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Nutanix has recently released a new version of Acropolis Operating System (AOS): AOS 5.8 is now the latest version. Just few months after Nutanix AOS 5.6.

NOTICE: AOS 5.8 is a new AOS Feature Release or Short term Support (STS) Release, that means it isn’t a Long Term Supported (LTS). The support for all feature release version will only be for 6 months after the release date, within which period you will have to upgrade to the next feature release version.

The new AOS 5.8 release will have some interesting improvements and new features:

  • Erasure Coding with Block Awareness: prior to release 5.8, erasure coding was not supported on a block aware cluster
  • Nutanix Native Key Management Server for AOS based DAR Encryption
    • The native KMS requires a minimum of 3-node cluster and can be used instead of an external KMS.
    • But in this release, the native KMS is supported only for AOS Software Encryption (not for SED based encryption)
  • Better Encryption: from long time was available the support for SED disks. But they are costly, so with AOS 5.5 was addede the support for FIPS compliant software-based encryption (AOS Software Encryption )
    • Now it’s possible have dual level Data-at-Rest encryprion, both with SEDs and AOS Software encryption same time
    • With AOS 5.8 and the built-in native local key management (LKM) is possible use it for for software-based encryption
  • SAML Authentication Support in Prism Central
    • One identity provider can be configured
    • The role mapping is restricted to individual users; groups are not supported
    • Session timeouts are based on Prism Central only; the identify provider is not queried for session expiry
  • Prism Element Image Management

Now you can multi-queue between hypervisors and CVMs – making your sequential traffic go up to 30-50% faster. Other new features include dual encryption, local key management, erasure coding and block awareness.

The new release bring the following products versions:

AOS NCC Foundation AHV
5.8.0.1 3.5.3.1 4.0.5 AHV-20170830.151
5.8 3.5.3.1 4.0.5 AHV-20170830.151

Note that AOS 5.8 supports upgrading your cluster from the AOS 5.5 family and 5.6 family versions. You cannot upgrade to AOS 5.8 from the AOS 5.1 family versions. For information about upgrade paths for this release, browse to the Nutanix Support portal and consult Acropolis Upgrade Paths.

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