Nutanix AOS and Prism Central 5.10 + More!

Hot off the press is a bunch of new Nutanix software, via our Long Term Support (LTS) release cycle. AOS, Acropolis Operating System, is now up to version 5.10 as is Prism Central. Also in this release is an updated version of AHV (the Nutanix hypervisor). Our short term (STS) and long term release (LTS) cadence is new, so refer to KB #5505 for an explanation of the differences, so you can decide which train you want to be on. The 5.10 package will be maintained until March 2020, and supported until September 2020. Given our frequent releases of software, be sure to always refer to the Nutanix EOL Bulletin - AOS Versions for the latest support time frames.

To recap the following software went GA this past week:

Acropolis Operating System (AOS) 5.10
Prism Central 5.10
AHV (Acropolis hypervisor) 20171830.184
Witness VM 5.10
Nutanix Cluster Check (NCC) 3.6.3

Previously announced, Nutanix's cloud offering called Xi is now GA. The 5.10 bits have the required code to connect to Xi and also provide Xi leap (Disaster Recovery as a Service--DRaaS) functionality. So if you are interested in Xi or Xi Leap, first upgrade Nutanix to the 5.10 release.

One of the under cover changes that I've been anticipating in 5.10 is AES, or the autonomous extent store. This is an enhanced core data path for all flash nodes, noticeably improve performance for a variety of workloads. One great thing about HCI, and Nutanix in particular, is over time we optimize the software more and more and provide increasing performance on the same hardware with these free updates. No forklift upgrades needed to take advantage of our optimizations.

Another worthy mention is the support of SAP HANA VMs on AHV, via an optimized scheduler. We've also added AHV HA support for vGPU enabled VMs. This is great news for VDI environments. Also for AHV is a new concept of a 'never scheduluable node'. The easiest way to think of this is a storage only node for AHV, where VMs can *never* run on that node. It only provides storage resources, and performance boost, to the cluster. Environments where software licensing is a concern, can now use the capacity of these nodes without fear of getting a surprise licensing bill.

Across all of the software releases are a number of bug fixes and security patches, such as those for L1TF. Both AHV nodes and the CVM are patched for L1TF. Also, Windows 10 performance for the spring and fall updates of 2018 has been greatly enhanced.

Summary

The 5.10 release is a big release for customers with a lot of under the cover optimizations, security patches, bug releases, and the ability to connect to Xi and Xi leap. Be sure to check out the Nutanix Compatibility Matrix and all before you start upgrading. And in case you are wondering why 5.10 hasn't popped up in the Prism auto-updater, that's because we generally wait for a minor patch or two to enable the automated one-click upgrades. But feel free to download the binaries yourself and do the one-click upgrade if you don't want to wait on the minor patches.