Releases are coming on a regular basis, so a new release is not a big deal. Over time, you talk to Nutanix about new enhancements in the software. The standard answer is, it is on the roadmap, and maybe it is in the next release. Well, today was a big surprise.

While reading the release notes, I was able to ping two customers to make them happy. A few enhancements are in the software, that help fix them their issues.

First customer, pretty new to Nutanix was equipped with all NVMe nodes, 105T capacity. Just over the limit of 92TB to support less than 6 hr RPO with async replication. Of course, in environments with a small change rate, it will still work with 4 hr RPO, but is not supported. An alert in Prism reminds you of this limitation. With the new release of AOS, a capacity of 185T all flash per node is supported for async replication with a RPO of 1 hr.

The text in the release nodes about this feature.
Starting with AOS 7.3 release, the All-Flash nodes support a capacity up to 185 TB for Asynchronous replication with 1 hour to less than 6 hours recovery point objective (RPO).

Don’t forget to check the Data Protection and Recovery with Prism Element Guide about sizing the CVM.

Second customer, not new to Nutanix, but in fact the first customer in (at least) Europe with AHV in production, was complaining about the inability to replicate machines in a protection domain, when a vTPM was attached to the machine. This discussion was only two weeks ago. Today, I was pleased to tell him that with AOS 7.3, no workarounds were needed anymore. If both the source as the destination cluster are running AOS 7.3, machines with a vTPM attached are replicated without any problem.

The text of the releases notes is the following.
Starting with AOS 7.3, asynchronous replication schedule is supported for virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM)-enabled VMs in protection domain (PD)-based disaster recovery (DR). Ensure that both the primary and recovery sites use AOS 7.3 or later to protect the vTPM-enabled VMs in protection domain-based DR with an asynchronous replication schedule. However, protection of vTPM-enabled VMs in PD-based DR with legacy nearsync replication schedule is not supported.

Two customers happy and only one releasae of AOS. Nutanix, keep up the good work. Happy customers are the best customers!

Another cool new features is about the AHV passwords. You were able to set them at cluster level, but according to the release notes, you can do that now at node level to allow unique passwords.

Starting with AOS 7.3 release, you can use the password management feature in Prism Central to manage passwords for AHV system accounts (root and admin) at the node level. Previously, centralized password management was supported only at the cluster level. This enhancement allows each AHV host to have a unique password for the root account and admin account (if password is set).