Yesterday (July 27th) Nutanix released new versions of Prism Central (v7.6), AOS (v7.6) & AHV (v11.2) and o boy do they contain some goodies. I will highlight the most important for me in the below post.
New and updated features
The following span across the three products to improve scalability, security and migration:
- Simplified Cluster Expansion: Now supports the seamless expansion of a two-node AHV cluster to a three-node cluster by adding a single node.
- Modernized Workload Migration: On-Demand Cross-Cluster Live Migration (OD-CCLM) now allows one-way VM migration from older AHV versions to newer versions, removing the need for downtime during platform upgrades.
- Hardened Secure Access: Introduces the NuService Menu (a restricted shell) for admin users and removes direct SSH access to AHV hosts, centralizing all administrative control via Prism Central.
- NGT Enhancements: Significant updates to Nutanix Guest Tools (NGT), including improved installation reliability, enhanced integration with Prism Central for VM management, and updated API support for guest-level operations.
- RHEL 9 Integration: The underlying OS for both the Controller VM (CVM) and Prism Central VM has been upgraded to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9.
- Configurable Fault Tolerance (CFT): New support for 1N/2D (one node or two disks) and 1N&1D configurations, giving users more choice in balancing resiliency vs. capacity.
- Unified Security Profiles: Introduction of predefined security tiers (Standard, Elevated, and Strict) applicable across AOS and AHV clusters.
- Expanded Hardware Ecosystem: Broad integration for Dell PowerStore (external storage and DR via NVMeoF/TCP) and new Mixed-Media Guardrails to prevent unsupported combinations of HDD, SSD, and NVMe.
Prism Central v7.6
- Nutanix Projects: New enterprise-grade logical boundaries for multi-tenancy, enabling strict resource governance and workload isolation.
- DR Modernization: A new tool to migrate legacy protection domains to entity-centric DR, along with age-based bulk deletion for recovery points.
- Centralized Visibility: Added a dedicated Storage Dashboard for health tracking and a CVM Management tab for rapid resource identification.
- Improved UX: Enabled copy/paste text functionality directly into the AHV VM console and implemented a comprehensive Accessibility (a11y) program aligned with WCAG 2.2.
- Orchestration Scale: Support for “Zero Compute” MST DR automation and increased scale for volume groups in Metro Availability.
AOS v7.6
- Extreme Storage Scale: Increased capacity support up to 307 TB for All-Flash NVMe systems and 270 TB for Hybrid HCI nodes.
- NVMe Density: Increased EDSFF NVMe drive limits to support up to 40 drives per node.
- Intelligent DR: Eligible protection domains now automatically upgrade to Autonomous NearSync.
- Hypervisor Support: Official support for VMware vCenter Server 9.0 with ESXi 8.0
AHV v11.2
- Advanced VM Monitoring: New memory metrics that distinguish between actual guest consumption and ballooned memory for precise capacity planning.
- AI & High-Performance Compute: Added support for NVIDIA HGX (H200/B200) platforms and Intel MBEC for Windows Credential Guard.
- Storage-Aware Migration: OD-CCLM now includes a storage migration option, allowing administrators to select specific destination storage placement during live migration.
- Network Acceleration: Expanded NIC support for SR-IOV and Network Offload (specifically for Nvidia ConnectX-7 and Intel E810).
- Management Shift: Introduced new aCLI commands for GPU management and migrated network-crashcart and rdma-configuration tools from GUI to CLI.
- Host Access Control: New ability to manage cluster-wide host console access (physical, serial, and virtual) via a NuBash script.
- Backup Chain Integrity: BIOS UUID preservation during failover and restore to ensure third-party backup chains remain intact.
Changed features
- AOS Alerting: Tightened default threshold settings for NIC link-down, CRC error checks, and NIC flaps to ensure faster incident detection.
- PC Permissions: Updated API permissions for NGT v4 (VM Guest Tools) and modified requirements for assigning categories to VMs.
- Interface Refinements: Restructured the Prism Central Admin Center navigation bar and grouped Database Service instances in the Application Switcher for better clarity.
Deprecated Features
- Legacy APIs: Nutanix Legacy API versions (v0.8, v1, v2, and v3) are slated for deprecation by Q4-CY2026 (AOS) and Q4-CY2027 (PC). Migration to v4 APIs is recommended.
- Cluster-Level Quotas: Phasing out support for cluster-level quotas for projects and Self-Service accounts.
- Standalone Console Tab: The dedicated “Console” tab in the Prism Central web console is deprecated; users should now use the “Launch Console” option.
As you can see there is a whole slew of enhancements and changes in these new versions. The ones that stand out to me are:
- Simplified Cluster Expansion: from a 2-node cluster to a 3-node cluster. This is huge for edge sites where you start small and you don’t need to rebuild your cluster if you want to expand
- NGT Enhancements: easier deployment and no CD-ROM required.
- Centralized Visibility: the addition of the CVM management tab
- Improved UX: copy/past functionality into the AHV VM Console
- Security: underlying OS for the PCVM & CVM upgraded to RHEL9, the introduction of the NuService menu and disablement of direct SSH access to AHV hosts (this will get used to :))