In Sept 2024 IBM GA'd a new version of IBM Copy Services Manager
Copy Services Manager 6.3.12.0 Download
IBM Copy Services Manager is a storage replication product that provides a single place to manage all the replication across your IBM storage environment. With IBM Copy Services Manager customers can simplify the management of their replication solutions while providing disaster recovery and high availability to their applications.
As always, we're very excited to provide the following key features being released in this new version. We develop Copy Services Manager in an agile development cycle and as such have included a number of customer requested features!!!
IDEA CSM-I-161 - Re-add small Global Mirror RPO graphs for DS8000
- All sessions in CSM that use DS8000 Global Mirror, will store historical RPO information for the session. This RPO data can either be exported to a CSV file, or can be view graphically within the CSM GUI itself.
- When the 6.3.10 release came out with support for DS8000 Multi-target Global Mirror - Global Mirror, the options to view the RPO data in a small 15 minute or 24 hour format, was no longer available because for sessions where there might be multiple Global Mirror role pairs active at the same time, the small graphs didn't fit.
- The historical RPO could be still see in the larger, more customizable graph format, however, customers expressed that they like the original small graph format as it allowed them to do a quick glance at the RPO without having to pull up the larger graph.
- We listened to this feedback, and in the 6.3.12 release the small RPO graphs have been reintroduced for all DS8000 sessions with Global Mirror. A new "RPO History" tab is now available which will show the small graphs for all active Global Mirror role pairs. It will also allow you to popup the larger graph (which includes LSS out of synch track history), or export the data to CSV.
Additional Operator Actions now available for server and connection management
- CSM supports defining users and groups with different roles that indicate what actions they can perform, or not perform on the server. The Administrator role however, is a role that has complete access to do all actions on the server. But in some customer environments, setting any users or groups to have this Administrator role, would violate their security requirements.
- The User Administrator role was then created to allow customers to provide a separation of duties, so that a group other than the one actually managing the replication through CSM, would have the ability to create or modify users.
- It was determined though that there were still some actions that still require and Administrator which could not be done by the User Administrator, nor an Operator. These actions were things like creating or managing hardware connections or setting up the active and standby server connections.
- So, in the 6.3.12 release, two new actions are now available, which can be applied to a user or group with the Operator Role.
- Manage Connections - This action allows the Operator to create/modify storage system connections as well as z/OS host connections
- Manage Server - This action allows the Operator to do server management actions such as setting properties on the server and setting up the active and standby server connections
IDEA CSM-I-173 - Add ability to set "From" address on email notifications
- Customers can setup both SNMP and email alerts from the CSM server. When setting up the email server which will be used to send email events, users can specify a "reply-to" value so that any email replies to a notification can be set to a given email address.
- The "from" value on the email however, defaults to a name built using the server hostname or IP so that the recipient knows which server sent the notification. We were informed however that in some customer environments, the "from" value has to be a valid email address in their system.
- In previous releases you could specify the csm.server.notification.sender.name property in Server properties which would set the "from" value to a given user.
- Starting with 6.3.12 you can now specify the following property instead, which will tell the server to set the "from" value of the email to be the same as the "reply-to" email address specified in the CSM GUI.
csm.server.use_replyto_for_sender=true
By default, automatically start Global Mirror after a HyperSwap 3 site and 4 site sessions
- Prior to this release, when z/OS HyperSwap was enabled on any 3 site or 4 site session in CSM, while in a multi-target configuration, if a planned or unplanned HyperSwap event occurred, customers would need to manually startup replication from the site that HyperSwap swapped to.
- For planned swaps, this could be easily handled in a scheduled task that coordinates the swap and the restart. But in unplanned swaps, this could mean that customers after the swap, had no disaster recovery protection until after a user manually starts the replication from the new site.
- Starting with 6.3.12, the above affected sessions will automatically attempt to start the session between the new production site and the other remote site. For example, in a MT MM-GM session running H1->H2 (HyperSwap) and H1->H3 (Global Mirror), after a swap occurs to the H2 volumes, moving all production to H2, the session will automatically start Global Mirror between H2 and H3. This ensures that even if the customer is not actively watching the session, the session will attempt to provide disaster recovery protection.
- Once the original production site is available again, a manual Start command will then be necessary to restart replication back to that site.
- NOTE: This support also includes the 3 site and 4 site MT MM-MM session types.
IDEA CSM-I-173 - Setup password policies for Basic Users
- CSM supports both LDAP and Basic Users. When using LDAP, password policies can be setup on the LDAP server, however, CSM never provided a way to provide basic user password policies previously.
- Starting with 6.3.12, an Administrator or User Administrator can now select the Password Security Requirements link under the Administration panel header in order to define the password policy for the server. The following are the options available:
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- Expiration in Days: This is the number of days until users will need to change their password. When the password expires, the next time they attempt to login they will be prompted to provide a new password. Setting this value to 0 will indicate that passwords will not expire.
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- Minimum Length: This defines the minimum number of characters necessary for all passwords.
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- Mixed Case: Check this box if you want to require that the password have both upper and lower case characters
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- Numbers: Check this box if you want to require that the password have at least one numerical character.
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- Symbols: Check this box if you want to require that the password have at least one of the supported symbols: ! @ $ % ^ & ( ) _
Automatically put Active server into an inactive mode after a Standby takeover
- This new features adds onto the change made in CSM 6.3.11, where the active server will now automatically attempt to resync to the standby once both servers are back up after a disconnect. The auto reconnect feature in CSM 6.3.11 can save customers valuable time and helps to ensure all updates are consistently being sent to the standby server without manual intervention.
- But what happens if it is was actually necessary to issue a Takeover from the standby server? By issuing the Takeover command the standby server now becomes an active server which includes running any Scheduled tasks that were enabled to run on a schedule. If the original active server comes back up after the Takeover on the standby, then you may end up with two active servers, both running the same Scheduled tasks on the same schedule.
- In the CSM 6.3.12 release, if a Takeover is issued on the standby, when the original active server comes back up, it will attempt to reconnect to the standby per the 6.3.11 feature. When it does this though, it will see that a Takeover was in fact already issued on the standby server which will them prompt the original active to go into an inactive (standby) mode. In this state, Scheduled Tasks will not run and the server will not respond to hardware events.
- The active/standby status for the server will be a disconnected consistent state. Customers can then either set this server up as a standby to the original standby, or they can issue the Takeover command which will make the original active server an active server again.
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