Acropolis Block Services – Acropolis Block Services (ABS) provides highly available and high-performance block storage as iSCSI LUNs to clients. Clients can be non-Nutanix servers external to the cluster or guest VMs internal or external to the cluster, with the cluster block storage configured as one or more volume groups.
This block storage acts as the iSCSI target for client Windows or Linux operating systems running on a bare metal server or as guest VMs using iSCSI initiators from within the client operating systems.
Cluster Resiliency (Degraded Node Detection) – Nutanix Engineering has introduced capabilities in AOS to identify partially available nodes and prevent them from affecting cluster availability. It can detect if a node is experiencing network latency issues, disk or memory errors, or other issue that would affect cluster performance.
AOS marks the node as degraded, places it in maintenance mode, and raises an alert to indicate its status. The node will be prevented from participating in cluster operations and cluster operations will continue. The node can rejoin the cluster once the issue is fixed.
This feature is disabled by default and customers are advised to contact Nutanix Support to enable and use it.
Docker Container Support – The Nutanix volume plug-in for Docker enables Docker deployments to be integrated with external storage systems, in this case the Nutanix distributed file system (NDFS), and enable data volumes to persist beyond the lifetime of a single container machine host.
HBA Disk Controller Firmware 1-Click Upgrade – The LSI host bus adapter/controller (HBA) 1-click firmware upgrade feature is available for Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) and ESXi hypervisor host environments running on NX-xxxx G4 (Haswell) or NX-xxxx-G5 (Broadwell) platforms only.
In-Place Hypervisor Conversion – Previously tech preview, this 1-click feature available through the Prism web console allows you to convert your cluster from using ESXi hosts to using AHV hosts. Guest VMs are converted to the hypervisor target format, and cluster network configurations are stored and then restored as part of the conversion process.
Note: This feature converts your existing ESXi cluster to an AHV cluster. You cannot start the conversion process on the AHV cluster.
Support for the Microsoft Cloud Platform System – Support for the Microsoft Cloud Platform System (CPS), which bundles Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2 and Windows Azure Pack for easier hybrid cloud configuration. Nutanix offers the CPS Standard version pre-installed on nodes from the factory.
Tech Preview Features
Acropolis File Services – Provides file server capability within a Nutanix AHV cluster, as one or more network-attached VMs, to form a virtual file server.
