The latest release of Dell EMC Unity 4.5.1 is a service pack update for the previous release of Unity OS 4.5 which already included a massive number of updates and improvements. The latest release of Dell EMC Unity OS is available for download from the Dell Support site. The procedure to upgrade an existing installation of Unity OS is very straight forward. The details have been covered in the article showing the steps on installing the latest release.
As already mentioned Dell EMC Unity OS 4.5 already packs plenty of new updates. The following is en excerpt from the official release notes available from the Dell EMC site:
Unity OE version convention update: The Unity Operating Environment (OE) version numbering convention has changed to become more logical and streamlined. The first three fields denoting major release, minor release, and service pack release remain unchanged. A new field for “distribution type” has been added. The distribution type indicates the type of release of the OE.
In previous releases, OE versions are displayed in four fields:
In 4.5 and later releases, OE versions are displayed in six fields:
Distribution types:
• 0-3 Internal
• 4 Early Access / Beta
• 5 GA
• 6 Special / Hot Fix
UnityVSA HA with optional Tie-breaker Node (TBN): With this release, the Professional Edition of UnityVSA now offers the ability to deploy two “storage processors” on to two different nodes for high availability. Deploying UnityVSA HA allows to deploy each node on a different ESXi server, which provides high availability. If one node goes down, the resources can be automatically failed over to the other node. This minimizes downtime, allowing VMware HA to restart the failed node on another ESXi server in the cluster.
UnityVSA Support for VMware Cloud (VMC): With this release, both the Professional and Community editions of UnityVSA can be deployed to the VMware Cloud (VMC) as a single node.
NFSv4-only option: In previous releases, when creating a NAS server, the NFS version options included NFSv3 only, or both NFSv3 and NFSv4. If NFSv4 was selected, NFSv3 was also enabled by default. With this release, NFSv4 can be selected to enable NFSv4 only, independently of NFSv3.
Quota enhancements: The User Quota report has been updated to include UNIX Name, Windows Name and Windows SID values.
Dynamic Pool enhancements: In previous releases, when adding multiple drives to a Dynamic Pool, but less than the entire RAID width of the pool (for example, R5 pool with stripe width of 6 drives), none of the newly added drive space was usable until all RAID extents were mapped over to the new drives. With this release, when adding multiple drives to a Dynamic Pool, but less than the entire RAID width of the pool, the first drive will be added to the pool immediately to provide usable free space.
The rest of the drives are added together through the shuffling of RAID extents. This function allows the user to obtain usable space faster.
Performance Metrics enhancements: For both Historical and Performance Metrics charts, it can now select the Percentage View for object-level line charts (such as metrics for LUNs, file systems, datastores, and hardware components). This displays data points as percentage values rather than absolute values.
Data reduction enhancements: This release includes an optional Advanced Deduplication switch which expands the deduplication capabilities of the Data Reduction algorithm. This switch helps increase the storage efficiency of systems above what is achieved with data reduction on a LUN or file system. It provides the ability to reduce the amount of storage needed for user data by eliminating duplicate 8KB blocks of data within a storage resource.
File-level Retention: File-level Retention (FLR) is now supported on Unity systems. FLR protects files from modification or deletion through the CIFS/SMB, NFS, or FTP protocols based on a specified retention policy. FLR is enabled during the creation of a file system.
These are only a small selection of the new updates in the latest Dell EMC Unity 4.5.1 Unity OS release. There is plenty more including:
- Space Reporting Improvements
- Lookup Sequencing between NIS and DNS
- ESRS Credentials Check
- ESRS Connection Test CLI support
- Standard Email server support for system notifications
- Service command enhancements
- SAN Copy Pull enhancements
- File system enhancements
- Unity MetroSync Manager
- Restricted Shell (rbash) Mode
- Unity Native Remote Logging
- and more..
A complete list is available in the release notes and the nice part is most of them are available for the Community Edition as well.
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