Release Notes V-Bien 6.5.22

Collax V-Bien
21.06.2018

Installation Notes

Install Update

Please read the following release notes carefully, before continuing. When installing this update on a Collax V-Bien cluster the following steps have to be performed:

/ Important information

Please have a look at the Collax V-Bien 6.5.28 Release Notes if the nodes have Version 6.5.26 or above and haven’t been updated yet. For this update, it is necessary that both nodes are set in maintenance mode simultaneously.

Procedure

  1. Click at High Availability within the Dashboard.
  2. Select the other (not the local) and change into the Start Maintenance dialog.
  3. Now, put this other node into maintenance mode by confirming the query in the dialog. Wait until the maintenance mode is reached. Depending on the number of virtual machines and hard disk, this can take some time. Virtual machines will be migrated live, which can take a few minutes depending on the size of the RAM. The progress will be displayed in the list of background activities.
  4. Close the dialog.
  5. In the list of nodes, select again the other node whose software is to be updated by right-clicking it.
  6. Change to System Update ….
  7. Click Check for Updates. The completion will be displayed as “100%”.
  8. Click Download and Install. This function will download the latest software packages from the update server and install them. The completion will be displayed as Install - 100%.
  9. Close the dialog and set the node to active.
  10. Please repeat this procedure for the local node.

Install Update

Please read the following release notes carefully, before continuing. When installing this update on a Collax V-Bien cluster the following steps have to be performed:

/ Important information

For this update, it is necessary that both nodes are set in maintenance mode simultaneously.

Note that when using multiple drives within a virtual machine, they can be viewed as “offline” in Disk Management because of a Windows policy. By clicking Online, the volume can be reactivated.

Procedure

  1. Please shut down all virtual machines within the cluster management gui before continuing with the following steps. Please consider hat virtual machines, beeing hibernated will loose its hybernate files.
  2. For this update it’s necessary to put bote nodes into maintenance mode simultaneously.
  3. Click at High Availability within the Dashboard.
  4. Choose one V-Bien node after another and change into the Start Maintenance dialog.
  5. Now, put both nodes into maintenance mode by confirming the query in the dialog. Wait until the maintenance mode is reached. The progress will be displayed in the list of background activities.
  6. Close the dialog.
  7. In the list of nodes, select the node whose software is to be updated by right-clicking it.
  8. Wechseln Sie in den Dialog System Update ….
  9. Click Check for Updates. The completion will be displayed as “100%”.
  10. Click Download and Install. This function will download the latest software packages from the update server and install them. The completion will be displayed as Install - 100%.
  11. A new kernel is going to be installed. The node will automatically be rebooted two minutes after the installation of the system update. This will be indicated upon completion of the update procedure. Wait for the node to reboot.
  12. Please repeat this procedure on the next node that needs to be updated.
  13. If all nodes within the cluster are updated and active the virtual machines can be started again.

New in this Version

Proactive HA: Adjusted evacuated state

The fencing mechanism ensures that all VMs remain available even after a spontaneous hardware failure. Some hardware failures, however, are predictable. With Proactive HA, permanent checks of the hardware components are performed. All errors are monitored which indicates an imminent hardware failure. If such an error is detected, the node is evacuated. This means that all VMs will be moved to the other node in a timely, uninterrupted manner by live migration. With this release will be the behavior and the message adjusted and improved if the other node is not available and the first active node would have to be evacuated.

Extended desciption field in Wizard for virtual machines

The wizard assists you in setting up a virtual machine. The “comment” field for VMs is beeing extended within this release to a multi-line input field and the complete description can be shown in the tooltip.

Number of virtual network interfaces

Inside the configuration of the virtual machine, the number of virtual network interface cards that the virtual machine is permitted to use is raised.

Number of virtual drives

Inside the configuration of the virtual machine, the number of virtual drives that the virtual machine is permitted to use is raised.

HTML5 - RDP Access to VM Consoles

This update has replaced the Java Viewer with HTML5 in the virtual machine management dialog. By clicking on the icon in this column, the screen console of the corresponding virtual machine is opened in a separate browser tab. In addition, a pop-up displays how the virtual machine screen can be accesse with a VNC software client or with a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) connection.

Collax V-Bien Office

Collax V-Bien is an integrated package for virtualization and high availability. With this update the technical framework for Collax V-Bien Office will be released. From now on the carefree package for virtualization and high availability can be licensed with upto 32 GB RAM and one server CPU. A registered V-Bien Office license will be visible as such in the administration interface. V-Bien can furthermore use upto 64 GB RAM and V-Bien Pro more than 64 GB RAM and more than one CPU. V-Bien, V-Bien Office and V-Bien Pro have no functional differences.

Emulation USB keyboard

The dialogue is located under the extended settings of the virtual machine. If this option is set, in addition to a PS2 keyboard a USB keyboard will be emulated. If a VM does not respond to keystrokes, you may need to enable the virtual USB keyboard.

Important System Components

The following important system components will be installed with this update.

  • drbd 8.4.11-1
  • kernel 4.9.102

Issues Fixed in this Version

Blocked eSAN hard disk replication

Due to a code change within the software component DRBD, which is responsible for synchronization the virtual disks, under rare circumstances it could lead to problems on systems with a large number of virtual disks. The replication of a single virtual disk might no longer start automatically and a manual intervention was needed. With this update, the replication of all virtual hard disks works reliable at any time.

Cluster Join and Interconnect

The initial setup of the Collax V-Bien cluster could not be carried out if more than 8 network cards were used and at the same time for the Cluster Interconnect, the highest numbers of interfaces (from eth7) were selected. This is going to be improved with this update.

ISO upload after Cluster Setup

Installing virtual machines requires an ISO installation media. These ISO files can be uploaded in advance. Alternatively, the ISO files can also be used during the Wizard to create a virtual machine. Right after commissioning a Collax V-Bien Cluster, it could take a moment to upload ISO files, because the required internal directories have not yet been created. With this update, the behavior improved.

Dollarsign in Display-Password

For security reasons, the VM screen is accessed only after entering a specified password. Due to an error in the program code, you could not connect to the display console if the password contained a dollar sign. This is fixed with this update.

List of VMs from backup target

For backups with V-Bien, data can either be copied to a Windows(tm) network share or to an NFS (Network File System) share. The backup target is also required in order to restore data, as a list of VM backups will be read from there and be listed for recovery. Due to a bug in the GUI routine the list of VMs was still in the cache, even though the backup target was unreachable. With this release the list will be updated according to availability.

Remote Login Program OpenSSH

In the source code of OpenSSH security holes have been discovered. These holes will be closed within this software update to OpenSSH 7.7p1

See OpenSSH Release 7.7

Meltdown and Spectre

Security researchers have discovered massive security holes in processors that were developed by security experts. These holes were published under the name Meltdown and Spectre. This update installs a kernel in version 4.9.102 and protecs against Meltdown, Spectre Variant 1, Variant2, Variant 3, Variant 3a und Variant 4.

Microcode update

To protect against Specter V2, it is necessary to perform an update of the microcode. With this update, this happens automatically, without having to update the BIOS. Also see here :

Internet Domain Name Server Bind

In the source code of the internet domain name server BIND security holes have been discovered. These holes will be closed within this Collax software update to bind 9.9.11-P1

Assigned Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) number: CVE-2017-3145

Cryptography Toolkit OpenSSL

In the source code of the cryptography toolkit OpenSSL 1.0.2o security holes have been discovered. These holes will be closed within this Collax software update.

Assigned Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) numbers:

CVE-2018-0739 CVE-2017-3737 CVE-2017-3738 CVE-2017-3736 CVE-2017-3735

Race condition when using a non certified software component

The use of non-Collax certified software component Docusnap on a customers Cluster causes the scripts called in this case to have extremely long entries in the process list. This in turn could lead to the stonith of a node in the worst case, since the Cluster resource agent, responsible for controlling the cluster resources, is not working properly. This situation can no longer occur with this update.

Please note that when using non-certified 3rd party software on our products, is could happen that the HA functionality is not guaranteed. This can cause failures or at worst lead to data loss. If you have additional software on Collax V servers, please contact Collax Support in advance.

Notes

V-Cube+: Windows Setup notes Error Message 0x80300001

If Windows Server 2008 R2 and above is to be installed on Virtio hard disks using the Virtio driver CD for Windows, Windows reports the error code 0x80300001. The error message occurs if the partitions are recognized and the user clicks the button Next. The message means, that the installation CD of Windows needs to be inserted again.

Restore virtual harddiscs

From Collax V-Bien version 6.8.15 on the internal path for virtual harddiscs changes and a restore from previous backups isn’t possible anymore without manual intervention. In case of a baremetal resore please use the previous verion or don’t hesitate to contact support.

Monitoring Media Erros on LSI Controllers

Within update Collax V-Bien 6.5.22 the active monitoring of media errors on LSI RAID-Controllers has been customized. Up to now a warning information for hard disks with a single media error has been issued, although the controller was able to handle those errors and correct them automatically. From now on the warning threshold is 100 errors.

CD-/DVD-ROM Selection

Are multiple drives assigned to a virtual machine and is the CD-/DVD-ROM drive specified as drive 1, the boot process of the VM failes with the message “No bootable device”. As a workaround, the CD-/DVD-ROM drive should not come first.