Nutanix 4.6 Features Overview – Part 2

22Feb/160

Nutanix 4.6 Features Overview – Part 2

Andre Lebovici from Nutanix has posted the second part of the series what's new in Nutanix 4.6 removing the marketing fluff as much as possible.

Here are some of my favorites:

Single CG Restriction Removal for Linked Clone Deployments

Nutanix cluster has a complete understanding of Horizon View Composer intricacies and is able to backup/restore and replicate Linked Clone desktops to a recovery site. Additionally, when in recovery mode, it is possible to power on desktops and Nutanix will automatically register the desktops with vCenter in the recovery site. When the recovery event is over all changes are replicated back to the primary site and life returns to normal.

There was a limitation to be observed that is now gone – “Limit Linked Clone desktop pools to a maximum of 50 desktops and ensure desktops are member of a unique Nutanix Consistency Group and Protection Domain.” Administrators now may create multiple protection domains with different schedules for the same large desktop pool now with up to 250 desktops per protection domain.

Nutanix Guest Tools (NGT)

The NGT is a software bundle that enables advanced user VM (UVM) functionality. At this point in time NGT provide support for the Nutanix Guest Agent service for communicating with Nutanix CVM, Nutanix Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) software for Nutanix snapshots, Cross-Hypervisor VM Mobility Drivers and File Level Restores.

Guided Alert Root Cause Analysis

Nutanix 4.6 has some big improvements to alerting usability and configurability. Some of these improvements include User Friendly Titles, Alert threshold and exception configuration for a subset of Prism elements, and Prism Central Widgets with emphasis on alert categories such as performance, availability, capacity, configuration and system indicator.Additionally, Alert notifications can now follow special email rules based on a combination of Severity, Category and Cluster selection.

For Root Cause Analysis, Prism Central now offer a guided alert drill-down for the top 15 frequently occurring alerts with relevant metrics for possible causes.

Replication Factor Migration/Conversion

Resiliency Factor 2 (FT1) ensures that two copies of all data are written to persistent media prior to being acknowledged to the guest operating system. This ensures at N+1 level of redundancy which translates to being able to tolerate a single failure.

Resiliency Factor 3 (FT2) ensures that three copies of all data are written to persistent media prior to being acknowledged to the guest operating system. This ensures at N+2 level of redundancy which translates to being able to tolerate two concurrent SSD/HDD or node failures.

Nutanix 4.6 offers the ability for the administrator to change the metatada and data resiliency factors online for a container without cluster disruption. Everything happens automatically in the background, allowing any business SLA changes to be quickly followed by IT without disruptions.

Application Consistent Snapshots for AHV

Nutanix 4.6 introduces the ability to take application consistency snapshots with AHV. AHV works in tandem with NGT to send a quiesce request to the VM while the agent running in the VM will invoke Microsoft VSS service to quiesce the workload. After quiesce is done Nutanix takes a snapshot of the VM.

There are other major and minor improvements in Nutanix 4.6 such as Zookeper Auto Migration and Leader Only Paxos Reader, but these are operating under the covers to make users and admins experience better or improve performance and reliability.