The September VUG meeting was on "What's New in Guardium V12", presented by Nagendra Pattavardhanam and Usman Minhas, IBM Security Product Managers for Guardium Data Protection and Vulnerability Assessment, respectively.
Discussion Summary
Guardium V12 has several new capabilities and enhancements in the broad areas of: real-time insights, streamlined compliance, simplified Guardium infrastructure and support for hybrid cloud environments. The meeting slide deck covers what's New in Guardium V12 - it is in the Security Community library, here.
You can also read more in the Guardium V12 documentation: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/guardium/12.0?topic=overview-whats-new-in-this-release
Another important topic mentioned in the Support Update is about upgrading GIM clients with SHA256 certificates, please read:
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/7013031
Q & A
Q: Can you explain when to use 9997 vs 9998?
A: Use 9997 for patch upgrades within the same major version, like if you're on v11.4 and before installing a patch. But if you're going from v11.5 to 12, before you have to install 9998. Note we have p9997 and p9998 for all versions (10,11,12). The major version where the patch is installed is a prefix to the patch number e.g. 10.0p9998 (upgrade hc to v11), 11.0p9998 (upgrade hc to v12), 12.0p9997.
Q: Can you only upgrade to v12 from v11.5?
A: Yes.
Q: I am currently at 525, does it make any sense to go to 530 or go directly to v12?
A: You can go directly to V12 from either 525 or 530. Take into account that going to V12 from either is a bigger task, that requires planning, takes longer.
Q: Do we have an ETA for v12 Bundle?
A: End of November
Q: Is V12 supported for Guardium hardware appliance M5?
A: Testing is in progress; the documentation will be updated when complete.
Q: Is GDP v12 Is also available on clouds?
A: Yes, V12 images to cloud platforms will be available by the end of October.
Q: Any plans to upgrade Java 8 to Java 11?
A: (Updated): The java 11.x and 17.x are Semeru versions which are releases of OpenJDK that Guardium GDP does not use. There won't be any update to have new Java version at this time. Just incremental updates to Java 8.0.8.x.
Q: For threat analytics, is there any plan to use an API instead of current way using audit process for export data from Guardium appliances.
A: This is part of a phased roadmap.
Q: Regarding the cluster support, which clusters does it support?
A: This is being followed up on.
Q: We noticed with p530 that we needed to reinstall the custom Oracle driver. We were also advised customers would need to install DB2 z/OS license JAR file.
A: The release notes for v12 include information about this. The fix will be included in upcoming November v12.0 bundle.
A customer mentioned he was really excited about the v12 improvements to VA speed.
Your feedback
As part of our planning, we'd like to know if customers use CAS (Configuration Auditing System in Guardium). During this meeting we asked "Do you use CAS?" 11 customers responded; all said no.
If you do use CAS, please let me know.
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Mark your calendars: Next VUG meeting on Oct 31!