This release is only available for VAST on Cloud clusters.
New Features in 5.4.2
This release focuses on VAST on Cloud and offers the following key capabilities for VAST on Google Cloud Platform:
VAST Cloud (Polaris), a new service delivery platform for deploying and managing VoC clusters in the cloud
Support for VM replacement to avoid service disruption during planned maintenance of VMs
Support for VoC cluster expansion.
Welcome to VAST Cloud
VAST Cloud (Polaris) is where you create and manage your cloud deployments. It empowers you to:
Track your cloud status on a dashboard providing a visual summary of your cloud deployments (including subscriptions, tenants, deployed clusters, capacity entitlements)
View and manage your marketplace subscriptions
View and manage your cloud deployments
Create new deployment configurations
Expand existing deployments
Manage related entities, including tenants, resource groups, organizations and users
VAST Cloud is operated via a web-based UI, a CLI tool, and an API. You access the VAST Cloud UI by navigating to its URL in the browser. The VAST Cloud CLI tool (vastcloud) is installed on your local machine to provide additional capabilities, the most important of which is running the task of deploying a VoC cluster using the deployment configuration file created in VAST Cloud UI.
Support for VM Maintenance
With release 5.4.2, your VoC cluster is able to withstand Google planned maintenance of the VMs. To avoid service disruption, you can migrate from the VM that is scheduled to undergo maintenance, to a new VM that will be unaffected by the maintenance events.
After you've chosen the Replace VM option for a cloud deployment host in VAST Cloud UI, the platform creates a new VM, adds it to the cluster, performs migration from the VM being replaced to the new VM, and terminates the old VM once the migration is complete.
Note that VM replacement cannot be performed at the same time as VoC cluster expansion.
Support for Deployment Expansion
You can increase usable storage capacity of a running VoC cluster by adding more hosts to it.
To expand an existing deployment in VAST Cloud UI, select the deployment you want in the Deployments page and choose Expand in its action menu. The expansion dialog will prompt you to enter the desired Usage TB you require from the cluster. The platform automatically calculates the number of additional hosts needed and verifies that you have the entitlements to cover the expansion.
Note that you cannot run the expansion at the time when a VM replacement is in progress.
Managing VMs with VAST CLI
A new set of commands has been added to VAST CLI to help manage VMs from within the cluster's VMS: vm list, vm show, vm expand, vm replace, vm remove.
Limitations in 5.4.2
ORION-327048: It is recommended to have a multiple of 8 non-VMS VMs per cluster, since GCP has 8 failure domains and imbalance may result in failed stripe allocations.
ORION-145141: Creating a tenant with EKM encryption is not supported on VoC clusters.
ORION-113036: After you reregister the same VoC cluster in Uplink, information about the previously registered instance of this cluster is no longer available in Uplink.
VAST on Cloud clusters do not support OS upgrade.
Ongoing changes on a data path that you cloned using a global snapshot clone are not synced with the VAST on Cloud cluster. The data you work with is sourced from the specific snapshot that you clone.
VAST on Cloud clusters on AWS are supported only if the instance type (which is set during the creation procedure) is On-demand and the Resiliency setting is enabled.
In the event of downtime, data is rebuilt while the cluster comes back online. In case of a subsequent failure during the rebuild, data integrity is not guaranteed.
VAST Cloud (Polaris) UI does not provide an option to run a cluster upgrade. Cluster upgrades are to be performed using the VAST Web UI.