Optimized availability and performance for mission-critical hybrid-cloud applications.

Feature Category

Feature

Details

Kubernetes Support

Persistent Volumes

InfoScale provides three classes of persistent storage (performance, resilient and secure with encryption) for stateful container applications. The creation of persistent volumes ensures that there is no loss of data when containers fail. Consequentially data is always available no matter where the containers are scheduled in the container ecosystem.

Kubernetes Support

Application availability

InfoScale manages HA and recovery automation for applications running in containers by monitoring critical application processes and resources. InfoScale also provides fencing and arbitration to prevent application data corruption and speed up recovery.

Kubernetes Support

Advanced storage management

InfoScale supports Kubernetes Container Storage Interface (CSI) plugin to provide high-performance shared storage for the Kubernetes clusters using the fast storage that is directly attached to the Kubernetes cluster nodes. InfoScale Storage provides highly available, persistent storage that conforms to CSI specifications for enterprise applications. It does so by using high-performance parallel storage access on shared storage (SAN) or in Flexible Storage Sharing (FSS) environments. InfoScale also supports Velero, which is a third-party application, to provide snapshot lifecycle management.

Kubernetes Support

Application migration

InfoScale supports moving non-containerized applications into a container environment by copying the application data storage volumes onto the Kubernetes cluster nodes. The InfoScale CSI plugin then presents the same data to the applications that are running in the container.

Security and Governance

Support for protection against ransomware

To ensure compliance with the security and governance requirements of critical data, support for the following features is added to the Veritas File System (VxFS) module:

• Write Once Read Many (WORM) storage system.
• Secure clock.
• Audit logging.

Compliance

Volume encryption keys for compliance

For the encrypted volumes that are created with disk group version 300 or later, InfoScale uses the FIPS 140-2 standards to validate the wrapping key (KEK) that secures volume encryption. For the encrypted volumes that are created with disk group version 290 or earlier, you must first upgrade to disk group version 300 or later. Thereafter, you can use the re-key operation to ensure that InfoScale uses the FIPS standards to validate the KEK.

Communication

Support for configuring LLT over UDP multiport

LLT uses UDP sockets for communication among the cluster nodes and creates one UDP socket for each LLT link. In Flexible Storage Sharing (FSS) environments, read-write operations may be performed on remote disks, and one socket per LLT link may not be enough for large data volumes. More sockets are needed to achieve the parallelism and the throughput that is required to meet the needs of applications that generate large volumes of data.

Cluster Node Upgrades

Rolling upgrade of cluster nodes with different versions of VCS engine

The rolling upgrade process minimizes the downtime of a cluster during an upgrade to the amount of time that it takes to fail over a service group. InfoScale 7.4.2 and later versions let you configure clusters with nodes that run different versions of the VCS engine. To support such configurations, the installer provides a rolling upgrade option for InfoScale components that upgrades the kernel RPMs and the VCS agent-related RPMs in the same process. The rolling upgrade may involve some application downtime while a node is upgraded, but there is zero cluster downtime.

Feature Category

Feature

Details

Replication

DCM logging in DCO

In InfoScale 7.4.1 and prior releases, when replication is configured, a Data Change Map (DCM) log is associated as separate log plex to each data volume in the RVG. Starting with version 7.4.2, InfoScale allows you to maintain DCM logs as per-volume Fast Mirror Resync (FMR) maps inside the Data Change Object (DCO) that is associated with the corresponding data volumes.

Replication

Adaptive synchronous mode in VVR

The adaptive synchronous mode in VVR is an enhancement to the existing synchronous override mode. In the adaptive synchronous mode, replication switches from synchronous to asynchronous based on cross-site network latency. This allows replication to take place in synchronous mode when network conditions are good, and automatically switch to asynchronous mode when there is an increase in cross-site network latency.

Veritas File System

Changes in VxFS Disk Layout Versions (DLV)

The following DLV changes are now applicable:

• Added support for DLV 16.
• Default DLV is DLV 16.
• Support deprecated for DLV 11.

Veritas Volume Manager

Support for disk group level encryption key management and the re-key operation

InfoScale supports the use of a single KMS key for all the volumes in a disk group. Consequently, you can maintain a common KMS key at the disk group level instead of maintaining an individual KMS key for each volume. When you start an encrypted volume that has a common KMS key with the disk group, VxVM needs to fetch only one key to enable access to the volume. Thus, a common KMS key reduces the network load that is sent to the KMS in the form of multiple requests based on the number of volumes. A single request to KMS lets you to start all the volumes in a single operation.

Cluster Server Agents

IMF-aware Mount agent

IMF for mounts is now supported for VxFS, ext4, XFS and NFS file system types.

Cluster Server Agents

SystemD support for Sybase and SybaseBk agents

The VCS agents for Sybase and SybaseBk are now supported in SystemD environments, and VCS unit service files are available for the corresponding application services.

Cluster Server

Support for configuring LLT over UDP multiport

LLT uses UDP sockets for communication among the cluster nodes and creates one UDP socket per LLT link. In a Flexible Storage Sharing (FSS) environment, data can be read from and written to remote disks. In such a case, one socket per LLT link may not be enough for large read-write operations. More sockets are needed to achieve parallelism and throughput to meet the needs of the high data-generating applications. Configuring LLT over UDP multiport enables you to create additional sockets per link. These sockets are reserved only for I/O shipping.

Cluster Server

Ability to disable CmdServer

By default, the CmdServer process runs as a daemon. It starts as soon as VCS starts and you cannot disable the daemon. InfoScale now lets you disable the CmdServer daemon.

Cluster Server

Ability to stop VCS without evacuating service groups

By default, when VCS is stopped as part of a system restart operation, the active service groups on the node are migrated to another cluster node. In some cases, you may not want to evacuate the service groups during a system restart. For example, you may want to avoid administrative intervention during a manual shutdown. InfoScale now lets you choose whether or not to evacuate service groups when VCS is stopped.

Cluster Server

Support for starting VCS in a customised environment

InfoScale provides the following files that let you customise your VCS startup environment and how the VCS engine is started:

• pre_hastart to perform custom tasks before hastart.
• custom_vcsenv to set up a custom environment.
• custom_had_start to customise HAD startup.

Cluster Server

Ability to form a cluster with different versions of the VCS engine

Starting with version 7.4.2, InfoScale allows for the formation of clusters with nodes that run different versions of the VCS engine. It does so by providing a framework that lets you:

• Add nodes with newer versions of the VCS engine to an existing cluster.
• Upgrade InfoScale on one node at a time without the need for a cluster-wide HA downtime.
• Manage the simultaneous usage of multiple VCS engine versions by using the cluster protocol number.

Supported Configurations

Deprecated support for Oracle 11g R2

InfoScale no longer supports any configurations with Oracle 11g R2 or earlier.

Supported Configurations

Support for Oracle 19c

InfoScale now supports single-instance configurations with Oracle 19c.

Security

Improved password encryption for VCS users and agents

The VCS component now uses the AES-256 algorithm to encrypt the VCS user and the VCS agent passwords by default, for enhanced security. The vcsencrypt utility and the hauser command generate passwords that are encrypted by using the standard AES-256 algorithm.

Installation and Upgrades

Enhanced support for Ansible

In this release, additional capabilities have been added to the Ansible module provided by Veritas. You can now use Ansible to perform the following operations in an InfoScale environment n Linux:

• Add and delete nodes in a cluster.
• Configure a cluster with LLT over UDP.
• Create volumes based on disk tags.
• Configure and create resources for Veritas Volume Replicator (VVR) and Cluster.
• Volume Replication (CVR).
• Create a single-node cluster.

Installation and Upgrades

Changes in the VRTSperl package

The VRTSperl 5.30 package is built using the Perl 5.30 source code. Therefore, all the features and fixes of the core Perl 5.30 are available in VRTSperl 5.30. Additionally, the fix for the following issue is now included in VRTSperl 5.30:

Unable to set supplementary group IDs #17031: https://github.com/perl/perl5/issues/17031

Installation and Upgrades

Change in upgrade path

You can upgrade to Veritas InfoScale 7.4.2 only if your currently installed product has one of the following base versions.

• 6.2.1
• 7.2
• 7.3.1
• 7.4.1

Feature Category

Feature

Details

Supported Configurations

Support for CIFS configurations on SUSE 15

You may configure CIFS in the user mode, the domain mode or the ads mode.

Supported Configurations

Support for SUSE 15

Feature Category

Feature

Details

Cluster Server Agents

Using SystemD attributes for Sybase and SybaseBk

SystemD attributes are only applicable on SLES 12, RHEL 7 and supported RHEL-compatible distributions. InfoScale provides the following optional attributes to the Sybase and the SybaseBk agents in SystemD environments.

Cluster Server Agents

SystemD support for Sybase and SybaseBk agents

The VCS agents for Sybase and SybaseBk are now supported in SystemD environments, and VCS unit service files are available for the corresponding application services.

Cluster Server

Disabling CmdServer

By default, the CmdServer process runs as a daemon. It starts as soon as VCS starts and you cannot disable the daemon. InfoScale now lets you disable the CmdServer daemon.

Cluster Server

Stopping VCS without evacuating service groups

By default, when VCS is stopped as part of a system restart operation, the active service groups on the node are migrated to another cluster node. In some cases, you may not want to evacuate the service groups during a system restart. For example, you may want to avoid administrative intervention during a manual shutdown. InfoScale now lets you choose whether or not to evacuate service groups when VCS is stopped. A new environment variable, NOEVACUATE, is introduced to specify whether or not to evacuate service groups when a node is shut down or restarted.

Supported Configurations

InfoScale support in Nutanix HCI environments

InfoScale supports Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) architecture. The Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) can co-exist with the existing storage infrastructure and offload workloads from existing storage platforms to improve the performance, capability and linear scalability for InfoScale. This capability delivers a unified, scale-out, shared-nothing architecture with no single point of failure (SPOF). You can set up InfoScale clusters on virtual machines (VMs) that are hosted on Nutanix AHV. You can create the following high availability (HA) configurations for applications by using InfoScale components on Nutanix VMs:

• Active/active configuration where application data resides on Veritas Cluster File System (CFS)
• Active/passive configuration where application data resides on Veritas File System (VxFS)

You can configure applications for disaster recovery (DR) by using the Volume Replicator (VVR) component and the Global Cluster Option (GCO) feature of InfoScale.

InfoScale configurations are supported only with Nutanix AOS 5.10.5 and later.

Feature Category

Feature

Details

Installation and Upgrades

Ansible Support

Ansible is a popular configuration management tool that automates various configuration and deployment operations in your environment. Ansible playbooks are files written in YAML format that contain human-readable code that can define the operations performed in your environment.

Veritas now provides Ansible modules that can be used in playbooks to install or upgrade Veritas InfoScale, deploy clusters or configure features such as Flexible Storage Sharing (FSS), Cluster File System (CFS) and Disk Group Volume.

For the Ansible modules, playbook templates and user's guide for using Ansible in an InfoScale environment visit:

https://sort.veritas.com/utility/ansible

Installation and Upgrades

Upgrade Path

You can upgrade to Veritas InfoScale 7.4.1 only if the base version of your currently installed product is 6.2.1 or later.

Installation and Upgrades

Deprecated support for co-existence of Veritas InfoScale products

Support for co-existence of the following Veritas InfoScale products has been deprecated in 7.4.1:

• InfoScale Availability and InfoScale Storage
• InfoScale Availability and InfoScale Foundation

Veritas no longer supports co-existence of more than one InfoScale product on a system.

Licensing

Misc

Veritas collects licensing and platform related information from InfoScale products as part of the Veritas Product Improvement Program. The information collected helps identify how customers deploy and use the product, and enables Veritas to manage customer licences more efficiently.

The Veritas Telemetry Collector is used to collect licensing and platform related information from InfoScale products as part of the Veritas Product Improvement Program. The Veritas Telemetry Collector sends this information to an edge server.

The Veritas Cloud Receiver (VCR) is a pre-configured, cloud-based edge server deployed by Veritas. While installing or upgrading InfoScale, ensure that you configure the Veritas Cloud Receiver (VCR) as your edge server.

For more information about setting up and configuring telemetry data collection, see the Veritas InfoScale Installation or the Veritas InfoScale Configuration and Upgrade guides.

Security

Support for third-party certificate for entity validation in SSL/TLS Server

InfoScale supports using a third-party certificate for entity validation in SSL/TLS Server in VxAT on a Linux host.

Note: Third-party certificate is not supported for Windows host.

In the prior InfoScale releases, the SSL/TLS Server uses a self-signed certificate. This self-signed certificate is not verified by a trusted CertificateAuthority, and hence poses a security threat.

With the support for third-party trusted certificates, you can now generate a certificate for the SSL/TLS Server by providing the encrypted passphrase to InfoScale. InfoScale then issues a certificate signing request, which is used to generate a certificate for the SSL/TLS Server.

For more information, see the Veritas InfoScale Installation Guide - Linux.

Security

Discontinuation of SSL/TLS Server support for TLSv1.0 and TLSv1.1

To reduce security vulnerabilities, the TLSv1.0 and TLSv1.1 protocols are not supported by default. However, you can enable these protocols by setting the value of the AT_CLIENT_ALLOW_TLSV1 attribute to 1.

Security

Discontinued support

The following features are no longer supported in this release:

• The AllowV2 attribute to enable or disable SSLv2 protocol.
• The medium strength ciphers for SSL communication.

Security

openssl 1.0.2o for enhanced security

The VxAT server now uses openssl 1.0.2o for SSL communication.

Supported Configurations

Support for Oracle 18c

InfoScale now supports single-instance configurations with Oracle 18c.

Supported Configurations

Support for Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c

InfoScale now provides an OEM plugin for Oracle 13c.

Cloud Environments

New high availability agents for Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

InfoScale has introduced the GoogleIP and the GoogleDisk agents for GCP environments.

These agents are bundled with the product.

GoogleIP agent
The GoogleIP agent manages the networking resources in the Google Cloud.

The agent performs the following tasks:

• Gets the NIC details, creates the configuration and associates or disassociates private IP address with VM instances
• Manages the routing of overlay IPs for failing over across subnets

The GoogleIP resource depends on the IP resource.

GoogleDisk agent
The GoogleDisk agent works with zonal persistent disks in the Google Cloud. The agent brings the disks online, monitors their states and takes them offline. It attaches the disks to a VM instance of the same resource group or a different one. The agent uses GCP Python SDK to determine whether the disks are attached to the VM instances or not.

The GoogleDisk resource does not depend on any other resources.

For more information, see Cluster Server Bundled Agents Reference Guide - Linux.

Cloud Environments

Support for file-level tiering to migrate data using cloud connectors

InfoScale supports file-level tiering to migrate data using cloud connectors.

In file-level tiering, a single file is broken into chunks of definite size and each chunk is stored as a single object. A single file can thus have multiple objects. A relevant metadata is associated with each object, which makes it easy to access the file directly from the cloud.

Since a file is broken into individual objects, the read-write performance is improved. Also, the large object size facilitates migration of large files with minimal chunking.

For details about migrating data using cloud connectors, refer to the InfoScale Solutions in Cloud Environments document.

Cloud Environments

Support for InfoScale configurations in Google Cloud

InfoScale lets you configure applications for HA and DR in Google Cloud environments. The GoogleIP and GoogleDisk agents are provided to support IP and disk resources in GCP.

The following replication configurations are supported:

• Replication across GCP regions
• Replication across multiple GCP zones and regions (campus cluster)

The following HA and DR configurations are supported:

• Failover within a subnet of a GCP zone using virtual private IP
• Failover across GCP subnets using overlay IP
• DR across GCP regions or VPC networks
• Shared storage within a GCP zone or across GCP zones

For details, refer to the InfoScale Solutions in Cloud Environments document.

Cluster Server Agents

Support for cloned Application Agent

The Application agent is used to make applications highly available when an appropriate ISV agent is not available. To make multiple different applications highly available using a cluster, you must create a service group for each application. InfoScale lets you clone the Application agent so that you can configure a different service group for each application. You must then assign the appropriate operator permissions for each service group for it to function as expected.

Note: A cloned Application agent is also IMF-aware.

For details, see the Cluster Server Bundled Agents Reference Guide for your platform.

Cluster Server Agents

IMF-aware SambaShare agent

The SambaShare agent is now IMF-aware.

Cluster Server Agents

New optional attributes in the SambaServer Agent

The Samba Server Agent now supports the Interfaces and the BindInterfaceOnly attributes. These attributes enable the agent to listen on all the interfaces strings that are supported by the Samba Server.

Veritas Volume Manager

Enhanced performance of the vradmind daemon for collecting consolidated statistics

You can configure VVR to collect statistics of the VVR components. The collected statistics can be used to monitor the system and diagnose problems with the VVR setup. By default, VVR collects the statistics automatically when the vradmind daemon starts.

The vradmind daemon is enhanced by making it a multi-threaded process where one thread is reserved specifically for collecting periodic statistics.

Note: If the vradmind daemon is not running, VVR stops collecting the statistics.

For details, see Veritas InfoScale Replication Administrator's Guide.

Veritas Volume Manager

Changes in hot-relocation in FSS environment

In FSS environments, hot-relocation employs a policy-based mechanism for healing storage failures. Storage failures may include disk media failure or node failures that render storage inaccessible. However, VxVM could not differentiate between disk media and node failures. As a result, VxVM sets the same value for both the node_reloc_timeout and storage_reloc_timeout tunables.

The hot-relocation daemon is now enhanced to differentiate between the disk media failure or node failures. You can now set different values for the node_reloc_timeout and storage_reloc_timeout tunables for hot-relocation in FSS environments. The default values are 30 minutes for the storage_reloc_timeout tunable and 120 minutes for node_reloc_timeout tunable. You can modify the tunable values to suit your business needs.

Veritas File System

Changes in VxFS Disk Layout Versions (DLV)

The following DLV changes are now applicable:

• Added support for DLV 15
• Default DLV is DLV 15
• Support deprecated for DLV 10

With this change, you can create and mount VxFS only on DLV 11 and later. DLV 6 to 10 can be used for local mount only.

Veritas File System

Support for SELinux security extended attributes

The SELinux policy for RHEL 7.6 and later now includes support for VxFS file system as persistent storage of SELinux security extended attributes. With this support, you can now use SELinux security functionalities and features on VxFS files and directories on RHEL 7.6 and later.

Replication

Added support to assign a slave node as a logowner

In a disaster recovery environment, VVR maintains write-order fidelity for the application I/Os received. When replicating in a shared disk group environment, VVR designates one cluster node as a logowner to maintain the order of writes.

By default, VVR designates the master node as a logowner.

To optimise the master node workload, VVR now enables you to assign any cluster node (slave node) as a logowner.

Note: In the following cases, the change in logowner role is not preserved, and the master nodes take over as a logowner.

• Product upgrade
• Cluster upgrade or reboot
• Logowner Slave node failure

For more details about assigning a slave node as a logowner, refer to, Veritas InfoScale™ 7.4.1 Replication Administrator's Guide.

Replication

Technology preview: Adaptive synchronous mode in VVR

When the synchronous attribute of the RLINK in VVR is set to override, the system temporarily switches the replication mode from synchronous to asynchronous whenever RLINK is disconnected. The override option allows VVR to continue receiving writes from the application even when RLINK is disconnected. However, in case of high network latency, replication continues to run in synchronous mode with degraded application performance.

The adaptive synchronous mode in VVR is an enhancement to the existing synchronous override mode. In the adaptive synchronous mode, replication switches from synchronous to asynchronous based on cross-site network latency. This allows replication to take place in synchronous mode when network conditions are good, and automatically switch to asynchronous mode when there is an increase in cross-site network latency.

• threshold for switching to asynchronous mode (percentage of timed-out occurrences)
• time interval for which threshold is calculated
• time interval for which the system must remain in asynchronous mode before switching back to synchronous mode

You can also set alerts for when the system undergoes prolonged periods of network deterioration. For more information, see the Veritas InfoScale Replication Administrator's Guide - Linux.