Nutanix AOS 6.10 End of Life Is October 31, 2026 — the Last LTS Exits, and Its Maintenance Already Ended in January

Published: August 11, 2026  ·  EOL Watch — deadline coverage  ·  Dates verified against our tracked lifecycle data (verification pass 2026-08-11). Nutanix's own EOL portal page sits behind a support login and does not render for us, so lifecycle definitions here follow the Nutanix support model as documented by endoflife.date, which sources Nutanix's published support policies — methodology

In 81 days, on October 31, 2026, Nutanix AOS 6.10 reaches End of Support Life. If your calendar has that as the date to plan around, it is missing the more important one: AOS 6.10's End of Maintenance was January 31, 2026. The release has not received regular bug-fix maintenance for over six months. What it has had since January is Nutanix's tail phase — troubleshooting support with security fixes only — and October 31 is the day that ends too. After it, a cluster on 6.10 runs an operating system that will never change again: no security fixes, no bug fixes, no one to call.

That two-date structure is not a Nutanix quirk — it is fast becoming the standard shape of enterprise lifecycles, and it is the shape most planning spreadsheets get wrong. We documented the same pattern on FortiOS 7.2 (critical-fixes-only for sixteen months before its September 30 End of Support) and OpenShift 4.18 (maintenance ends August 25, with continued patches gated behind an EUS entitlement). The single "EOL date" a dashboard shows is usually the second cliff. By the time it arrives, the first one — the end of routine patching — is long past.

The two-clock reality: 6.10's patch flow already narrowed in January

Per the support model our data tracks, each AOS release is actively maintained with bug and security fixes for roughly 15 months, followed by roughly 9 more months of troubleshooting support carrying security fixes only. Those are the two clocks: End of Maintenance stops the routine patch flow; End of Support Life stops everything. (Nutanix publishes the authoritative per-version table on its support portal's EOL page, which requires a customer login — our tracked AOS lifecycle data mirrors those dates in the open.)

AOS 6.10 has tracked the model exactly: released October 7, 2024, End of Maintenance January 31, 2026, End of Support Life October 31, 2026. The tail phase has been real but thin — our data shows the last 6.10 build to date, 6.10.1.14, shipped February 11, 2026, just after the maintenance cutoff, consistent with security-only updates continuing into the troubleshooting window. So the question "is 6.10 still supported?" has had a narrower answer than most inventories show since January: it is supported for security fixes and troubleshooting, not maintained. In 81 days it will be neither.

Why the distinction carries more weight here than on most products: AOS is not one application in a stack — it is the layer the whole stack stands on. A Nutanix node runs storage, compute and virtualization management as one converged platform; the distributed storage fabric that every VM's disk lives on is AOS. When the patch flow to that layer stops, there is no compensating control sitting underneath it, and "we'll isolate the unpatched box" is not available advice when the box is the infrastructure. For completeness: there is no Nutanix entry in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog as of August 11, 2026 — we checked the live catalog before publishing. The stakes here are structural, not an active fire.

6.10 is the last LTS — the 7.x train is a different lifestyle

In our tracked data, AOS 6.10 carries the LTS flag — and it is the last release that does. Nutanix historically ran a two-track model: long-lived LTS releases (5.5, 5.10, 5.15, 5.20, 6.5, 6.10 in our dataset) for teams that wanted to park, and short-term releases in between for teams that wanted features. Per the release-model note documented alongside our upstream data, that split ended with AOS 7.0: Nutanix moved from the LTS/STS designations to a unified release model in which every release gets the same window — the roughly 15 + 9 months described above — and major or minor releases arrive every 6 to 9 months.

The honest way to read the data is that the LTS tier was already winding down before it ended. AOS 6.5, the previous LTS, lived roughly 35 months from release to End of Support Life (July 2022 to June 2025). AOS 6.10 gets roughly 25 (October 2024 to October 2026) — barely more than the unified-model releases that replaced the tier. But the planning consequence of the new model is real and worth stating plainly: on the 7.x train there is no release you can park on. The longest runway any AOS release now gets is about two years from its own GA, and staying inside the maintained window — the phase with bug fixes, not just security fixes — means upgrading roughly once a year. Teams that chose 6.10 precisely because it was the LTS should treat this migration as a cadence change, not just a version change.

Where to land: 7.0 and 7.3 are short piers, 7.5 and 7.6 are targets

Four 7.x releases have published dates, and two of them are effectively ruled out by their own clocks:

AOS 7.0 — ruled out. Its maintenance ended March 31, 2026, and its End of Support Life is December 31, 2026 — two months after 6.10's. Migrating to it would be a move from one expiring release to another.

AOS 7.3 — technically alive, practically short. Its End of Support Life is June 30, 2027, but its maintenance ends September 30, 2026 — seven weeks from this article's publication, and a month before 6.10 is even end of life. A migration landing on 7.3 arrives in the troubleshooting phase almost immediately.

AOS 7.5 — the conservative target. Released December 8, 2025, in the field for eight months with current patch builds (latest tracked: 7.5.1.10, July 28, 2026). Maintained to March 31, 2027, End of Support Life December 31, 2027. Choosing it buys a proven release at the cost of facing the next upgrade decision within about a year.

AOS 7.6 — the longest runway. Released July 27, 2026 — two weeks ago. Maintained to October 31, 2027, End of Support Life July 31, 2028, the furthest date currently published for any AOS release. The trade is the usual one for a fresh release: maximum runway, minimum field history. For a migration completing in September or October, validating 7.6 in a non-production cluster first — with 7.5 as the fallback landing — is the path the dates themselves suggest.

Whichever target you pick, plan the hop before the deadline compresses it: AOS upgrades are sequential through supported paths, and the last weeks before an End of Support Life date are the worst time to discover your hardware generation or hypervisor pairing needs an intermediate step. Nutanix's upgrade planning tooling on the support portal maps valid paths per cluster; the point of this article is the calendar, and the calendar says start now.

The post-Broadcom wrinkle: the refuge has a lifecycle too

A meaningful share of the clusters affected by this date exist because of a different vendor's licensing decisions. Since Broadcom's acquisition of VMware ended perpetual licensing and repackaged vSphere into subscription bundles, Nutanix has been the destination most often named for full-scale enterprise exits — the complete HCI-plus-hypervisor alternative, with AHV removing the ESXi dependency entirely. We track the lanes those migrations leave from: every ESXi and vSphere support date in the Broadcom era, the Horizon lifecycle under Omnissa, and — for the open-source exit lane — Proxmox VE 8's August 31 end of life, its first deadline most VMware refugees have ever faced.

AOS 6.10 is the Nutanix edition of the same lesson. An organization that left VMware in 2024 or 2025 and standardized on the then-current LTS — 6.10 — now faces its first Nutanix lifecycle event, on a cadence rhythm entirely unlike the one it left. vSphere majors historically lived the better part of a decade; an AOS release now lives about two years, with the maintained phase closer to fifteen months. Neither model is wrong, but they demand different operating muscles: the VMware muscle was the big once-a-cycle migration project; the Nutanix muscle is a standing annual upgrade practice. Teams that ported the old muscle to the new platform are exactly the ones for whom October 31 will arrive as a surprise — and lifecycle attention in this lane is scarce enough that many will first hear the date from their support renewal, not their monitoring.

Every Nutanix AOS version's dates

All dates from our tracked Nutanix AOS lifecycle data, current as of the verification pass on August 11, 2026. "End of Maintenance" ends active maintenance with bug and security fixes; "End of Support Life" ends the subsequent troubleshooting-and-security-fixes phase — and everything else. Each version links to its lifecycle page with live status and risk score.

Dates from our tracked dataset (verification pass 2026-08-11), which follows Nutanix's published per-version lifecycle. Nutanix's authoritative EOL table lives on its support portal behind a customer login, so we could not fetch it directly for this article; the support-model description (15 months of maintenance, then 9 months of troubleshooting with security fixes only) follows the documentation maintained at endoflife.date/nutanix-aos, which cites Nutanix's support policies. LTS labels are as flagged in that dataset. If your portal shows different dates for your entitlement, the portal wins — tell us and we will chase the discrepancy.

We track Nutanix AOS alongside Nutanix Files, Nutanix Prism and 480+ other products against vendor-verified dates — check any version in seconds, or see what else hits end of life this quarter.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related

• All Nutanix AOS versions with live status · AOS 6.10 — dates and risk score
• VMware ESXi & vSphere End of Life in the Broadcom Era — the lifecycle most Nutanix migrations left behind
• Proxmox VE 8 End of Life Is August 31, 2026 — the open-source lane of the same post-VMware story
• VMware / Omnissa Horizon End of Life — every Horizon 8 version's three-year clock
• The H2 2026 EOL Pileup — everything else with a fourth-quarter date