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What's new in Cloud Volumes ONTAP 9.15.1

Contributors netapp-manini
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Cloud Volumes ONTAP 9.15.1 includes new enhancements.

Additional features and enhancements are also introduced in the latest versions of BlueXP. See the BlueXP Release Notes for details.

9.15.1 P4 (25 November 2024)

The 9.15.1 P4 patch is now available for Cloud Volumes ONTAP for all cloud providers. BlueXP will prompt you to upgrade your existing systems to this patch release.

View the list of bugs fixed in the P4 patch (NetApp Support Site login required).

9.15.1 P3 (29 October 2024)

The 9.15.1 P3 patch is now available for Cloud Volumes ONTAP for all cloud providers. BlueXP will prompt you to upgrade your existing systems to this patch release.

View the list of bugs fixed in the P3 patch (NetApp Support Site login required).

9.15.1 P2 (14 October 2024)

The 9.15.1 P2 patch is now available for Cloud Volumes ONTAP for all cloud providers. BlueXP will prompt you to upgrade your existing systems to this patch release.

View the list of bugs fixed in the P2 patch (NetApp Support Site login required).

9.15.1 P1 (3 September 2024)

The 9.15.1 P1 patch is now available for Cloud Volumes ONTAP for all cloud providers. BlueXP will prompt you to upgrade your existing systems to this patch release.

View the list of bugs fixed in the P1 patch (NetApp Support Site login required).

9.15.1 GA (22 August 2024)

The Cloud Volumes ONTAP 9.15.1 GA is now available in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. The GA version is available for deployment and upgrade.

This release includes the following features and enhancements for Azure. Read on to learn more about the specific configurations supporting these new features.

Support for Premium SSD v2 Managed Disks on Azure

Premium SSD v2 Managed Disks are now supported in Cloud Volumes ONTAP systems on Azure. These premium disks provide higher performance with lower latency at a lower cost for both single node and high-availability (HA) pairs, as compared to Premium SSD Managed Disks. Like other managed disks, the maximum disk size is 32 TiB. The performance (capacity, throughput, and IOPS) of a Premium SSD v2 Managed Disks can be configured, allowing workloads to be cost effective, while meeting shifting performance needs.

Learn about Azure storage.

Deploy HA pairs in single availability zones on Azure

Beginning with Cloud Volumes ONTAP 9.15.1, you can deploy virtual machine (VM) instances in HA mode in single availability zones (AZs) in Azure. Unlike the previous non-zonal deployments, Cloud Volumes ONTAP 9.15.1 uses Microsoft Virtual Machines Scale Sets in Flexible orchestration mode to deploy all resources, including separate fault domains within the same AZ, guaranteeing optimal availability. This deployment mode, by default, uses Premium SSD v2 Managed Disks when the following criteria are met:

If any of these criteria is not fulfilled, the previous non-zonal deployment mode for locally-redundant storage (LRS) becomes effective.

Support for Virtual Machines Scale Sets to unify all Azure HA types

Cloud Volumes ONTAP 9.15.1 leverages Virtual Machines Scale Sets in Flexible orchestration mode on Azure for deploying virtual machine (VM) instances in single availability zones for high-availability (HA) pairs. It covers all flavors of the HA mode, page blob, LRS, zone-redundant storage (ZRS) or multi-zonal, and LRS zonal (single AZ).

Support for FlexCache write-back

Beginning with Cloud Volumes ONTAP 9.15.1, FlexCache write-back is supported as an alternate mode of operation for writing at a cache.

For more information about this feature, refer to the ONTAP documentation FlexCache write-back overview.

For information about how BlueXP manages FlexCache volumes, refer to the BlueXP volume caching documents.

Upgrade notes

Read through these notes to learn more about upgrading to this release.

How to upgrade

Upgrades of Cloud Volumes ONTAP must be completed from BlueXP. You should not upgrade Cloud Volumes ONTAP by using System Manager or the CLI. Doing so can impact system stability.

Learn how to upgrade when BlueXP notifies you.

Supported upgrade path

You can upgrade to Cloud Volumes ONTAP 9.15.1 from 9.15.0 and 9.14.1 releases. BlueXP will prompt you to upgrade eligible Cloud Volumes ONTAP systems to this release.

Downtime

  • The upgrade of a single node system takes the system offline for up to 25 minutes, during which I/O is interrupted.

  • Upgrading an HA pair is nondisruptive and I/O is uninterrupted. During this nondisruptive upgrade process, each node is upgraded in tandem to continue serving I/O to clients.

c4, m4, and r4 instances no longer supported

In AWS, the c4, m4, and r4 EC2 instance types are no longer supported with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. If you have an existing system that's running on a c4, m4, or r4 instance type, you must change to an instance type in the c5, m5, or r5 instance family. You can't upgrade to this release until you change the instance type.

Learn how to change the EC2 instance type for Cloud Volumes ONTAP.

Refer to NetApp Support to learn more about the end of availability and support for these instance types.