Bringing you the radiance of our signature virtualization product with exciting features and fixes added in the all new season of 2019. We proudly announce the grand GA of PowerVC 1.4.3.0.
Here are the highlights of some of the exciting new functions included in the new release:
- OpenStack release
PowerVC version 1.4.3.0 is built on OpenStack Stein release.
- PowerVC supports all Dell EMC PowerMax storage
If you are using "Dell EMC PowerMax" (formerly VMAX) with PowerVC, you must use REST based storage provider. PowerVC also provides tools that help you to migrate from the earlier SMI-S based Cinder driver to the new REST based driver.
- Hitachi Global-active device (GAD) technical preview
This technical preview enables PowerVC users to register their Hitachi Global-Active Device (GAD) in PowerVC. If your environment has the Hitachi storage, you can configure the Hitachi GAD to create and maintain synchronous, remote copies of data volumes.
- Increased reliability of long running migration
Migrating a machine with large memory could fail in PowerVC due to insufficient timeout. PowerVC has an adaptive timeout logic to prevent such failures. Timeout value is incremented by 45 min per TB of RAM. If the timeout value is insufficient for your workloads, and you still see errors while migrating virtual machines with large memory, you can increase the timeout value. For details on setting timeout value, see Moving a host to maintenance mode.
- Support for hosts using active memory sharing
You can manage an HMC host that has a shared memory pool. However, PowerVC does not support deploying or importing a virtual machine that uses shared memory.
- Support for hosts using Power Enterprise Pool 2.0
You can manage a host that is part of Power Enterprise Pool 2.0. PowerVC does not support deploying, migrating, resizing, or remote restart operations for virtual machines with dedicated processors on these hosts. However, you can perform rest of the virtual machine life-cycle operations. Later when you manage the host through a different HMC, the host continues to have the Power Enterprise Pool 2.0 property enabled.
- Support for additional metrics for a virtual machine
You can now capture storage and network related metrics for a virtual machine. You can enable these settings via powervc-config CLI for PowerVC to collect the metrics.
- Redundant mover server partition support for live partition migration
For multiple VIOS environments, you can list MSP IP's of all VIOSes and two will randomly be chosen for redundant MSP during the live partition migration operation.
- Add a new I/O group to the storage template for Storwize®
You can add new I/O groups to the existing storage templates for Storwize. The new I/O groups are used only for newly created volumes. However, you cannot remove I/O groups that are already assigned to the template.
- Storwize data reduction pool support
You can add data reduction pool for thin-provisioned and compressed volumes while using the Storwize Cinder driver.
- Cross HMC remote restart
PowerVC now supports remote restart of virtual machines on the hosts that are managed by different HMCs.
- Storage specific zoning
For "initiator" and "intitiator-vfc" modes of zoning, the targets across multiple storage were combined in a single entity. Now, the powervc-config option zone_by_stg_provider creates separate zones when volumes from multiple storage providers are mapped to a virtual machine.
- Handle rename of SVC volume on the backend
Earlier, when a Storwize volume was renamed outside of PowerVC in the backend, PowerVC marked the volume as deleted. Now, PowerVC handles the rename and shows appropriate messages.
- Edit Storage connectivity group of a virtual machine
When you manage or deploy a virtual machine using PowerVC, you can edit the Storage connectivity group (SCG) associated with a virtual machine using the powervc-edit-scg command.
- VMAX2 storage providers are no longer supported
Only REST-based storage providers are supported. The VMAX2 driver is SMI-S based and is therefore no longer supported.
And where would a new version of PowerVC be without a new version of the Knowledge Center? You can learn about all the above functions and more here:
Although a little less exciting than new support, there are a couple of fixes too. These are the APAR fixes included with this release:
.
.