Release notes

Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure 2.5 Update 7

Changes

• Mitigation of the Microarchitectural Store Buffer Data (MDS) vulnerability and a performance bug fix.

Fixed issues

Security

• The Microarchitectural Store Buffer Data (MDS) is a series of hardware vulnerabilities which allow speculative execution attacks on Intel processors. A malicious application or guest virtual machine can use this flaw to gain access to data stored in internal CPU buffers, bypassing security restrictions. (VSTOR-23200)

Performance

• Performance improvement comparing to previous updates. (VSTOR-22963)

Obtaining the update

You can update Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure in the SETTINGS > UPDATE section of the admin panel. A reboot is required to complete the update. Updated nodes will be rebooted automatically, one at a time. During the reboot, the storage service might be unavailable on cluster configurations without the redundancy of services or data.

Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure 2.5 Update 6

Changes

• Improvements and bug fixes.

Fixed issues

Storage Core

• Command-line tools improvements. (VSTOR-9712, VSTOR-21601)
• Automatic replication could stall in case some replicas were dirty while others were offline. (VSTOR-21075)
• Fixed recovery of SSL connections after network errors. (VSTOR-21899)
• Fixed a memory leak in MDS. (VSTOR-22074)
• Enabled support of 30-day Acronis licenses. (VSTOR-22105)

Block Storage

• Fixed possible crash of vstorage-target-monitor on shutdown. (VSTOR-21059)
• Fixed possible incorrect behaviour during failover. (VSTOR-22635)

Obtaining the update

You can update Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure in the SETTINGS > UPDATE section of the admin panel. A reboot may or may not be required, depending on your product version and build:

• No reboot is required to update from Update 5 (build 1639).
• A manual reboot is required to update from Update 3 or 4 (builds 1601-1617).
• Automatic reboot will be performed on each node in succession to update from older versions (build 1600 and earlier).

Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure 2.5 Update 5

Changes

• Improvements and bug fixes.

Fixed issues

iSCSI

• [VSTOR-21518] The xcopy operation did not work correctly when moving VMs between different datastore tiers placed on the same iSCSI target.

S3

• [VSTOR-21089] Under certain circumstances, accounting of S3 space usage was incorrect.

Other Enhancements

• [VSTOR-21462] High availability logs could occupy a lot of space.
• [VSTOR-21624] The automatic reporting tool could leave reports in '/var/tmp/report.tar.gz'.
• [VSTOR-20558] The same data path ID could be assigned to VLAN interfaces in OVS bridges.
• [VSTOR-21603] Some graphs could be empty or not shown in the monitoring dashboard after a node crash.
• [VSTOR-21674] Custom firewall rules could disappear after a restart of the iptables service.
• [VSTOR-21354] Improved performance of requests to obtain information about CSes.
• [VSTOR-21718, VSTOR-21199, VSTOR-21835, VSTOR-21023, VSTOR-20757, VSTOR-21730, VSTOR-21783, VSTOR-20087, VSTOR-18477, VSTOR-20333, VSTOR-18658, VSTOR-21089, VSTOR-21812, VSTOR-5197, VSTOR-21155, VSTOR-21844, VSTOR-21493, VSTOR-20304, VSTOR-21418] Several stability and performance improvements.

Obtaining the update

You can update Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure in the SETTINGS > UPDATE section of the admin panel. A reboot is required to complete the update for clusters with enabled iSCSI services. Updated nodes will need to be rebooted manually. During the reboot, the storage service may be unavailable on cluster configurations without the redundancy of services or data.

Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure 2.5 Update 4

Changes

• Improvements and bug fixes.

Fixed issues

Appliance

• [VSTOR-18995] Drive bay LED indication was not working if a drive is broken.
• [VSTOR-20205] Factory reset doesn't show when reset has been finished on local monitor.
• [VSTOR-20194] Network cable plugin was not detected.
• [VSTOR-20159] Initial cluster configuration may fail if detected date and time from client machine was in the past.
• [VSTOR-20287] Highlight necessary steps the administrator has to do in factory reset.

User Interface

• [VSTOR-20232] Disk replacement occasionally doesn't allow to assign disk and fails with 'service_params'.
• [VSTOR-20239] Bringing up network interface from web user may interface show an error.
• [VSTOR-18929] System time and timezone configuration in web wizard couldn't be specified.
• [VSTOR-20197] System doesn't allow to create network bondings
• [VSTOR-20526, VSTOR-14144] Blink button in web user interface was not working in some cases.

Other Enhancements

• [VSTOR-19284, VSTOR-20370, VSTOR-19410] Several stability and performance improvements.

Obtaining the update

You can update Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure in the SETTINGS > UPDATE section of the admin panel. A reboot is required to complete the update. Updated nodes will be rebooted automatically, one at a time. During the reboot, the storage service might be unavailable on cluster configurations without the redundancy of services or data.

Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure 2.5 Update 3

Changes

• Improvements and bug fixes.

Fixed issues

Storage Core

• [VSTOR-19098] With erasure coding, write operations are blocked after two or more nodes fail, even if the cluster has enough disks available.
• [VSTOR-19620] vstorage-mount may occasionally hang with the message "task fuse-evloop:2710 blocked".

Object Storage

• [VSTOR-19326] Unable to list buckets via CLI after bucket removal via API.

Block Storage

• [VSTOR-20626] vstorage-target-monitor may occasionally fail with the error message "concurrent map writes".

Obtaining the update

You can update Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure in the SETTINGS > UPDATE section of the admin panel. A reboot is required to complete the update. Updated nodes will be rebooted automatically, one at a time. During the reboot, the storage service might be unavailable on cluster configurations without the redundancy of services or data.

Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure 2.5 Update 2

Changes

• Bug fixes.

Fixed issues

[VSTOR-20151] Some storage cluster archives may become unavailable after upgrade to version 2.5.

Obtaining the update

You can update Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure in the SETTINGS > UPDATE section of the admin panel. A reboot is required to complete the update. Updated nodes will be rebooted automatically, one at a time. During the reboot, the storage service might be unavailable on cluster configurations without the redundancy of services or data.

Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure 2.5 Update 1

Changes

• Improvements and bug fixes.

Fixed issues

[VSTOR-19857, VSTOR-19695] Improved automatic firewall rules configuration.

[VSTOR-19813, VSTOR-19896, VSTOR-19925, VSTOR-19667] Set of bug fixes and improvements for cluster upgrade to version 2.5.

[VSTOR-19909] Unable to register Acronis Backup Gateway in Acronis Backup Advanced with an IP address.

Obtaining the update

You can update Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure in the SETTINGS > UPDATE section of the admin panel. A reboot is required to complete the update. Updated nodes will be rebooted automatically, one at a time. During the reboot, the storage service might be unavailable on cluster configurations without the redundancy of services or data.

Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure 2.5 

Overview

This product is formerly known as Acronis Storage.

With this release, Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure offers a wide range of new features for compute virtualization and software-defined networking, as well as enhancements and stability improvements. It also addresses issues found in the previous releases.

What's new?

• Compute virtualization. Run virtual machines (technical preview) on Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure nodes in the hyper-converged mode (storage and compute on same node) or the traditional way (storage and compute on separate nodes).
  • Virtual machine management: run, resize, migrate, and open console to virtual machines.
  • Private software-defined networking for virtual machines (VXLAN).
  • Storage policies for virtual machines. Easy-to-use data redundancy options for virtual machine volumes.
  • Easy to configure high availability for compute service and virtual machines.
  • Supported guest operation systems: CentOS 6, CentOS 7, RHEL 6, RHEL 7, Debian 9, Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04, Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019.
  • Full Windows guest support with automatic installation of paravirtualization drivers (virtio) during installation from ISO.
• iSCSI targets get better performance and high availability via multi-path. The new iSCSI target subsystem and high availability engine reduce downtime by 2-4 times during node failures, making them barely noticeable for end-user applications. The subsystem uses Asymmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA) in the Active-Passive mode.
• Fibre Channel support. Export block storage over Fibre Channel. Check Installation guide for the list of supported cards.
• RoCE and Infiniband RDMA support. Up to 25% better I/O latency and lower CPU utilization on InfiniBand, RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) and iWARP (Internet Wide-area RDMA Protocol).
• New comprehensive monitoring:
  • Built-in monitoring with pre-configured Prometheus and Grafana.
  • Grafana dashboards for nodes, disks, network, latency, performance, storage services.
  • New charts with tooltips in the admin panel, including I/O latency charts, new physical and logical space charts.
  • Zoomable charts on dashboards: from 30 minutes to 1 week.
  • Virtual machines performance monitoring: CPU, RAM, disks and networking
• Performance improvements for all-flash configurations. Get more IOPS with multi-threaded I/O on all-flash clusters. New fast-path approach in the core of Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure reduces latency and implements fast multi-threaded I/O handling in Linux kernel.
• New comprehensive command-line tool. Support for more operations. Unified output for all commands: as a text table, in JSON, and in XML.
• Built-in ReadyKernel™ eliminates system update downtime. Based on the kpatch technology, ReadyKernel™ is live patching of a running Linux kernel to apply kernel hotfixes and CVEs in seconds.
• New infrastructure networking. Simplifies cluster-wide traffic and firewall configuration. Traffic types are easily assigned to cluster networks on a single screen which minimizes chances of misconfiguration. Also, new traffic types for Compute service and SNMP are added.
• UI and UX improvements:
  • New navigation menu.
  • New controls and fresh UI.
  • Ability to send problem reports.
  • Improved admin panel performance when listing resources of nodes with more than 250 local disks and 100 network interfaces.
• Single repository for all components. Easy and integrated cluster updates from the unified RPM repository.
• Acronis Backup Gateway improvements:
  • Improved backup protocol (higher backup speed, better resilience for network lags) for Acronis Backup Cloud 8.0 and Acronis Backup 15 coming in 2019.
  • It is possible to configure geo-replication for Acronis Backup Gateway via CLI. Setup via UI is planned for the next release.
  • Yandex.Cloud support.
• Other enhancements:
  • New high availability engine significantly improves cluster reaction time to node failure for all services.
  • New internal cluster DNS service that improves cluster services discovery.
  • Better overall stability and performance.

Fixed issues

Acronis Backup Gateway

• [VSTOR-15478] Now Acronis Backup Gateway can be registered in Acronis Data Cloud 7.8 using the base "cloud.acronis.com" URL instead of a direct link to the datacentre.

Core storage

• [VSTOR-18256] Persistent iSCSI Portal is used during configuration.

S3

• [VSTOR-2948, VSTOR-8883] Improved S3 cluster creation. Automatic high availability management for object storage configuration service.

Known issues

Acronis Backup Gateway

• [VSTOR-12966] Management portal address must start with "http://" while registering Acronis Backup Gateway in Acronis Backup 12.5.
• [VSTOR-17808] Failover for Backup Gateway geo-replication is possible via CLI only.

Compute service

• [VSTOR-15978] Compute overview may not work during adding/releasing nodes in the compute cluster.
• [VSTOR-18299] Unable to release a node from the compute cluster if it's included in the management node high availability configuration. Release the node from the management node high availability first before releasing it from the compute cluster.
• [VSTOR-16644] It is not possible to scale down virtual machine RAM, if the compute cluster has no free memory.
• [VSTOR-18054] There is no "crashed" state for virtual machines. Such virtual machines are displayed as "ACTIVE" even though they are not operational anymore.
• [VSTOR-18491] User is unable to reassign the "Compute private" and "Compute API" traffic types to other networks after the compute cluster has been deployed.
• [VSTOR-17752] Need to manually clean browser cache and cookies after destroying the compute cluster. Otherwise the newly created compute cluster will have empty compute dashboard.
• [VSTOR-15252] Need to manually refresh browser page after flavor creation.

Virtual machines migration

• [VSTOR-12379] It is not possible to cancel an ongoing migration.
• [VSTOR-18053] No error on attempt to migrate a virtual machine to a node with no free RAM.
• [VSTOR-17921] The admin panel does not prevent migration of a virtual machine with a public NIC to a node that is not connected to an underlying public network.
• [VSTOR-18061] Virtual Machine live migration to a node with a different CPU may fail without an error message.

Compute networking

• [VSTOR-17943] It is not possible to use VLANs in virtual machines in the 'private' backnet.
• [VSTOR-16839] The DHCP address might not be obtained by a virtual machine from a network that not assigned to the adapter.

Core storage

• [VSTOR-16523] No "System + Metadata" disk role in the advanced mode during storage cluster creation or joining nodes to a storage cluster.
• [VSTOR-11567] It is not possible to release the "MDS + cache" disk role without releasing all the corresponding disks to the cache or whole node release.
• [VSTOR-17902] Storage cluster name must be shorter than 50 characters.

High availability for Management

• [VSTOR-14800] Need to manually refresh admin panel web page after creating the management node high availability configuration.
• [VSTOR-16823] In some cases, a node could be treated as "offline" for a while after creating the management node high availability configuration.
• [VSTOR-18730] If only one, "Private", network is used in a cluster, the user must unassign the "Admin panel" traffic type from the "Public" network before Management node high availability creation on top of only one ("Private") network.
• [VSTOR-10950, VSTOR-17690, VSTOR-16716] It is impossible to add a node to the management node high availability cluster if one of the nodes included in the management node high availability configuration is offline. The user needs to remove all nodes from the management node high availability cluster and recreate it from scratch.
• [VSTOR-18259, VSTOR-17852] User cannot release the master management node from the management node high availability configuration.
• [VSTOR-19274] In some cases it is needed to add "vstoradmin" user to "vstorage-user" group manually ("usermod -a -G vstorage-users vstoradmin; systemctl restart vstorage-ui-backend") after adding new node to Management node high availability.

Block Storage service

• [VSTOR-12872] In some cases, I/O may hang or cluster performance may degrade on iWARP cards in case of a node failure.
• [VSTOR-18121, VSTOR-5621] High availability for iSCSI/FC does not work for iSCSI initiator in Windows 7, Windows 10 due to the lack of Active-Active mode and persistent reservations.

Monitoring and alerting

• [VSTOR-13811] S.M.A.R.T. alerts for system disks are not shown in the panel.
• [VSTOR-17286] "Network has undefined speed" alert is displayed for network interface with unplugged link.
• [VSTOR-13622] The chart zoom on disk performance graphs on node screen can't be reset to the initial state.
• [VSTOR-17297] The storage dashboard and the compute overview may report different physical space values, because the compute overview also takes into account licensed space.

Licensing

• [VSTOR-12495] SPLA license may stop working with an error "bad request", if the local time is set to a past value.

NFS

• [VSTOR-18068] No error message when creating NFS cluster on a node without the 'NFS' traffic type.

Installer

• [VSTOR-18277] Installation from ISO is possible only with a US keyboard. This may result in issues with installations via IPMI with non-US locales.

Obtaining the update

You can upgrade Acronis Storage 2.4 to Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure 2.5 in the SETTINGS > UPDATE section via the upgrade wizard that will check update eligibility. Refer to section 2.7.1 of the Acronis Storage Administrator's Guide for a list of conditions that must be met in order to upgrade. A reboot is required to complete the update. Updated nodes will be rebooted automatically, one at a time. During the reboot, the storage service and management panel might be unavailable on cluster configurations without the redundancy of services or data. iSCSI targets will be stopped during the update.

Acronis Storage 2.4 Update 1.2 

Changes

• Bug fixes.

Fixed issues

[VSTOR-13682] Creation of Acronis Backup Gateway over NFS fails with error "Failure domain is not set".

[VSTOR-13516] Creation of network bonds could fail in some cases.

Obtaining the update

You can update Acronis Storage by clicking "Update now" in web control panel. A reboot is required to complete the update. Updated nodes will be rebooted automatically, one at a time. During the reboot, the storage service might be unavailable on cluster configurations without the redundancy of services or data.

Acronis Storage 2.4 Update 1.1 

Changes

• Bug fix.

Fixed issue

[VSTOR-13181] MDS could fail during update from 2.4 to 2.4 Update 1 in some cases.

Obtaining the update

You can update Acronis Storage by clicking "Update now" in web control panel. A reboot is required to complete the update. Updated nodes will be rebooted automatically, one at a time. During the reboot, the storage service might be unavailable on cluster configurations without the redundancy of services or data.

Acronis Storage 2.4 Update 1 

Changes

• Security improvements and bug fixes.

Fixed issues

Acronis Backup Gateway

VSTOR-11436, VSTOR-9899, VSTOR-9719] Bug fixes and improvements in communication between Backup Gateway and Data Cloud, backup agents, and external object storages.

Performance and data balancing

[VSTOR-10144] Improved performance of clusters with SSD cache under extremely high load.

[VSTOR-9973, VSTOR-10892, VSTOR-12305] Improved algorithms for space allocation and balancing when adding nodes/disks to cluster.

[VSTOR-9406] Improved I/O latency on all-SSD clusters.

Licensing

[VSTOR-12495, VSTOR-10978] Bug fixes in the SPLA licensing registration procedure and space usage reporting.

UI/UX

[VSTOR-10540] More precise calculation of physical space on Storage cluster overview in web control panel.

[VSTOR-9792] A false positive warning could be issued about network interfaces missing important features.

[VSTOR-9784, VSTOR-9785, VSTOR-9690, VSTOR-9689] The current product version is now displayed in the updates section of web control panel.

[VSTOR-11214, VSTOR-10605, VSTOR-10584, VSTOR-9595] UI and usability improvements.

Other

[VSTOR-10432] Republished Azure solution template to avoid metadata creation on ephemeral disks.

Obtaining the update

You can update Acronis Storage by clicking "Update now" in web control panel. A reboot is required to complete the update. Updated nodes will be rebooted automatically, one at a time. During the reboot, the storage service might be unavailable on cluster configurations without the redundancy of services or data.

Acronis Storage 2.4 

Changes

• Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA) for Storage 2.4 in Data Cloud 7.7. Users now can license Acronis Storage in Data Cloud Management Console using a service provider license agreement (SPLA) instead of a license key. The Storage cluster will automatically report usage to Data Cloud for accounting and billing purposes. Acronis Data Cloud 7.7 or newer is required.
• Acronis Backup Gateway for Google Cloud Platform. It is now possible to store backups from Acronis Backup Cloud and Acronis Backup Advanced on Google Cloud Storage via Acronis Backup Gateway.
• Connect iSCSI as local disks. It is possible to connect remote iSCSI SAN LUNs as disks to Storage nodes. The disks can be used for cluster needs, for example, to store Acronis Backup Gateway backup data.
• Automated migration from Acronis Storage 1.5 to 2.4. It is now possible to automatically migrate backup data from Acronis Storage 1.5 (end of life) to storage backends supported by Acronis Backup Gateway. Automated migration is performed without service interruption.
• Other enhancements: better overall stability and performance.

Fixed issues

UI/UX

[VSTOR-5722] Wrong locale in Alerts list.

[VSTOR-8855, VSTOR-8309] Reduced memory consumption by Redis and UI-Backend.

[VSTOR-6743] Prevent removal of WebCP role from the last network interface.

[VSTOR-8419] Hide the "Error details" button if there are no details.

[VSTOR-5288] User email addresses are not checked for uniqueness.

[VSTOR-9331, VSTOR-6743, VSTOR-6856, VSTOR-9126, VSTOR-9167, VSTOR-8899, VSTOR-5252, VSTOR-5200, VSTOR-5922, VSTOR-6748, VSTOR-9267, VSTOR-6389] Set of UI and usability improvements.

iSCSI

[VSTOR-9202] iSCSI is not fully stopped in certain conditions.

Acronis Backup Gateway

[VSTOR-8753, VSTOR-8812] All Swift parameters must be optional if Keystone v2 or v3 is used.

[VSTOR-5048] Need to improve retrievals in Acronis Backup Gateway for unstable network connections.

[VSTOR-5376, VSTOR-7464, VSTOR-8226, VSTOR-7734, VSTOR-8938, VSTOR-7281, VSTOR-6862, VSTOR-6286, VSTOR-7579, VSTOR-7277] Set of Acronis Backup Gateway improvements.

Performance and stability improvements

[VSTOR-9163] I/O request may hang when redundancy settings (replicas) are changed.

[VSTOR-9130] To reduce load on disks, data scrubbing must be relaxed when Acronis Storage is running in virtual machines.

[VSTOR-6399] High load average due to hanging of vstorage-mount in some cases.

[VSTOR-9198, VSTOR-8411] Acronis Backup Gateway may crash on migration due to a segfault in astor_client_set_host.

[VSTOR-8319, VSTOR-5744, VSTOR-8388] Possible file descriptor leakage ("too many open files") in Storage components.

[VSTOR-6343, VSTOR-6007, VSTOR-5210, VSTOR-6262, VSTOR-6394, VSTOR-6971, VSTOR-6975, VSTOR-9266, VSTOR-9205, VSTOR-7822, VSTOR-5673, VSTOR-2956] Set of improvements to Storage core.

Obtaining the update

You can update Acronis Storage by clicking "Update now" in WebCP. A reboot is required to complete the update. Updated nodes will be rebooted automatically, one at a time. During the reboot, the storage service might be unavailable on cluster configurations without the redundancy of services or data.

Acronis Storage 2.3 Update 1 

Changes

• Improved performance. The new memory allocator (tcmalloc) reduces memory footprint.
• Improved performance and stability of backup migration. Automated migration of backup data from Acronis Storage Gateway v1.x via Acronis Backup Gateway is now faster and more stable.
• Added NFSv4 support for MacOS. Users can now connect to Acronis Storage cluster via the NFSv4 protocol from MacOS, using Finder or CLI. See more information in the User's Guide.
• Improved localization and usability of WebCP. Fixed moving the network management role across adapters. Fixed checking of NFS share IP addresses. Other improvements.
• Better S3 browser support in Mozilla Firefox.Fixed the problem with downloading objects in the S3 browser in Mozilla Firefox.
• Improved ISO installer. Fixed problems with rescanning disks and installation without network.

Obtaining the update

You can update Acronis Storage by clicking "Update now" in the WebCP. After the entire cluster is updated, you will need to reboot cluster nodes one at a time. During the reboot, the storage service might be unavailable on cluster configurations without services or data redundancy.

Acronis Storage 2.3 

What's new?

• Support for Object Storage (S3, Azure, Swift, etc.) by Acronis Backup Gateway. Users can now store Acronis Backup Cloud backups in external object storages via Acronis Backup Gateway. Supported object storages include Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3, IBM Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, IIJ, Softlayer, Cleversafe, as well as other solutions using the S3 or Swift protocol.
• Automated backup data migration from Acronis Storage Gateway v1.6 and v1.7 via Acronis Backup Gateway. It is now possible to migrate backup data from the older Acronis Storage Gateway solutions to storage backends supported by Acronis Backup Gateway. Migration is performed without service interruption.
• NFS support. Users can now store general purpose files in Acronis Storage cluster via the NFSv4 and pNFS protocols. Also supported now is Kerberos and LDAP integration with NFS for user authentication and authorization.
• Acronis Backup Gateway geo-replication (technical availability). Acronis Storage 2.3 provides the technical availability of master-slave geo-replication of backup storage. For now, this feature can only be configured by technical account managers and the Professional Services team.
• E-mail notifications. It is now possible to receive e-mails about cluster alerts, including license expiration, node/disk failure, and such.
• Quality of service for iSCSI. It is now possible to set limits on IOPS and network bandwidth per iSCSI target.
• Custom SSL certificates for WebCP. Users can now install custom SSL certificates via the management panel to enable secure access to it.
• Improved Acronis Backup Gateway monitoring. It is now possible to monitor Acronis Backup gateway traffic as well as replication and migration backlog and speed.
• Other improvements:
  • Better stability on large clusters (more than 500 nodes or 10PB of data).
  • Reduced WebCP backend resource consumption.
  • Improved WebCP user experience: WebCP localization support (English and Russian).
  • Ability to forcibly delete the Acronis Backup Gateway cluster without unregistering it from Acronis Backup Cloud.
  • Better overall stability and higher object storage performance.

Known issues

• Linux NFS client working via pNFS in the O_DIRECT mode may hang if Storage cluster is not available due to a bug in the Linux NFS client.

Obtaining the update

You can update Acronis Storage by clicking "Update now" in the WebCP. After the entire cluster is updated, you will need to reboot cluster nodes one at a time. During the reboot, the storage service might be unavailable on cluster configurations without services or data redundancy.

Acronis Storage 2.2 

What's new?

• Alerts in Web UI. It is now possible to get useful notifications about potential issues and misconfigurations (license alerts, cluster nodes alerts, network alerts, and cluster services health). The system monitors cluster configuration, health of cluster services, network links, and disk health. Critical Alerts are exported via SNMP.
• Audit of Web UI actions. It is now possible to get a log of all user actions in Web UI: (configure, change, create).
• S3 geo-replication. Acronis Storage can now store and keep up-to-date replicas of data in multiple geographically distributed datacenters with S3 clusters based on Acronis Storage. Geo-replication works in the Active-Active mode.
• Automated management node HA. It is now possible to have management node data continuously replicated between redundant management node instances.
• SNMP monitoring and ZABBIX integration. It is now possible to get monitoring counters (space, health, license, IOPS, throughput, disk load, etc.) via SNMP version 2. Management node HA, if enabled, makes this feature highly available as well.
• Role-based user model. Acronis Storage 2.2 provides improved security and control with role-based user access, increasing flexibility without risking cluster security.
• LDAP and Active Directory support. Storage admins and users can now authenticate in storage clusters using their LDAP/AD credentials.
• Performance optimizations. Erasure coding is now faster. Storage for Acronis Backups is optimized.
• Acronis Backup Gateway for NFS. Users can now store Acronis Backup Cloud backups on external NFS via Acronis Backup Gateway on single Storage nodes (in the non-clustered mode).
• Cloud Raid 1+2. This new encoding mode is meant for small clusters that have insufficient nodes for other erasure coding modes but will grow in the future. As redundancy type cannot be changed once chosen (from replication to erasure coding or vice versa), this mode allows one to choose erasure coding even if their cluster is smaller than recommended. Once the cluster grows, more beneficial redundancy modes can be chosen.
• Acronis Backup Gateway certificate renewal. It is now possible to renew expired backup certificates via Web UI.
• SSL on Web UI by default for new installations.
• Other improvements: Better stability, object storage scalability, security, processing of batch operations (assign/release) for disks.

Known issues

• S3 geo-replication requires either HTTP-only setup (evaluation) or HTTPS on both datacenters with real certificates obtained from well-known certificate authorities. Setups with self-signed certificates will require manual configuration.
• Objects notarization is not fully compatible with geo-replication. Notary signatures created in one datacenter will not be replicated to another datacenter.

Obtaining the update

You can update Acronis Storage by clicking "Update now" in the management panel. Node reboot is required after updating. Note that during update from 2.1 to 2.2, S3 cluster will stop processing client requests. It will resume normal operation after all nodes in the S3 cluster are fully updated.

Acronis Storage 2.1

What's new?

• Management node backup/restore. It is now possible to backup the management node database to the cluster. In case of management node failure, user can at any time restore the management node on any Acronis Storage node and continue managing the cluster.
• Flexible SSD cache configuration. It is now possible to attach a caching SSD to a specific tier. This is useful if multiple tiers are required and only some of them need to be cached.
• Improved network configuration. Multiple improvements were introduced to network configuration capabilities to support more cluster configurations.
  • MTU and DNS configuration. New options allow setting custom MTU and DNS via the web UI.
  • Ability to open custom ports in firewall. It is now possible to amend automatic firewall settings by specifying custom ports to open on a cluster node. This feature allows one to run custom services on Storage nodes, e.g., Zabbix.
• S3 HTTPS configuration via management panel. It is now possible to upload SSL certificates to S3 and have users access the object storage via HTTPS. It is also possible to generate self-signed certificates for evaluation. The web UI is now fully accessible via HTTPS.
• Activity LED blinking for PERC and LSI controllers. Now you can have disks on all LSI and PERC controllers to blink their activity LEDs.
• Improvements to the Services section. New tabs for S3, ISCSI, and Acronis Backup Gateway services simplify navigation and service management.
• New S3 overview screen. The new S3 overview screen offers a better view of the current S3 configuration and provides access to the user control panel.
• Support of a single VM installation for Acronis Backup Gateway on a cluster over SAN/NAS. It is now possible to configure several MDS servers on a single node to support single VM installations with Acronis Storage 2.0 deployed over share provided by SAN/NAS.
• Improved Acronis Storage integration with Acronis Notary. Better hash algorithms are now used: SHA-256 instead of MD5. Also, support for multipart uploads is improved.

Obtaining the update

You can update to the new version with the "Update now" feature of the management panel. Node reboot after update is required.