Netapp yesterday released its Virtual Storage Console (renamed SMVI plugin) 4.2 beta. There are about 150 bug fixes in it and also include roles as one of its newer features.
There is also support for VDDK 5.1 to support Windows 2012 servers as well. There is some consolidation done in the Backup and recovery sections as well.
An excerpt below –
VSC Privileges
The first thing you should go look at is the native Roles pane in your vSphere client after installing VSC 4.2. You may have seen the few we’ve had in there before, but it has now been massively expanded to include an individual privilege for just about every granular task you could perform within the VSC.
VSC Canned Roles
We’ve also taken the liberty of creating some pre-canned roles for you to use as sample templates. I’d like to recommend that you only use these as SAMPLE TEMPLATES to clone and customize as you see fit. If we need to modify these in a future release, we don’t want to screw you up by doing so. We’re gonna warn you about it, we’re gonna recommend against doing it, but fully expect some people will modify them and run into trouble when upgrading in the future. We’re hoping to avoid this as much as possible, so please please please do not modify the canned roles themselves, but Clone the roles and then modify those.
As part of the Canned Roles, one of the things we insisted on doing was identifying which native vSphere privileges were required to perform VSC-specific actions. This is one of those awesome stories where we collaborated heavily with devs from VMware to really nail this down for YOU. We’ve taken into account as many scenarios as possible and here is what we’ve delivered…
- VSC Administrator
- VSC Read-Only
- VSC Provision
- VSC Clone
- VSC Scan/Migrate
- VSC Backup
- VSC Restore
The coolest one of these, to me, is the Read-Only. If you look at the list of privileges available to any role, you will see a nested privilege called “View.” This solves several asks, two of which I want to highlight here…
- One of the asks we’ve had for some time is the ability to hide the VSC for certain underprivileged Jr. admins, where the seniors did not want certain vSphere users/admins to even see the VSC. We’ve added this privilege specifically for this task.
- Secondly, admins have always wanted a “read-only” view. Sometimes, the IT Director wants to come in and see what things look like. Sometimes, you want to be able to have certain screens up on a NOC panel. Whatever the use case, if you select none of the other VSC privileges, and select ‘View’ by itself, this will enable Read-Only and not allow a user to interact with the product, or execute any of the tasks/workflows within.
VSC Shared Credentials
When VSC 1.0 first came out, Rapid Cloning Utility (RCU), and SMVI were separate products. When they were all baked together around VSC 2.0 timeframe, they still managed their own controllers independently. One of the core charters of development for the 4.x cycle, along with clustered Data ONTAP equivalency, was to consolidate all of this into one centrally managed list within Monitoring & Host Configuration.I’m happy to report that as of 4.2, we have completed this story by consolidating management of controllers used in Backup & Recovery as well.
We have modified the installer to put in a notification screen to note this, and we are adding some notes into the Install & Admin Guide, as well as the Release Notes to let you know what steps you need to take in order for your jobs to continue to run successfully.
The long and the short of it is: In past releases, you had to Add… storage controllers and credentials in the B&R section if you wanted to enable them for snapshot backup operations. When you go into B&R in 4.2, you will notice that list is now gone, and that the credentials have been consolidated into Monitoring & Host Config.
Upgrades from 4.x to 4.2 will leave your backup jobs intact, but they could potentially fail if they use a special user account to run. For example, let’s say you were using the account “backupadmin” in Backup & Recovery previously, but the controller(s) were listed in Monitoring & Host Config with “root.” Whatever account is configured in M&HC will override what is configured in B&R during the upgrade process. Now that these have been consolidated, your jobs will use “root” to run, as that is what is configured in Monitoring & Host Configuration. In this particular scenario, the jobs will continue to run, simply because root is root. But in the case where you might have “DiscoveryOnly” as an account for listing controllers in M&HC, and the account you used previously to run backup jobs would have higher permissions, the jobs would then fail because the “DiscoveryOnly” account does not have enough permissions to execute snapshots on the controllers.
Note: It is always ill-advised to use root, and both NetApp and myself always recommend against it. If you’re a generalist managing both, it might not be a big deal, but I would at least create a named user with the same “root” privileges so that you could at least audit what was doing what to what as time goes on.
All storage controllers, clusters, and user/pass credentials for all functional areas of VSC are now solely managed within Monitoring & Host Configuration.
VSC Bug Fixes
VSC 4.2 addresses and fixes more than 150 bugs, issues, and vulnerabilities. It’s hard to call out any one in particular because they all carry tremendous weight as a full payload, but I wanted to highlight one of the big ticket items we fixed in this release, in an effort to encourage you to upgrade your production environments as soon as possible when the final release of VSC 4.2 is available.Upgraded to VDDK 5.1 to support W2K12
VDDK 5.1 has support for newer versions of Windows operation systems including Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and Windows Server 2012. P&C and O&M both have a dependency on the VDDK, so they have both been upgraded to the newest version in order for VSC to support the latest Microsoft OS’s.
You can download your version here.
Comment if you like! Comment if you have tried it
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