PowerVC

• IBM Cloud Private integration: IBM Cloud Private is an application platform for developing and managing on-premises, containerized applications. IBM Cloud Private already supports the Power architecture. Now, Iyou can use the FlexVolume driver to specify PowerVC managed volumes for your cloud environment.


• Add or remove data and metadata disks from the IBM Spectrum Scale™ cluster: When using software-defined storage, you can add and remove data and metadata disks from the cluster.


• Quality of Service (QoS) technical preview: When working with software-defined networking, you can specify Quality of Service (QoS) rules. These rules allow you to define how fast a virtual machine can send data without any special hardware required. The ability to use QoS rules is included with every PowerVC install, but is
  a technical preview function.


• Security groups: When working with software-defined networking, you can create security groups. A security group is a group of inclusion and exclusion rules for network traffic. Security groups are associated with one or more ports and let you control which virtual machines can communicate with each other.


• SQL based authentication for service users: The SQL driver is now Keystone's default identity driver for internal service users. Switching to the SQL driver for service users means that you will no longer set passwords for service users at the operating system level. Instead, service users and passwords are created in the Keystone database using the SQL driver. These credentials will be used in the respective service configuration files as before.


• Affinity score checking: After deployment, the virtual machine is assigned an affinity score based on processor and memory resource placement within the host. If affinity score checking is on, the virtual machine can only be migrated to a host if the resulting affinity score will be at least as high as the current score. Affinity score checking can be enabled for POWER9™ hosts and is particularly useful for SAP HANA users.


• Dual-initiator target zoning: PowerVC 1.4.0 supports two community zoning modes:
  • Initiator-target zoning creates a zone with one initiator and one target.
  
  
  • Initiator zoning creates a zone with one initiator and the targets for the storage provider.
  
  
  
  

  With 1.4.1, we will be introducing initiator-vfc zoning, which will put both the active and migration initiators in a single zone, along with the targets from the storage provider.

  
  


• Automatically configure candidate port groups for EMC VMAX storage devices: For new VMAX storage registrations, the list of port groups that PowerVC is allowed to choose from is automatically configured by default, if any fabrics are registered.


• Support for asynchronous copies on IBM® System Storage® DS8000® storage devices: Asynchronous flash copies are now supported on all DS8000 hardware and firmware. This can save a lot of time when deploying virtual machines, especially if you are using spinning disks.


• Set the storage template ID for an existing volume: When existing volumes are managed, they do not have storage templates associated with them. This solves problems with any functions, such as consistency groups, that require a storage template. You can now use the powervc-config storage set-template command to set the storage template ID for a volume.


• Satisfaction survey: You might notice a new survey pop up. We will use this information to improve PowerVC and will always keep your private information secure.


• Other miscellaneous updates: Note that, maintaining our approach to support three generations of hardware, with the announcement of POWER9, we will be removing support for POWER6.

Of course there will also be other exciting tidbits - look for full details in June! Until then, keep watching our information outlets for more fun information about using PowerVC! Find us on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.