On 31st March 2020 we made available our latest Long Term Support (LTS) release of AOS, version 5.15. This LTS release builds upon a mature and proven AOS codebase which customers have already been running successfully in their production environments.
End of Support Life (EOSL) and Release Information:
AOS 5.15 is a Long Term Support (LTS) Release:
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Information on AOS Long Term Support (LTS) and Short Term Support (STS) Releases, please see KB 5505 or the Support policies page
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Please refer to the AOS EOL Schedule for release details
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If you are on an EOSL release, please plan on moving to one of the following to avoid disruption in support:
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AOS 5.15 (LTS) or a supported LTS release
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AOS 5.16 (STS) or a supported STS release for rapid adoption of new features mentioned in the release notes
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Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) for Approved Platforms and EOL:
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Information on the Hardware Compatibility Guidelines and EOL can be found on the Support policies page
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Please refer to the HW EOL Schedule for details on the compatible hardware platforms (“Approved Platforms”)
Key Features available in AOS 5.15 (LTS)
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AOS 5.15
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Upgrades
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Storage QoS
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Autonomous Extent Store (AES)
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Enhanced Storage Capacity
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Network Segmentation for Volumes
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Nutanix Objects
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X-Play (Cross-Play) for Prism Pro
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Enhanced AHV Image Management
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Leap (DR Runbooks) for VMware ESXi hypervisor
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Upgrades
Significant effort has gone into all AOS releases with specific focus on AOS 5.15 (LTS) to improve the upgrade experience and enhance upon the existing simplicity. Strengthening the core to self heal along with additional pre-checks and deterministic UI messages, both 1-click and Life Cycle Manager (LCM) provides for upgrades to both software and firmware that is truly invisible.
Storage QoS
Nutanix AOS architecture already has built-in QoS capabilities that help protect against noisy neighbors. With AOS 5.15, we allow for end-user control of Storage Quality of Service (QoS), specifically Nutanix cluster admins can now rate limit (throttle) IOPS of selected virtual machines on their clusters.
Autonomous Extent Store (AES)
There is considerable ongoing innovation in the core AOS architecture. One such innovation debuted with AOS 5.10 and further enhanced from 5.11 and 5.15 (LTS) onwards in Autonomous Extent Store (AES). The Nutanix AOS architecture is generally well-known for the benefits of data locality. AES takes this concept further by introducing metadata locality and keeping copies of metadata in a faster to access local location. Metadata locality results in improved network utilization, reduced CPU utilization and reduced disk writes. The benefit to performance is significant in particular for workloads with sustained random write and random read such as those found in Databases with large working sets.
Enhanced Storage Capacity
Speaking of larger capacity, included with AOS 5.15 (LTS), we have the ability to support up to 120TB HDD-tier storage capacity per node. As you can see, AOS continues to become more versatile with enhancements in all-flash and hybrid for performance and capacity.
Network Segmentation for Volumes
AOS 5.15 includes the capability to physically isolate block storage (Volume Group) traffic external to a Nutanix cluster to a separate physical network. This will enable our customer’s ability to configure for network security requirements as you can isolate certain traffic to specific ports on a cluster so that networking policies can be selectively applied.
Nutanix Objects
Nutanix Objects has been available since AOS 5.11 for growing use cases for unstructured data. Nutanix Objects enables customers to use Objects for big data applications such as Splunk SmartStore, and as a target for their backup solutions such as Commvault, Veritas NetBackup, Veeam, HYCU, Unitrends and others. It’s designed with an S3-compatible REST API interface to handle terabytes to petabytes of unstructured data, all from a single namespace.
X-Play (Cross-Play) for Prism Pro
Users of AOS are already familiar with Nutanix’s IT Operations tool, Prism Pro. In the past, Prism Pro’s machine learning based anomaly detection and just-in-time forecasting features have given teams the simplicity and accuracy to achieve high productivity in IT operations. From Prism Central 5.11 onwards, we introduced X-Play (cross-play) in Prism Pro, a task automation engine that empowers IT to automate remediation of common issues as well as automate routine tasks of performance and capacity optimization. Using X-Play, IT teams can create playbooks for common issues. These playbooks can be triggered automatically based on the alert policies.
Enhanced AHV Image Management
As environments grow and the number of various workloads expand the need for image management grows as well. We know our customers are building and deploying clusters for various mixed workloads and you are looking for better ways to ensure the disk images needed by those applications are always available in the right locations. Released in Prism Central 5.11, the image service has a new way to manage disk and application images with the introduction of Image Management Policies. These policies can be used to control image replication and cluster location. Using the PC category model that is being adopted by many policy-based features in PC, clusters and images can be grouped and those groups can be used to ensure images are delivered to the right locations. Additionally, there are new options for direct image uploads, enabling admins to quickly deploy images to any cluster.
Leap (DR Runbooks) for VMware ESXi hypervisor
Introduced in Prism Central 5.11 Nutanix customers running VMware ESXi hypervisor can now orchestrate and simplify the DR procedure using VM-centric DR Runbooks.
If you are currently under a valid support contract, you are entitled to upgrade AOS. If you have any questions about how to upgrade, or interoperability, please refer to the following links:
https://portal.nutanix.com/#/page/upgradePaths or https://portal.nutanix.com/#/page/softwareinteroperability