Release Note for systems built with IBM Spectrum Virtualize

Customers planning to upgrade to v8.4.0 or later should be aware that an update to OpenSSH has terminated support for all DSA keys. An update to OpenSSL has also terminated support for 1024-bit RSA keys used in SSL certificates.

Customers currently using DSA public keys for SSH access will need to generate new keys using alternative ciphers, such as RSA or ECDSA. If using RSA public keys for SSH access, it is recommended to use keys of 2048 bits or longer.

Customers currently using 1024-bit RSA keys in SSL certificates will need to generate new SSL certificates using 2048-bit RSA keys or ECDSA keys. This applies not only to the system certificate, but also to any SSL certificates used by external services such as LDAP servers.

There is an existing limit on the number of files that can be returned by the CLI of approximately 780 entries. In many configurations this limit is of no concern. However, due to a problem with hot-spare node I/O stats files, 8-node clusters with many hardware upgrades or multiple spare nodes may see up to 900 I/O stats files. As a consequence the data collector for Storage Insights and Spectrum Control cannot list or download the required set of performance statistics data. The result is that there are many gaps in the performance data, leading to errors with the performance monitoring tools and a lack of performance history.

The workaround is to remove the files associated with spare nodes or previously/updated hardware using the cleardumps command (or to cleardumps the entire iostats directory).

This is a known limitation that will be lifted in a future PTF. The fix can be tracked using APAR HU02403.

Customers using Spectrum Control v5.4.3 or earlier may notice that IP port status is incorrectly shown as "Unconfigured".

This issue will be resolved by a future release of Spectrum Control.

The GUI does not allow the expansion of HyperSwap volumes. Customers wishing to perform this operation should use the expandvolume CLI command.

This is a known issue that will be lifted in a future PTF. The fix can be tracked using APAR HU02487.

In the next release of Spectrum Virtualize there will be some minor changes to the format of the performance statistics that may break backwards compatibility with tools that parse the performance XML files to provide performance statistics.

The new statistics format can be enabled in the 8.5.1 release of Spectrum Virtualize to enable third-party performance analysis tools to test and update their software to support the new format.

IBM recommends that any product teams which own a performance tool comment on this Idea and IBM will contact you with more details about how to enable these new statistics.

Upgrade to 8.5.1 and higher is not currently supported on systems with compressed volume copies in Data Reduction Pools, to avoid SVAPAR-105430.

On a small proportion of systems, this can cause a node warmstart when specific data patterns are written to compressed volumes. This restriction will be lifted in a future release.

Systems, with NPIV enabled, presenting storage to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) hosts running the ibmvfc driver on IBM Power can experience path loss or read-only file system events.

This is cause by issues within the ibmvfc driver and VIOS code.

Refer to this troubleshooting page for more information.

The CLI command 'lsportip' was removed in 8.4.2.0 and replaced with a new command 'lsip'. This will impact interoperability with any tools that rely on lsportip.

This change prevents Veeam from working correctly with Spectrum Virtualize systems running 8.4.2 or higher, until Veeam release a new version.

This issue has now been resolved as Veeam Backup and Replication Version 12 no longer has this restriction