Enhancements in 5.3.1

Install & Upgrade

ORION-252916: Prior to starting an upgrade, VAST Cluster displays a message that provides summary information for the upgrade to be performed, such as the source and target versions, as well as software components included in the upgrade.
ORION-235755: Enhanced the Upgrade Cluster dialog (Infrastructure -> Clusters -> right-click a cluster and choose to upgrade it) so that it provides an ability to overwrite the last imported build with a new one. To do so, click the new Replace icon to the right of the Last Imported Build pane title.

The DBox replacement procedure has been enhanced to allow for replacement of Ceres v1 DBox with Ceres v2 DBox.

ORION-241708, ORION-242967: Enhanced the cluster networking configuration script (configure_network.py) to support configuring CNode Port Affinity for Supermicro Gen5 CNodes and HPE Genoa CNodes.
ORION-242254: Changed the default flow control type from Global Pause to Priority Flow Control. You set the flow control type in the Selected QoS type field in the Customized Network Settings tab of VAST Easy Install.

ORION-234157: Added an ability to associate the cluster with a Thales CipherTrust domain (other than the root domain). The following user controls have been added for this purpose:
- In VAST Web UI, the Auth Domain field in the Advanced Configurations -> Encryption tab of VAST Cluster Install
- In VAST CLI, the --ekm-auth-domain option on the cluster create command
- In VAST REST API, the ekm_auth_domain parameter in POST requests to the /clusters/ endpoint.
Note that the domain must be created in Thales CipherTrust Manager prior to cluster deployment.
ORION-236934: Added an ability to connect the cluster to Thales CipherTrust Manager via an HTTP(s) proxy. To do so, use the following controls during cluster deployment:
- In VAST Web UI, the Use proxy flag that displays additional fields to specify the proxy in the Advanced Configurations -> Encryption tab of VAST Cluster Install
- In VAST CLI, the --ekm-proxy-address option on the cluster create command
Note
When entering the command in the command line, a different spelling for the option is automatically suggested, --ekm-proxies, although the correct option keyword is --ekm-proxy-address.

ORION-219500: Enhanced NFS rquota implementation to support retrieving quota sizes that exceed 16TB.

ORION-212662: Added user controls to determine whether POSIX mode bits are inherited from the parent directory when using a view policy with NFS security flavor:
- In VAST Web UI, the Inherit ACL from parent option in the Permissions for New Files and Directories tab of view policy settings (Element Store -> View policies -> choose to create or edit a policy).
- In VAST CLI, the --enable-inherit-parent-mode-bits and --disable-inherit-parent-mode-bits options on the viewpolicy create and viewpolicy modify commands.

ORION-223116: Added an ability to configure the way the cluster handles SMB compound requests beginning with a CREATE request when the starting CREATE request gets a STATUS_PENDING response.
By default, the cluster sends STATUS_PENDING responses to all remaining requests in the compound, which may not be expected by the client.
You can alter this behavior so that the cluster will first respond with STATUS_PENDING only to the starting CREATE request (skipping the rest of the responses). After the entire compound is executed, responses to all requests in the compound will be sent. To alter the cluster behavior, contact VAST Support.

ORION-231931: Added support for the If-None-Match header in GET and HEAD requests as part of S3 conditional reads. The VAST cluster returns the object only if its ETag differs from the client-specified value; otherwise, it responds with a NotModified status.
Note
When the If-None-Match header contains a list of ETags and this list includes a matching ETag, the VAST cluster returns status code 200 (OK).

ORION-237693: Added an ability to import data columns from a Parquet file to a VAST Database table that already contains rows with keys. The import requires that the keys in the Parquet file and the keys in the table are ordered in the same order. If there are missing or excessive keys, the import request is rejected.
Added support for the vector data type (arrays of floats) and similarity queries.

ORION-233204: Removed the requirement for the snapshot name to be unique across all tenants on a VAST cluster. Starting with this release, the snapshot name must be unique within the tenant.

ORION-241238: Updated protected path validations to allow for creation of protected paths on a subdirectory of an S3 Bucket view for local protection policies.

VAST Cluster 5.3.1 adds support for asynchronous replication peers that are running the following VAST Cluster releases:
- 5.0.0-SP70 or later 5.0 SPs
- 5.1.0-SP45 or later 5.1 SPs

ORION-244796: The following Kafka-related metrics can now be exported with VAST Prometheus Exporter:
- The amount of data produced/consumed in bytes per second
- The number of produced/consumed events per second
- The number of produced/consumed messages per second
- Produce/consume message latency
The metrics can be collected per cluster and per view.
ORION-232589: Removed the limit of 256 characters for the webhook payload definition (in VAST Web UI: Settings -> Notifications -> Webhook Setup -> Webhook Data field).
ORION-226846: The variables that you can insert into the webhook JSON when configuring a webhook (in VAST Web UI: Settings -> VMS -> Webhooks) include two new timestamps:
- {vastdata_timestamp_unix} - A UNIX-style timestamp.
- {vastdata_timestamp_iso_8601} - A timestamp in the ISO 8601 format, for example: 2025-07-14T26:01:06+0000.
ORION-216345: VAST Prometheus Exporter lets you export metrics to analyze data reduction by reduction type (compression, deduplication, similarity).