It’s New Release Wednesday from Nutanix (3.19.25), with new releases for AHV, AOS and Prism Central, bringing some fixes and nice new features. March has been a busy month for Nutanix, dropping a number of different product updates (shown below), but I’m going to focus on the big 3 that came out today.
Updates in March
So far, March has been a busy month with a wide variety of product releases across the Nutanix Cloud Platform:
- Prism Central 2024.3.0.2 and 2024.2.0.5 and 2024.3.1
- AOS 7.0.1
- AHV 10.0.1
- Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) 2.1.4
- Self-Service 3.8.1.1
- NVIDIA vGPU drivers for AHV 16.9 and 17.5
- MSP 2.6.1.0
Prism Central
Dropping today, Prism Central 2024.3.1 is the latest release to the PC release train, and I love seeing how Nutanix is putting a very targeted effort into not only bringing new valuable features to the product, but focusing on stablizing PC as it becomes more a cornerstone to the environment.
First off, 2024.3.1 introduces a power consumption monitor for your infrastructure. This gives insight into real-time power usage into the cluster. Very cool to see this feature within Prism Central, especially for those organizations who watch power consumption, either due to consumption restrictions at a colo facility, or in general watching for overhead. Per the release notes, this feature provides real-time and historical line charts of the power usage data for each cluster on the Prism Central (PC) Dashboard for the last hour, last 24 hours, and last week.
While there weren’t a ton of new features to 2024.3.1, there were two features that jumped out to me as something to dig into.
While a very cool feature, it does have some requirements that initially I didn’t meet!
- Must be on AOS 7.0 and PC 2024.3.1 or later (I missed the 7.0 part!).
- You must establish Prism Central BMC OOB network connectivity.
- Only NX, Dell, HPE, Lenovo, and Fujitsu hardware models are supported (Stinks to see Cisco not supported, there goes my tests!).
- Only Large and X-Large Prism Central instances are supported. This is a big one, as unless you’re consuming the additional features such as Flow Network Security, Intelligent Operations and/or Disaster Recovery, you might have to resize your PC instance.
The second feature that I found interesting is the decouples NCM from Prism Central. This one was a bit confusing to me, as I couldn’t find out where or how to opt-in. I like the ideal of the flexibility of moving certain services to this style of platform, but it wasn’t clear to me onhow you opt-in. More to come there… Per the release notes:
“This release introduces a decoupled NCM from Prism Central on an opt-in basis. If you opt-in for a decoupled NCM, NCM runs in a modern Kubernetes-based underlying platform. Intelligent Operations-related features are removed from Prism Central web console. On such touchpoints, the Prism Central web console displays a message pointing to the new NCM web console.”
Going through the resolved issues, there’s a decent list of items, but one that I’ve dealt with here recently was below, good to see this one fixed.
Resolved an issue with Prism Central instances running pc.2024.3 or later versions where configuring these instances with fully qualified domain names (FQDNs) instead of IP addresses resulted in the Nutanix Objects-lite pod failing with a status of CrashLoopBackOff.
AOS
Much like AHV, AOS didn’t introduce much in the way of new features, other than the AMD Turin support on the G10 platforms. Makes sense with AHV 10.0.1 bringing that support, but would have loved to see another fun new feature!
Also like AHV 10.0.1, not a lot in the way of resolved issues, many CVE’s and some minor bug fixes.
AHV
Moving onto AHV, there was only a single item in the What’s New, and a biggie! Starting with AHV 10.0.1, the AMD Turin processor is now supported, but what came after that was the big one, with a hint to the Nutanix G10 release. The G9’s have been out for over a year now, so it will be interesting to see what is on the horizon with the G10’s – something we might see at .Next in early May.
In the resolved issues category, not a ton of fixed, but CVE’s fixed and a few oddball host issues.
Unified NCI Release Model
As a reminder, starting with AOS 7.0, AHV 10.0 and PC 2024.3, Nutanix has moved these to the new Unified Release model, moving away from the Legacy Long Term, Short Term and Extended Short Term Support releases. Much like the LTS release, the Unified Release model will still provide 15 months of maintenance from GA followed by 9 months of Support, which is exactly as LTS was (while STS was 12 months of maintenance and 3 months of SUpport).
As Nutanix has highlighted in the KB article, some of the key features of the Unified Release model are:
- Aligned Maintenance and Support: AOS, AHV, Prism, NCC, Foundation, FNS and FVN are now all synchronized with the same End of Support and End of Maintenance dates.
- Two Unified Releases per year
- Manual and Staged Availabiltiy: Manual downloads will be available, while updates via LCM will be rolled out in stages
- Upgrade Support: Upgrades can be performed directly from the previous one or two releases (n-1 or n-2). For versions older than n-2, an intermediate upgrade step (hop) is required.