A few days ago Nutanix released a fantastic new LTS release of AOS, alongside the previous 6.5.6.6 LTS (which goes EoS in January 2025), so I decided to upgrade a lab environment based on a Nutanix NX G5 cluster.
I already knew that the G5 models were no longer in the compatibility matrix for the new AOS releases, but I wanted to try forcing the issue, given that the environment is, after all, a lab.
If you try the upgrade procedure from Prism Element, you’ll obviously get an incompatibility error, because hardware compatibility is validated before the upgrade starts; and the G5s are not in the matrix.
So I approached the problem by trying to bypass the checks Nutanix runs before starting the upgrade, and ended up with this procedure:
- download the installation package of the new AOS release from the Nutanix portal, which in my case is
nutanix_installer_package-release-fraser-6.10-stable-45706f65299ffde905da43b6e7d98478d071b7b9-x86_64.tar.gz - also download the metadata file for the release you downloaded; in my case the file is called
generated-nutanix_installer_package-release-fraser-6.10-stable-45706f65299ffde905da43b6e7d98478d071b7b9-x86_64-metadata.json
- upload the AOS package via WinSCP to a CVM, in the
/home/nutanix/location - upload the metadata file of the AOS release, which in my case I renamed to
fraser-6.10-metadata.json, again to the/home/nutanix/location - extract the package contents with the command
tar -zxvf nutanix_installer_package-release-fraser-6.10-stable-45706f65299ffde905da43b6e7d98478d071b7b9-x86_64.tar.gz
- run the command
/home/nutanix/install/bin/cluster -i /home/nutanix/install -v /home/nutanix/fraser-6.10-metadata.json -p upgrade
This way, I forced the AOS installation, bypassing the preliminary checks.
The installation obviously takes quite a while, but you can still follow the tasks being run from Prism. After the upgrade, the AOS environment is on release 6.10. In my case I came from AOS 6.5.6.6, which came bundled with AHV 20220304.511, so once the AOS upgrade was done I was also able to upgrade AHV to release 20230302.102001, directly through LCM. No pre-upgrade check is run for AHV, so it can be started from LCM.
Obviously none of this is supported by Nutanix, and it’s absolutely not advisable to do it in production environments!!