The following will highlight what is new with AOS 5.6 release, originally pencilled in as a 5.5.1 release but it has now been changed to 5.6.

Security

Micro-segmentation is now GA via Flow. This is delivered through AHV, a stateful distributed firewall directly integrated into AHV and managed through Prism central. I have a separate post on this going into a bit more details found below. This is the first set of SDN features brought to the Nutanix platform which will no doubt grow.

http://18.130.155.133/2018/04/nutanix-flow-networking/

AHV Improvements

• Volume Group load balancer support for AHV. A Nutanix cluster can scale-up to meet the application need, IO automatically spreads across multiple nodes leveraging multiple CVMs. This can provide very high IO with use cases for those applications that demand high IO per VM.

• Two node support - additional to the previously announced 1-node configuration. Aimed at small ROBO sites with around 5-10 VMs including support for cross hypervisors across production and DR. Resiliency across nodes with a 2-node configuration whereas a 1-node configuration, the resiliency was at a disk level.

• Support for 80TB per node - use case used for backups or an expansion to AFS
• AHV guest tools - can now perform a guest shutdown via the GUI or CLI
• Erasure Coding improvement - in place write/update of the erasure code by computing updated parity data. This improves efficentcy of data reductions and garbage collection

Prsim Update

• Prism Central Scale Out - multiple instances of Prism Central can form a resilient and distributed control plane. Supported on AHV and ESXi. Scales upto 25K VMs and 60 clusters

• v3 API - finally announced, programmatic self-service to manage the virtual infrastructure. Support for micro-segmentation

AFS 3.0

• Support for NFSv4 - single fileserver can support both SMB shares and NFS exports
• Incremental file backup support - change file tracker based backups. Partnership with Comtrade and in talks with Commvault, Veritas and Rubrik
• Active-Active deployment supported
• File Auditing - using an external syslog server, exposed APIs for auditing