Nutanix recently introduced a new, simplified and altogether easier to work with support model for the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) product portfolio.
Previously, customers had a choice between:
- Short Term Support (STS) releases – New features, and provides a regular upgrade path
- Long Term Support (LTS) release – Primarily bug fixes and is maintained for a longer support term duration
Our recommended model for production installations was always to use LTS where possible, and to only consider STS if there was functionality you needed that wasn’t yet implemented within LTS.
As the gap between STS (AOS 6.6, 6.7…) and LTS (6.5..) releases increased, an ‘Extended Short Term Support’ aka eSTS (AOS 6.8) was released to try to provide LTS-esque support functionality with updated functionality without calling it an LTS.
Wider than just AOS though, there are other products within the portfolio that need to be factored into upgrade/deployment decisions and sometimes that can be complicated and lining everything up.
To that end Nutanix have introduced a new release model – ‘(Unified) NCI Release Model‘ with AOS 7.0, and Prism Central pc.2024.3.
This new model provides the benefits of long-term support in that it has full maintenance support for 15 months, and a further 9 months of troubleshooting support and includes other Nutanix portfolio products as a single certified compatible bundle.
Those portfolio products are: AOS, AHV, Prism, NCC, Foundation, Flow Network Security (FNS), and Flow Virtual Networking (FVN) making it much easier to upgrade without having to cross check supported versions between each of the components.
In example, this means that for the AOS 7.0 Unified Release we have:
- AOS: 7.0
- AHV: 10.0
- Prism: 2024.3
- NCC: 5.1.0
- FNS: 5.1
- FVN: ANC-5.0.0
- Foundation: 5.7
If we then need to factor in something else like Files, we can use the Compatibility and Interoperability Matrix and see that Files is widely supported:
Upgrading to reach the Unified Release Model for AOS 7.0 is straight forward thanks to LCM, and the wide supported versions of AOS with Prism Central.
LCM will help get platforms upgraded to AOS 7.0 and associated products and improve decisions beyond.
I’m very happy to see this simplified release model, I’ve spent a lot of time over the years making sure each product in a deployment remains in support with the other products in place.