This week Nutanix announced the general availability release of our AOS™ 6.5 long term support (LTS) infrastructure software, delivering better performance, simpler management, enhanced orchestration capabilities, and more for customers who have adopted a long term support deployment cadence. The new functionality continues to enhance the value of our customers’ hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) deployments and further simplifies day 1 and day 2 operations. Our customers can easily upgrade to this new version to benefit from these new capabilities.
We have been hard at work listening to feedback and bringing features to fruition that help implement and manage disaster recovery (DR) workflows. This blog talks about the major new features that were included in previous short term support (STS) releases but are now available in the AOS™ 6.5 LTS release. Let’s dive in and have a look at how this new release will help our customers achieve their DR goals!
AHV Metro Support with Single PC
With the introduction of witness support for AHV synchronous replication, we have released AHV Metro-Availability which enables a fully automated failover during a disaster or could even be leveraged for disaster avoidance. The witness is included as a service in Prism Central so there is no need to deploy a separate VM to manage. This solution enables a 0 recovery point objective (RPO) and near 0 recovery time objective (RTO) and leverages the same constructs as the rest of our DR portfolio with Nutanix Disaster Recovery, such as protection policies, recovery plans and categories. With this release, we now offer a 0 RPO / near 0 RTO DR solution whether you are using VMware ESXi or Nutanix AHV. To see AHV Metro in action, please check out the demo from .NEXT.
Range Based Replication
In our journey to continue to optimize and hone our technology, we have released an update to how we replicate our snapshots. Previously we would replicate a 1MB or 4MB extent even if only a small portion of that data was changed. While still efficient due to its granularity, this resulted in excess data being replicated to the target site. With Range Based Replication, we will now only replicate the exact ranges of changed data. What this means for you is a decrease in time it takes to replicate your snapshots across the full range of change rates and snapshot chains.
For a deeper dive into Range Based Replication, please check out our article Range Based Replication Performance – The Tale of the Tape.
Enhanced NearSync Replication Schedules for vStore
As we continue to iterate on our DR capabilities, our customers have asked for even lower RPOs that aren’t restricted by the response time and distance limitations of synchronous replication. This feature still uses our async snapshot-based replication instead of synchronous IO replication, but enables protection of a vStore in an ESXi environment with an RPO as low as 20 seconds. This reduced RPO gives customers even greater protection and flexibility for their business.
DR Dashboard: Monitoring and Reporting
Observability is key to our solution and DR is no exception. Now included in our HCI stack is a dashboard in Prism Central that provides insights into your DR environment. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like RPO , service level agreements (SLAs), DR readiness, alerts, etc are easily accessible on the dashboard across all clusters participating in DR across on-premises, Nutanix DRaaS as well as Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2).
For a deeper look into DR Dashboards please have a look at the disaster recovery dashboard blog post.
End-to-End Encryption
As Nutanix continues to gain momentum in G2K adoption, data protection and security becomes an even more vital part of our solutions. Nutanix has supported Data-at-Rest Encryption since AOS™ 5.1 with Self Encrypting Drives and in AOS™ 5.8 fully in software. With AOS™ 6.5 LTS, we have brought 2 more key features to our platform. The first is the encryption of intra-cluster communication of replication factor (RF) copies. The second is encryption of DR replication between AOS clusters.
This feature enhances your security posture, providing an end-to-end secure HCI stack. Data can be encrypted at the storage layer using Data-at-Rest encryption, encrypted when replicated within the cluster, and encrypted when replicated between AOS clusters.
Instant Recovery
RTO is a very important aspect to a business continuity (BC)/DR plan and helping customers recover quickly is what the new Instant Recovery feature provides. This feature allows customers who want to leverage the Instant Recovery functionality from their backup solutions to quickly restore their applications from backups. In addition, once the VM has booted, restoring performance to that VM will become important so we have also included a foreground and background migration process to migrate that data back to the Nutanix platform.
There are two flavors of Instant Recovery. The first and recommended for most use cases is Fast-Clones External Datasource. In this method, we absorb the writes locally and only forward the read request to the external datasource when we can’t service it locally. This type of Instant Recovery supports foreground and background migrations and can be snapshotted, cloned and backed-up.
The second use case is Passthrough External Datasource. This type is passed though as a virtual disk to the VM on AHV. The local stargate instance acts as an iSCSI terminator and forwards all IO requests to the external datasource. This type of Instant Recovery cannot snapshot or clone the VM Disks and we recommend it be used for ephemeral VM disks such as CD-ROM ISOs.
The adaptive foreground migration is based on workload IO. When a read request for data happens and pre-defined criteria are met, the requested data is migrated to the AOS cluster. The background migration is based on a policy set to allow data to migrate from external storage to the AOS cluster.
Layer 2 Stretched Networking into Nutanix DRaaS
Nutanix DRaaS (formerly Xi Leap) now supports Layer 2 stretched networking between your primary datacenter and Nutanix DRaaS. By extending layer 2 networks to the Nutanix Cloud, VMs that have failed over are able to communicate without re-architecting the network all while retaining your IP and MAC addresses, simplifying DR failover. For more information please have a look at the Xi Leap: Standing the Test of Time blog.
Wrap up
As you can see, we have been busy at work bringing a lot of features to the Nutanix HCI solution especially for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. We are excited to package all of these features into an LTS so all of our customer base can now leverage and enjoy them. I only went over the top notable features but there is even more DR goodness packed in this release. If you are interested in taking Nutanix for a test drive, click the link here to select a test drive experience.