What's new
Each release offers new functions and improvements. IBM is constantly updating the infrastructure, security, and stability of IBM Fusion to improve your experience. Review this information for a high-level summary of the new features and changes in each release.
Version 2.9.0
IBM Fusion 2.9.0 includes new features in the following areas:
New platform support
You can now deploy IBM Fusion on Amazon Web Services ROSA HCP platform. For more information about installation and supported IBM Fusion services, see Installing IBM Fusion on Amazon Web Services and IBM Fusion Services support matrix respectively.
Enhancements to upgrade experience
The IBM Fusion 2.9 brings the following upgrade enhancements:
- Parallel upgrades
- Support is available for parallel upgrades for components that are not part of rolling updates. This enhancement allows multiple components to be upgraded simultaneously, significantly reducing downtime and improving overall system efficiency.
- Automatic Backup & Restore service upgrade based on the availability
- After a IBM Fusion operator upgrade, if a Backup & Restore service upgrade is available, IBM Fusion automatically initiates prechecks and then proceeds with the upgrade.
For more information about the upgrade feature, see Upgrading IBM Fusion and its components.
Improvements to Multi-cluster IBM Fusion using Hosted Control Plane
- Enhanced ability to deploy IBM Fusion services from the Red Hat® Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes user interace by adding a label to any Hosted Control Plane. This eliminates the need for a you to log into each Hosted Control Plane cluster to deploy IBM Fusion services. The support is available for IBM Fusion software, Fusion Data Foundation in client mode and Backup & Restore.
- The deletion of Hosted Control Plane automatically cleans up services used by the client cluster. For more information about the cleanup procedure, see Cleaning up of Hosted Control Plane cluster.
For more information about this multi-cluster improvements, see Deploying virtualized clusters with Fusion Data Foundation.
Simplified image mirroring during installation and upgrade
This release has significantly improved the image mirroring process during installation and upgrade by automating most of the steps. Additionally, a comprehensive end-to-end offline mirroring procedure is available so you can now choose between a complete end-to-end mirroring or mirroring of individual images based on your requirements. For more information about the offline mirroring procedure, see Enterprise registry for IBM Fusion installation.
Backup & Restore enhancements
- Change Block Detection Support
- Backup & Restore now has change block detection for Ceph RBD block volumes. With this change, the DataMover does not have to process the entire volume to identify changes. This feature greatly reduces backup times for applications using Ceph RBD block mode volumes, including OpenShift® Virtualization VMs based on RBD block volumes. For more information about this change block detection, see Backup & Restore Block and filesystem PVC.
- Self-service Backup & Restore
- You can protect your namespace application with IBM Fusion Backup & Restore even as an application user without a cluster or a user without IBM Fusion administration rights. For more information about this feature, see Self-service Backup & Restore. Note that this feature is for Hub applications only.
- Improved Data Mover for more efficient backups
- Improved Data Mover provides more efficient backups for data movement. It ensures faster, efficient, reliable, and secure data movement across different environments that is important for backups, transfer of files, and data replication. The very first backup after upgrade results in a full backup because of Data Mover. You can also choose to remain with the legacy Data Mover. For more information about Data mover and its configuration, see Configure DataMover type for Backup and Restore.
- Latest permissible start time for the backup process
- From 2.9 onwards, you can set the latest permissible start time for a scheduled backup. This setting is useful whenever multiple backups use the same policy or schedule and the agent gets overloaded frequently with jobs as they all start at the same time. With the new windowEndTime option, the backup job can remain queued up for processing by the agent for a custom period of time before getting canceled. This allows for a single agent replica to be fully utilized for a longer period of time throughout the day without the need to manually create multiple policies or schedules. For more information about how to configure this value, see Latest permissible start time for the backup process.
- Backup & Restore scaling
- A reference is now available to understand the number of spokes you can scale up to, that is, the number of spoke clusters that can be connected to a single hub. It outlines the capacities and the scalability considerations to ensure efficient backup and restore operations. This reference information is very useful guidance specifically in case of a large OpenShift environment that is spread across hundreds of clusters.
- Delete Backup Request improvements
- Prior to 2.9,
DeleteBackupRequestCRs that were created to handle the deletion of backups based on the retention settings were not deleted. Over time, the number ofDeleteBackupRequestCRs grew and affected the performance of the cluster.Starting with version 2.9,
DeleteBackupRequestCRs in theCompletedstate are automatically deleted after a default retention period of 14 days, thereby enhancing overall performance. For more information, see DeleteBackupRequest CR cleanup.Additionally, to prioritize backup performance, Backup Deletions scheduled from the Policy expiration attempts to run when a backup is not in progress.
Serviceability
- Expanded and resilient Log collection
- Log collection for remote spokes is included in the Backup & Restore package. To debug any Backup & Restore issue across all spokes clusters, you can collect logs directly from the Hub cluster instead of accessing each spoke individually. For more information about log collection, see Collecting logs in IBM Fusion.
New features and enhancements in Fusion Data Foundation 4.17
- New features:
- Disaster recovery solution
- VMware vSphere8 support
- Storage class with 2-way replication for CephFS
- Key rotation for PV encryption
- Azure Key Vault support on Fusion Data Foundation KMS
- Manual setting of Multicloud Object Gateway credentials to an account
- Downloading the ODF CLI tool from the user interface
- Enhancements:
- Capacity consumption trend card
- Bucket logging and log based replication optimization for MCG buckets
- Capacity alert thresholds increased
- Ceph full thresholds configurations
- Preserve the CLI flags that were passed during creation of external clusters
- MDS scalability
- Traditional user experience for must gather utility
- CephCSI pod log rotation
- Multiple filesystems
- topologySpreadConstraints added to PV backingstore pods so they get scheduled on a spread basis
OpenShift Container Platform support
IBM Fusion 2.9 includes support for OpenShift Container Platform 4.17.
New currency support
- IBM Storage Scale or Global Data Platform service 5.2.1.1
- Fusion Data Foundation 4.17
For new features in Fusion Data Foundation 4.17, see New features in 4.17.
- Data Cataloging 2.1.8
- Backup & Restore 2.9.0
- For supported IBM Cloud Paks versions, see IBM Cloud Paks support for IBM Fusion.
For a complete list of currency support, see Support matrix for IBM Fusion versions.