Active IQ Unified Manager 9.9 includes several new features and enhancements, focusing on simplicity, REST API automation, backup and restore on Windows, data protection monitoring, security, and so forth.
- 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:
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:
- 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.