As new cybersecurity threats evolve, Nutanix has been hard at work improving the way you patch, upgrade, and operate your Nutanix Cloud Platform. We understand how critical and difficult patching and upgrading can be, especially in a world under constant attack. You must be resilient, and proper lifecycle management improves your cyber resilience!
We know that upgrades can be a bit intimidating, but fear not! Nutanix is continually working to make the process smoother and more efficient. We’re thrilled to announce a new version of Nutanix Life Cycle Management (LCM), 2.6!
1. LCM Customs! Sleek New Pre-Upgrade / Update Checks
LCM 2.6 now allows you a dry-run of selected upgrade tasks for your Nutanix Cloud Platform. Quickly understand and reduce unexpected upgrade failures by running pre-checks, ensuring smooth upgrades.
Think of it like a dry run, with just one click. AOS, PC, and ESXi in LCM are all supported.
And that's not all - any module can call the NCC pre-check task, and we expect more LCM upgrade modules to be onboarded to the pre-check framework that are under development. Initially, Prism Central will lead the charge as the first module to use this pre-check, but we're excited to see other modules build on this new capability.
AOS pre-check will download the binaries and run validations against that new version, with a log bundle that can be quickly transferred to support if needed.
2. Foundation Joins the Party: Upgrade Nutanix Foundation in Parallel to Other Upgrades with LCM
Foundation can now be upgraded in LCM across CVMs (controller virtual machine) for all clusters and nodes. This cuts down doing things serially (one-by-one) and increases productivity. Below is a table to quickly understand this relationship:
If you’re running a dark site (non-internet connected Nutanix cluster(s)), use the re-spun Foundation dark site bundle for 2.6+. That means there are now two bundles available on the portal - one for LCM 2.6+ and one for earlier LCM 2.x versions.
3. New Platform-Wide Secure ESXi Upgrade Support in LCM
LCM 2.6 now supports a secure workflow for ESXi upgrades across all clusters, allowing for image checksum to ensure a secure supply chain from VMware to your Nutanix node. This provides parity to Nutanix AHV upgrades that already use this workflow. As ESXi upgrades continue, expect further advancements in LCM to support these critical features.
ESXi Upgrades are currently supported for:
- Nodes running as general HCI or compute-only (CO) nodes
- Nodes running in a secure boot configuration
- Nodes must be upgraded to VMware ESXi 6.7 or later
- NX nodes-only supported in this release
- Minimum node AOS version is: 6.5.1 or newer
As always, all Nutanix AHV versions are included and supported to upgrade securely out of the box.
4. Inventory Checks at Ludicrous Speed
LCM 2.6 brings upgrade improvements that are significant in reducing staging time of software to be upgraded. Depending on customer environments, this could be even faster!
(shown is a 48-node cluster; a 4 node cluster saw a large improvement, too)
Now, for all you Fujitsu fans out there - we've got some exciting news for you. iRMC upgrades via Redfish are now available for AHV only.
5. LCM Final Mentions
We would be remiss if it didn’t also mention some other key improvements brought to you by LCM 2.6:
- Enhanced background visibility for LCM 2.6 Self-Auto Upgrades (upgrading the upgrad-ER!)
Final Words
In the battle against global cyber threats, it’s critical that organizations maintain regularly patched/ updated systems. Doing so provides benefits of software enhancements, improved performance and resolutions of known vulnerabilities. Patching and upgrades with the latest LCM create a more secure environment, and Nutanix is happy to help our customers do it even faster. Nutanix, Your Cloud Platform, secured.