NimbleOS 4 - A Detailed Exploration

[shelbykhan79]

Nimble Operating System (NimbleOS) has been upgraded to version 4, and there are tons of useful new capabilities and features available for all systems.

Over the coming weeks we will be running a series of blog posts to provide additional technical detail and how-to guides on the new features.  Each topic will get updated below so the uninitiated or the curious can get a deeper-dive on each new feature.

Starting with NimbleOS 4, we have changed our release naming. NimbleOS 4 is currently Initial Production Release (IPR).  The IPR designation replaces Release Candidate (RC) as we felt "Initial Production Release" describes the lifecycle of the release schedule more accurately.  An IPR designation means the release is ready for production workloads and fully supported by Nimble Support, it has been through our extensive QA and certification testing, however it is still relatively early in the adoption cycle for customers.  Once a release gets a prescribed amount of field deployment time and stability then we promote IPR code to Generally Available (GA) and this is the release designation we recommend for customer Mission-Critical Systems.

Note: by running Software Update on the your controllers, you will only ever see General Available code, unless your array(s) have been specifically white-listed for the IPR code.

We will update this page once Nimble OS receives it's GA (Generally Available) status.

The release notes for NimbleOS 4, NCM/NWT/NLT 4 as well as associated VMware SRM, Openstack and Docker plugins can be found on Infosight, and are also linked back here: NimbleOS 4 Release Notes.

Below is an overview of some of the major new features in NimbleOS 4.  Please click on the links to get a more detailed overview of each feature and please feel free to add comments and questions below or to each post.

Post #	Title	Author	Link
1	Next Generation HTML 5 GUI	Craig Sullivan	Next Generation HTML 5 GUI
2	Quality of Service (QoS-Limits)	Rich Fenton	Quality of Service (QoS-Limits)
3	Oracle Integrated Management of Snapshots and Clones Walkthru	Jan Maue	Oracle Integrated Management of Snapshots and Clones Walk-thru
4	Hyper-V VSS Snapshot Requestor Support	Jason Monger	Hyper-V VSS Snapshot Requestor Support
5	Host Aware Windows Powershell cmdlets	Anagha Barve	The "Power" of PowerShell cmdlets in Nimble Windows Toolkit 4.0
6	Enhanced REST API	Julian Cates	Enhanced REST API in Nimble OS 4
7	NimbleOS 4 Use Case: Rapid Deployment of SQL Developer Containers with Nimble Storage	Dianne Gonzalez	NOS4 Use Case: Rapid Deployment of SQL Developer Containers with Nimble Storage
8	NimbleOS 4 Use Case: Leveraging NWT4 cmdlets for SQL Server Reporting or Dev/Test Workflows	Dianne Gonzalez	NOS4 Use Case: Leveraging NWT4 cmdlets for SQL Server Reporting or Dev/Test Workflows
9	NimbleOS 4 Use Case: Setting QOS on a Volume using the Nimble API	Rich Fenton	NimbleOS 4 Use Case: Setting QOS on a Volume using the Nimble API
10	NimbleOS 4 Use Case: Accelerate Exchange Mailbox Recovery with Nimble Clones	Dianne Gonzalez

[jwagner137]

Still nothing on the integration of 3rd party monitoring like Solarwinds or others?

I'm talking about the SMI-S integration.

There is actually a request for this,  see AS-52079..  

[Jacob_Wilde]

Any updates on when any 4.x version will actually go GA? There's a lot of new cool features in NOS4 and probably a handful more that should be added to the list above now that 4.4 is the current GA candidate such as new Secondary Flash Array (SFA), Nimble Cloud Volumes (NCV)... I can only hope maybe before the end of the year I'll get a chance to start rolling it out to my production arrays.

[rfenton4]

Transition to GA is always a variable based on multiple criteria.  Remember the whole purpose of this is to promote to GA status when we recommend it for mission-critical use.  Fingers crossed it won't be too long before we see 4.x go finally meet that GA criteria.

[Jacob_Wilde]

I  realize that you want to ensure a stable platform for customers to deploy for their mission-critical workloads and I was happy to see that there are a large number of issues fixed in 4.4 in addition to adding replication to NCV support. It's frustrating from a customer standpoint when there are features that were in 4.0 or 4.1 release that we're still waiting to take advantage of and it appears that adding new features is just as much of a priority as getting those already "released" in non-GA version available to customers in a GA release.