ESXi hypervisors.

Nutanix Engineering has significantly improved the performance of the disk firmware upgrade process, so you might observe better results when upgrading

And there you have it! Enhanced Metro availability, a new low-end block, enhancements to Acropolis and other new features. You can download 4.1.4 directly from the support portal. Not to far around the corner is a MAJOR NOS upgrade, with a list as long as my arm of new features. I won’t spill the beans, but stay tuned for some really cool enhancements. Also expect another minor release in August, with yet more features. And for those of you wanting full ‘legacy’ Microsoft clusters on Nutanix, stay tuned for good news on that front.