VTrak A-Class 1.08.0000.00 Release Notes
1. Release Summary This is a Service Release for the A-Class Shared Storage Appliance with firmware version 1.08.0000.00. It supports Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X. This release includes support for Apple OSx 10.9. Linux support will follow shortly. The supported OS versions are listed below. This release only provides English Language support. This will be expanded in future releases. This interim release does not currently support the Promise NAS Cluster Gateway and the additions of Ex30 Nodes. This support will be added in the upcoming release. Important Upgrade Note for MAC Users: This Release of the VTrakFS SR1 Package (1.08.0000.00) requires the MAC Client user to uninstall the MAC Clients for either of the two previous releases FCS (version 1.01.0000.00) or PR1 (version 1.05.0000.00). This means that you must FIRST uninstall using the VTrakFSClient from the FCS or PR1 package to uninstall the MAC Client, THEN use the current SR1 package to install the new one. This document is applicable to the following PROMISE A-Class models: Model VTrak A3800fSL VTrak A3800fDM Description 4U/24 FC, single controller with 2 FS Support for 4 Clients 4U/24 FC, dual controller with 4 FS support for 10 Clients The supported Client Operating Systems, the Client Packages, and the Multipath drivers used for each for this release include:
Vendor Platform Type Client Package Multipath Windows Server 2008 R2 Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 x64 VTrakFS Client 1.1.0 PerfectPath 4.1.0.2 x64 VTrakFS Client 1.1.0 PerfectPath 4.1.0.2 Microsoft Windows 7 x64 VTrakFS Client 1.1.0 Included in Client Windows 7 SP1 x64 VTrakFS Client 1.1.0 Included in Client Windows 8 x64 VTrakFS Client 1.1.0 Included in Client Windows 2012 Server X64 VTrakFS Client 1.1.0 PerfectPath 4.1.0.2 OS X 10.7 x64 VTrakFS Client 1.2.0 Included in OS Apple OS X 10.8 x64 VTrakFS Client 1.2.0 Included in OS OS X 10.9 x64 VTrakFS Client 1.2.0 Included in OS The supported Promise Expansion subsystems include: Vendor Platform Type VTrak J630s 3U/16-bay 6Gbs SAS Promise VTrak J830s 4U/24-bay 6Gbs SAS VTrak J930s 4U/60-bay 6Gbs SAS The Upcoming Release will support the following Promise Ex30 RAID subsystems that can be attached as Nodes to the A-Class SAN. This is not supported in this release. Please contact Technical Support for information regarding special builds to add this feature in the current release. Vendor Platform Type Supported Firmware VTrak E630f 3U/16-bay 6Gbs SAS HDD 4.10.0000.00, 10.13.2270.00 or higher Promise VTrak E830f 4U/24-bay 6Gbs SAS HDD 4.10.0000.00, 10.13.2270.00 or higher
2. Release version 1.08.0000.00 The following are changes that have been made since the 1.05.0000.00 Release. 2.1. Firmware Specific Fixes Fixed a defect seen where adding an A3800 to a switch that includes Ex30 s with a large number of LUNs could cause the A3800 Controllers to crash. Changed Event to indicate "Forced Offline" instead of "Dead" when a PD is forced offline. Fixed defect where a controller might reboot again following a controller failover due to a heartbeat timeout. Fixed defect where the Slave controller could get held on reset while disabling "cache Mirroring" in the subsytem Changed Automatic firmware synchronization event from critical severity to information. Fixed defect seen on some drives where a Medium Error on a drive could cause the drive to be marked "Dead". Fixed a defect where Logging into CLI or GUI, adding or deleting the FS license, or create a new file system caused "unknown" severity Events to pop up SAN Events have now been added Fixed defect where a controller could be held on reset when downgrading the firmware to an earlier build Corrected BIOS version display Fixed a defect where a Media Patrol could fail with PD's that are greater than 2 TB Fixed BIOS date display for CLI command "ptiflash -a versioninfo" Fixed defect where a controller could crash or reboot after relocating a Transport Ready PD to a free slot. Fixed defect where if you boot the A3800 before you boot an attached Jx30 JBOD, the arrays might not come online without an additional reboot. Fixed defect seen if you removed an array and its dedicated spare from the A3800 after transporting it, then insert an Unconfigured disk to the slot where the spare was, a stale entry of that spare was listed 2.2. Software Specific Fixes Improvements made to more clearly define GUI Access limitations for different levels of users.
Fixed defect where refreshing a GUI page might shift to a different attached node when selecting different options. Improved highlighting on some GUI selections Improved NTP service status in GUI Added option in GUI to select DST (Daylight Saving Time) Fixed defect where spare drive info wasn't available in multiple nodes The Auto-configuration of PD's and LUN's has been changed for performance improvement. Multiple GUI improvements and changes in display, help and configuration have been made Change made to disable the stop, pause and resume operations for the region initialization Fixed defect where the SAN wizard saw clients from a different network during discovery Improvements to CLI commands and outputs Fixed defect where replacing an AClass controller with a new one would lose the Quota and LDAP settings Added NTP management in the GUI Change made to stop filesystem operations when drives fail or are removed during filesystem formatting. Fixed bug where the CLI init command didn't distinguish between LUN on A3800 or an attached node. Improvements made to Filesystem Management performance Improvements made to setting time on the A3800 Added "stop" option when filesystem check is in progress. Fixed defect where the Subnet Mask wouldn't change after updating. Currently prevent user from adding more than the maximum 255 data groups Fixed a defect where Background activities weren't displayed when background synchronization was in progress. Formatting status has been added to the filesystem info page Added fragmentation level calculation Indicate that the maximum LUN's supported. Fixed a defect where the administrator rights was changed to viewer if the user restored factory defaults in the GUI. Added the ability to enable and disable rgbyparent for performance improvement * need to change this according to implementation. Added option to allow a user to move a lun from volume-group to another volume-group Added events for filesystem operations - Creation, Deletion, Format.
Enhanced the "defrag" command in the CLI Fixed and occasional controller crash when doing NDIU Fixed a bug where I/O might fail when expanding a filesystem while I/O is running 2.3. Client Specific Fixes for Windows or Mac Clients Fixed a problem seen when adding a MAC Client to an A3800 through a Promise SANLink, only one of the initiator entries of the SANLink were displayed. Note: this problem still exists on a SANLink 2. Fixed defect seen with MAC OSx 10.8 where a controller could crash and restart after periods of heavy I/O. Fixed a defect where a MAC OSx 10.7.5 client could crash when mounting the file system. Added case sensitivity to folder names which are supported in OSx. Changed "Action" heading name to "File" on MAC Client to conform to MAC standards. Additional language support including previously not supported European and Asian characters. Added defrag CLI Support on the MAC Client 3. Current Product Limitations or Requirements Description Workaround/Solution Array Transport is not supported in this Release The A-Class only supports ALUA and LUN Affinity Enabled The A-Class supports a maximum of 32 LUNs per node. (only the primary node is supported until the next release). General A-Class Controller Information Addressed in a future release. This current release only supports 32 LUNs in one AClass node.
Description The Auto configuration Wizard cannot configure a configuration with more than a 219 physical drives. Workaround/Solution Use the advanced options to Manually configure the luns and use greater than 7 drives per disk array group. SAN File System Information The maximum folder level in the file access settings in the AClass GUI is 4. This will be improved in a future release. User respective Client to View the folder or to create additional folders and files. If a filesystem is mounted on a MAC OS 10.7 or 10.8 Mac client, the new volume cannot be shared through AFP/SMB "File Sharing" for other machines to access remotely through the network. This problem was addressed and is working in Maverick s OS 10.9. If there is currently a system with LUN's installed and I/O is running on them, attempting to expand the Filesystem may cause the I/O's to stop. The user should always stop any disk activity before expanding the filesystem to avoid this issue. With Windows SAN clients, sometimes after the Filesystem Client is installed, the Windows Client isn't discovered. The user will see either 1) the client is not discovered by the GUI's setup wizard, or it shows the "! warning" or "n/a " status after manually adding the SAN to the GUI or the CLI. In the Windows system Event log, the following error messages are generated when adding a Server or when mounting LUNs: Virtual Disk Service (VDS) error ownership messages for "bw" volumes are listed after adding the server and rebooting. Partmanager (partmgr) warnings for duplicate LUN disk signatures are listed after mounting the LUNs When a Client has two or more network cards or ports, the Primary Port must be assigned to the A-Class network connections in order for the A-Class Filesystem to be seen. This was seen on some Clients with Qlogic HBA s. Stop any disk activity before expanding a file system. The most likely cause is that the client installed "bonjour" service needs to be restarted. This can be done by going to the Windows Task Manager or Control Panel and restarting the "bonjour" service. The error messages can be ignored. Use the Primary Port to attach the client to the A- Class.
Description Setting a folder to "squash_noroot" and mounting the filesystem in a Windows 8 Client will display the UID and GUID as 0 resulting in no root access. After a Windows Active Directory user logs into VTrak client and mounts the fs, and then logs out, a second Windows AD user cannot mount Vtrak client. LDAP Users folders created on Windows client allow full permission to everyone until configured in Windows. Workaround/Solution Follow the instructions provided by the Promise Knowledge Base: 1. Enable LDAP from A-Class GUI, setup according to Windows AD server 2. Create a Windows AD user and assign uid/gid as 0 (Administrator should have knowledge about how to install Windows AD and how to install UNIX ) 3. Login Windows client using the Windows AD user with uid/gid 0 4. Input username/password of the Windows AD user with uid/gid 0 5. Mount A-Class volume The second user will have to reboot the Windows Client in order to log in under these circumstances. Permission can be granted as follows: 1) create a new fs. In the GUI, if a user creates a Spare drive and later decides to change it from Global to Dedicated or Dedicated to Global, the modifying action won t succeed. It will need to be deleted and a new Spare created. The GUI will show the default settings after a Spare drive is created instead of the actual Spare drive setting. UPS support not currently available in the GUI but will be available in the future. It is available in the CLI using the UPS command. 2) create LDAP testgroup which has two members, such as testuser1 and testuser2. 3) login as local administrator, remove everyone from mount point and add "testgroup" & "owner" to it, then grant "testgroup" read and exec permission, grant"owner" full permission. 4) logout and login as testuser1 or testuser2 GUI and CLI Information To change the Spare drive from Global to Dedicated or vice versa, delete the spare drive and create it with the desired configuration. Actual Spare drive configuration can be viewed in the CLI. Use the CLI to configure the UPS.
Description SNMP support is currently not available in the GUI. The CLI supports only RAID and enclosure functions just as the Ex30 products. In the CLI, issuing the LUN command while Initialization is in progress will show drives as Faulty. Currently the Vtrak Performance Monitor contains Internally generated command traffic on Port 0 in addition to the traffic of the FC ports. This will be changed in the next release. Fibre channel stats as reported by the CLI command "fc -t stats" may report a non-zero InvalidWordSentCount. It is often of 510 but sometimes even a higher value. Client Information Internal LDAP support is currently not supported. This will be available in shortly to include all supported Operating Systems. Windows 7 and Windows 8 display the following harmless errors when the Client Package is installed: 1. module reporter (xx) " this is a redundant path to the lun" 2. Disk xxx has duplicate disk signature If you have a Windows Client version 1.1.0 installed on Windows 2008 R2 server with Domain Control, the VTrakFS GUI "Add SAN" wizard does not detect the new client. If you add it manually, the client has a Status of Warning, and no OS Type or Client Version. The LMM refresh fails for client with "connect to client is failed" Message Workaround/Solution Full SNMP support for both the GUI and CLI will be available in a future release. Check drive status with the LUN command only after the Initialization completes. Realize that the VTrak Performance monitor also contains internal command traffic. The value display is cosmetic. The user just needs to confirm that the value is not incrementing. Use External LDAP either Active Directory or Open Directory Ignore the 2 messages on Windows 7 and 8 when installing the Client Package. Clients that are Domain Controllers are not supported in this release. 4. Contacting Technical Support PROMISE Support Website at http://www.promise.com/support/support_eng.asp PROMISE E-mail Support at http://support.promise.com/
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