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 issue 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.

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.

If a Secured IP Partnership fails to connect properly, the system will log a 2020 error. However the Fix Procedure for the 2020 error is unable to guide the user to fix the problem.

If you are experiencing a 2020 error and can't diagnose the problem directly, please contact IBM support.

Systems that upgrade from pre-8.5.2 to 8.5.2 or later will now default to 5 minutes for the performance statistics file generation, regardless of any previous settings.

Note that only the first upgrade to a code level containing this change is affected.

Customers using IP Replication should be aware that the improved performance may produce more data over replication/WAN link.

Customers should ensure that the bandwidth of their replication/WAN link has sufficient capacity to avoid the possibility of network congestion.

Upgrade from 8.5.2.1 is not supported if replication policies exist, due to APAR HU02546.

Remove all replication policies before upgrading from 8.5.2.1. If this is not possible, contact your support representative.

Systems with iSCSI two-way CHAP authentication enabled cannot upgrade to 8.5.3.

To enable the upgrade to proceed, disable two-way CHAP authentication, complete the upgrade, and then re-enable two-way CHAP authentication.

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.

Customers using Storage Insights with systems running policy-based replication will see alerts for recovery volumes which are intentionally offline with the policy-based replication design.

This issue has now been resolved under Storage Insights APAR IT42347.

Applications that use 'lsportip' such as Veeam to retrieve iSCSI target IP address information from a Spectrum Virtualize system will fail.

The 'lsportip' command was deprecated in Spectrum Virtualize code release 8.4.2, so the host server is unable to detect that the Spectrum Virtualize system is iSCSI capable, resulting in failures

In the case of Veeam, there is no support for storage snapshot integration with IBM FlashSystem running Spectrum Virtualize 8.4.1 or newer, however they plan to add support for newer releases of Spectrum Virtualize in the next major release.

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