What's new in this release

Unified Manager 9.9

See the blog Introducing Active IQ Unified Manager 9.9 for enhancements in Unified Manager 9.9.

Data protection monitoring enhancements

Unified Manager now allows monitoring of Storage VM disaster recovery (SVM-DR) configurations. The following capabilities are supported:

• Discovery and monitoring of SVM-DR relationships
• Alerting capabilities about availability and protection issues with SVM-DR relationships
• Reporting support for SVM-DR relationships
• Ability to understand the protection source (volume or Storage VM) of a relationship

Public REST APIs enhancements

A new set of REST APIs have been introduced in this release for ONTAP performance monitoring and retrieving license information. The following APIs have been introduced:

• Datacenter API to retrieve information on cluster licenses
• Performance metrics and analytics APIs for clusters, nodes, storage VMs, aggregates, volumes, and LUNs
  • You can gather sample data and high level summary (average, max, min) at different time intervals.
  • The minimum granularity supported by performance APIs is equal to the current performance polling interval of 5 minutes for Unified Manager.

For more information about metrics and analytics APIs, see the Active IQ Unified Manager API Developer's Guide.

Note: As a part of the general ONTAP-wide REST API standardization process, Unified Manager 9.6 removed all of its public REST APIs. Release 9.7 onwards, Unified Manager is in the process of reintroducing public REST APIs, which are aligned syntactically and grammatically with those found in ONTAP 9.6 and greater. APIs available in earlier releases of Unified Manager are not compatible with those in Unified Manager 9.7 and greater.

Self-managing storage enhancements

This release introduces the capability to:

• Suppress remediation management action (‘Fix it’) for events where custom scripts are already defined for the corresponding event
• Three new events will be generated when a cluster configuration deviates from the selected configuration for the following scenarios:
  • NTP server settings change
  • Cluster and storage VM login banner change
  • Logging configuration change
• Improved user experience for the Management Actions: A new option has been added on the left navigation pane helping you to find and execute the actions quickly from the Management Actions page

Backup and restore of Unified Manager using NetApp Snapshots on Windows

Unified Manager 9.9 adds support for Snapshot-based backup and restore for LUNs on Windows Server. MySQL database dump is the default backup mechanism for Unified Manager. The present limitation of long backup or restore window is overcome using NetApp Snapshot backup method for Windows systems. The new backup and restore workflows take only a few seconds to complete. This is an extension of the Snapshot-based backup and restore functionality introduced for Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS Linux systems in the previous release.

Note: This release supports Snapshot-based backup and restore for LUNs on Windows server for only iSCSI configuration.

Configurable Security Dashboard

The Feature Settings page now provides the following functionality to:

• Disable/hide the Security Dashboard, if you do not want to follow the security settings on the ONTAP Hardening Security Guide
• Enable or disable the security settings depending on the compliance requirements in your environment. It also enables you to change the existing security settings to a user-defined value, for example NTP configuration
  Note: Only the compliance settings related to clusters and storage VM can be enabled or disabled.

Also, for security reasons the details of the user disabling the existing security settings is logged in an audit log.

Security enhancements

This release introduces the following capabilities:

• Certificates generated by using external Certificate Signing Request (CSR) tools, such as OpenSSL, BoringSSL, can now be imported into Unified Manager
• The HTTPS certificate can now be regenerated with a configurable key size and validity period. The validity period of the default HTTPS certificate during installation is changed from 825 days to 397 days
• Audit log support: The following enhancements have been made for audit logs. You can now:
  • Restrict unauthorized users to view, edit, or delete audit log files
  • Detect tampering of audit logs from authorised users
  • Forward audit logs to a remote server, such as the Syslog server.

    No other type of logs, such as server logs and error logs can be forwarded.

  • Capture interactions by authorized or unauthorized users against the system, including authentication attempts, and login and logout operations performed from the UI or by using REST APIs

UX enhancements

The following UI enhancements have been made for better user experience:

• Intuitive visualizations of the protection relationships: A new Relationships page is available under the Protection menu on the left navigation pane to view the various aspects of data center objects in a protection relationship
• One-shot view of all relationships: You can draw reports on the relationships of all objects in a data center from the Relationships page under the Protection menu on the left navigation pane
• Exclusion filter enhancement: You can now exclude entries as a part of the does not contain filter to generate customized UI view or custom reports
• Filtering inactive volumes: Unified Manager now makes it easy for you to find and reclaim your storage with the capability of finding all inactive volumes. You can now filter Zombie Volumes (inactive volumes) on the Volumes view to create reports and check which volumes you can shelve

Node support enhanced to support up to 250 nodes

The number of nodes supported by Unified Manager has now been extended to 250 from 150 (supported in Unified Manager 9.7 and 9.8 releases). For more information, see the Active IQ Unified Manager Best Practices Guide (TR-4621) on the Active IQ Unified ManagerActive IQ Unified Manager documentation resources page.

Launching System Manager

You can now launch ONTAP System Manager from a context-sensitive link on these Unified Manager pages. If you click the View in System Manager link from a page, for example, the Relationships page, the link redirects you to view the same protection relationships in System Manager.

• Cluster setup, Cluster Inventory, Cluster Health, and Cluster Performance pages
• Aggregate Inventory, Aggregate Health, and Aggregate Performance pages
• Volume Inventory, Volume Health, and Volume Performance pages
• Node Inventory and Node Performance pages
• Storage VM Inventory, Storage VM Health, and Storage VM Performance pages
• Protection relationship pages

The View in System Manager menu option is available as one of the link for each storage entity. The View in System Manager link is also available in the details page of the storage entities' health, performance, and capacity.

Note: The context-sensitive links to ONTAP System Manager are dependent on the ONTAP version you are running on. For ONTAP 9.7 and later, all the objects (Cluster, Volume, Aggregate, storage VM, Node, and Protection Relationship) have capability to launch context sensitive links to System Manager. For ONTAP versions 9.6 and 9.5, only cluster and volume objects have links to System Manager. For ONTAP version 9.3, only cluster objects have links to System Manager. The other objects in ONTAP versions 9.6, 9.5, and 9.3 do not have links to System Manager as these ONTAP versions do not support object linking through URL.

Launching vCenter Server user interface

You can now launch the vCenter Server UI from a context-sensitive link on these Unified Manager pages:

• VMware - vCenter list view
• VMware - Virtual machine Summary
• Topology/Extended Topology view with links to the vCenter Server datastore

On-demand backup of Unified Manager

This feature enables you to instantaneously create a backup of Unified Manager, irrespective of whether the configured backup type is MySQL database or NetApp Snapshot. You can now use the Active IQ Unified Manager web UI to generate on-demand MySQL database or Snapshot backups of the Unified Manager instance, as and when required.

Generating and sending on-demand support bundle

This release supports generating a support bundle using the Unified Manager web UI and sending it to technical support. While generating the on-demand support bundle, you can select whether you want to create a light or full support bundle. While the full support bundle contains all types of support data, the lightweight support bundle contains only 30 days of logs and configuration database records. For more information, see the Troubleshooting section of the Unified Manager Online Help.

Support for virtual machines on NFS4.1 datastores

This release provides support for virtual machines configured on NFS4.1 datastores. These virtual machines are listed in the grid of VM inventory.

Support for Python scripts

This release supports Python as a scripting language to associate with alerts, along with the previously supported file formats of Perl, Shell, PowerShell, and .bat.