AOS 7.0 Launch Blog

We are excited to introduce the next major AOS release for the Nutanix Cloud Platform solution, Version 7.0. This release is designed to help customers enhance fault tolerance, simplify automation, strengthen security, and improve networking across their Nutanix infrastructure.

With a new unified release model, organizations benefit from access to new features and a seamless upgrade experience, helping to prioritize efficient and reliable IT operations - whether in the datacenter, the cloud, or at the edge. Let's dive into some of the incredible features introduced in this release.

High Availability and Disaster Recovery

Take the Lead

We have always prioritized redefining enterprise resiliency and disaster recovery with innovations tailored for the modern IT environment. New cluster fault-tolerance features introduce enhanced resiliency by supporting one-node and one-disk fault tolerance.

This promotes uninterrupted operations in remote or distributed environments where maintaining high availability is critical while reducing the risk of downtime in the edge and in smaller deployments.

For datacenters leveraging the Nutanix AHV hypervisor , the Independent Witness Service was introduced to provide a solution for enhancing resiliency across sites. By deploying a lightweight witness VM, organizations can efficiently maintain quorum and ensure seamless operations and simplified management in metro cluster configurations.

Nutanix AOS 7.0 has also made significant improvements to the Nutanix Multicloud Snapshot Technology (MST), a cost-effective and scalable disaster recovery solution. This newest option supports replication to S3 and Nutanix Objects that eliminates the need for standby compute resources while allowing utilization of AWS as a public cloud target, potentially alleviating costs and maintaining robust recovery capabilities.

Together, these features empower organizations to achieve greater levels of fault tolerance and disaster preparedness across diverse IT environments.

Streamlining Automation and Management

We continue to enhance our platform with powerful tools designed to simplify automation and scale operations. With many v4 APIs now generally available, developers and administrators can confidently streamline the management of virtual environments on Nutanix by leveraging comprehensive software development toolkits for their clusters, VMs, networking, and storage, that are both easy to adopt and highly functional.

Security Enhancements Continue to be a Key Focus

For those customers with Data At Rest Encryption (DARE), we now provide the ability to use external key management in Azure, increasing KMS flexibility. This integration empowers businesses to maintain control over their encryption keys while benefiting from the scalability and convenience of Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) solution on Azure.

For network security, the Flow Network Security Next-Gen (FNS-NG) Multi-environment Isolation Policy now streamlines the management of VM isolation across multiple groups. By enabling multiple isolation groups to be protected and managed from a single policy, administrators can easily ensure that different VM groups remain securely segregated with simple policy management.

Finally, FNS-NG Flexible Policy enhancements allow users to organize rules logically by creating multiple smaller application policies using the same category. This makes policies more understandable and enforcement orders clearer, reducing complexity in dynamic environments. Less complex policies can be updated faster with more confidence.

Networking and Performance see Significant Boosts

We are constantly seeking ways to advance networking and compute capabilities with new features designed to enhance performance, availability and AI acceleration.

In this release, native Load Balancing in Flow Virtual Networking Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) offers an integrated L4 load balancer service built into AHV, managed seamlessly through the Nutanix Prism management control plane for the Nutanix Cloud Platform.

This feature optimizes traffic distribution to high-throughput, highly available applications, simplifying the deployment and management of critical workloads while ensuring consistent performance.

On the networking front, Flow Virtual Networking with NAT High Availability ensures robust connectivity for VPCs by supporting both NoNAT and NAT external subnets with up to four active gateway hosts per VPC. This enables seamless and resilient networking, even in demanding multicloud environments.

Complementing these advancements, AOS now supports Intel's fourth generation Sapphire Rapids® instruction sets, including Intel AMX®, on AHV.

Support for Intel AMX makes it possible for Nutanix customers to run AI inference workloads more cost-effectively under specific use-cases than with GPUs by leveraging the advanced matrix processing power of the Intel Sapphire Rapids architecture.

Customers who have Intel AMX-capable CPUs including Intel Sapphire Rapids and the fifth generation Intel Emerald Rapids® can begin leveraging this capability after upgrading to AOS 7.0.

An Evolved Release model

And finally, a simplified, unified release model for Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) component products, starting with AOS 7.0 and Prism Central 2024.3.

This new model offers two feature releases per year, aligned across NCI component products, each with a 24-month lifecycle (15 months of maintenance and nine months of support). This means more predictable upgrade schedules and faster access to new features.

We're also continuing our staged rollout approach, promoting early awareness of new releases, simplifying adoption, and enhancing customer satisfaction. Customers retain full control over when and which version to upgrade, ensuring flexibility and minimizing disruptions.

Summary

We invite you to explore these new features and experience firsthand how Nutanix AOS 7.0 can elevate your infrastructure's performance, security, and manageability. Upgrade to AOS 7.0 today!

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