Today we've released Version 9.0.0c of NMIS 9. This is a late beta release: it works pretty well, but isn't quite entirely production ready yet.
It's possible to run NMIS 8 and 9 in parallel on a single system, so experimenting  with the next generation of NMIS is quite easy.

The  NMIS 9 Release Notes page outlines what is new and different in NMIS 9.