Veritas InfoScale™ 7.3.1 What's New In This Release - AIX, Linux, Solaris

Last Published:
Product(s): InfoScale & Storage Foundation (7.3.1)
  1. What's new in this release
    1.  
      About this document
    2. Changes related to installation and upgrades
      1.  
        Change in upgrade path
    3. Changes related to Cluster Server agents
      1.  
        New High Availability agent for Amazon Web Services (AWS)
      2.  
        New High Availability agents for Azure environment
      3.  
        Support for configuring applications for HA in Azure cloud using InfoScale Enterprise
      4.  
        Support for configuring LLT over TCP
      5.  
        Start-only option for applications
      6.  
        256-bit encryption for enhanced security
      7.  
        Stale key detection to avoid a false preexisting split brain condition
      8.  
        VCS stop timeout
      9.  
        New attributes for Cluster Server agents
    4. Changes related to Veritas File System
      1.  
        New option [-i] included in fsadm command to exclude the actively used files during file system reorganization
      2.  
        Delayed allocation support extended to clustered file systems
      3.  
        Support for migrating Oracle database from Oracle ASM to Veritas File System (VxFS)
    5. Changes related to Veritas Volume Manager
      1.  
        Support for InfoScale deployments in Azure cloud
      2.  
        NVMe device support for Solaris
      3.  
        Support for Azure Blob storage connector
      4.  
        Erasure coded volume enhancements
    6. Changes related to replication
      1.  
        Support for configuring volume replication in Azure cloud
      2.  
        Support for setting up replication across clouds
      3.  
        Veritas Volume Replicator Performance Improvements
      4.  
        Support for replication of encrypted volumes
    7. Changes related to operating systems
      1.  
        Support for Root Disk Encapsulation (RDE) on All Linux Distributions is Deprecated
    8. Changes related to Dynamic Multipathing
      1.  
        Support for dynamic multipathing in the KVM guest virtualized machine

Delayed allocation support extended to clustered file systems

The delayed allocation capability for extending writes on a file system was available for local mounts. This capability is now extended for clustered file systems (CFS mounts).

With this support, depending on an application I/O size, instead of allocating a single block for every write operation a clustered file system will now allocate multiple blocks in a single instance. The delayed allocation thus reduces the file system fragmentation.

When an application I/O is received, the delayed allocation capability enables the clustered file system to spilt the write operation in to the following sequence:

  1. Reserve a disk space

    When an application I/O is received, the file system first reserves a disk space and the data is cached.

  2. Allocate extents

    After a disk space is reserved, a scheduler allocates disk blocks at the background and the file system then combines multiple block allocation requests to allocate extents.

The delayed extent allocation thus helps to avoid file system fragmentation and keeps the extent contiguous even if several files grow at the same time.

The delayed allocation is not dependent on the file system disk layout version and is disabled by default. You can enable delayed allocation using the vxtunefs command. You can display the delayed allocation range in the file by using the fsmap command.

See the vxtunefs(1M) and fsmap(1M) manual pages.

Notes:

  • Delayed allocation must be disabled in cases where the data must be immediately written to the disk. For example, direct I/O, concurrent I/O, FDD/ODM access, and synchronous I/O.

  • Delayed allocation is not supported on memory-mapped files, BSD quotas, and shared mount points in a Cluster File System (CFS).

  • When BSD quotas are enabled on a file system, delayed allocation is turned off automatically for that file system.