2.1 Changes and Improvements in Release 2.4.1

Support for Next-Generation Server Hardware

Oracle Private Cloud Appliance Release 2.4.1 software adds provisioning and orchestration support for Oracle Server X8-2 hardware.

No Upgrade

This software release is available only for factory installation on racks with Oracle Server X8-2 management nodes and compute nodes. Field upgrades of racks with previous generations of server hardware are not possible with Release 2.4.1.

Ethernet Fabric

With Release 2.4.1, a new network architecture is introduced. It is based on high-speed Ethernet switches in a leaf-spine configuration, and software defined networks that live on top of the Ethernet fabric. For a detailed description, see Network Infrastructure in the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance Administrator's Guide.

Oracle VM Update

Controller Software Release 2.4.1 comes with Oracle VM 3.4.6 – both Oracle VM Server and Oracle VM Manager –, meaning it contains all the latest bug fixes and enhancements. This also implies that paravirtualized (PVM) guests are no longer supported. For information about security concerns with PVM guests, refer to the support article with Doc ID 2347948.1.

Bugs Fixed in Release 2.4.1

The following table lists bugs that have been fixed in Oracle Private Cloud Appliance Release 2.4.1.

Table 2.1 List of Fixed Bugs

Bug ID	Description
29705317	“Increase the Size of the iscsi_repository1 LUN” The Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance ZS7-2 provides significantly more disk space than the previous models. Therefore, the default LUN for `iscsi_repository1` could be increased from 300GB to 3TB.
29529008	“Quota for kdump Must Be Applied During Compute Node Installation” The behavior of `kdump` and the file system it writes to have been configured differently, so that a failing system can no longer fill all the available space on the internal storage appliance.
29234323	“Update RAID Configuration for ZS7-2 Storage Appliance” The internal Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance ZS7-2 uses a different RAID configuration compared to previous systems: its disks are arranged in mirrors instead of RAID-z2.
21036745	“Implement XML-RPC Call to Determine Rack Type” A new XML-RPC call was added to identify the rack type and certain properties. This is particularly useful when using Oracle Enterprise Manager, so that the correct rack details are displayed.
26174921	“Missing LUN Paths Cause Refresh Failure on External Storage” This was an underlying issue in Oracle VM, where a refresh operation on a LUN storage element would fail if paths were missing. The code has been made more fault-tolerant and the fix is included in Oracle VM 3.4.6, which is used in Oracle Private Cloud Appliance 2.4.1.
26222844	“Saving the Local Repository when Reprovisioning a Compute Node Does Not Work” Previously, the `--save-local-repo` command option was not functional. The mechanism for reprovisioning has been updated so that it is now possible to reprovision a compute node and restore its local storage repository.
25410225	“Catastrophic Failure of ZFS Storage Appliance Controller Causes Management Node Fencing” The failover process between the storage controllers has been improved, reducing the service downtime to just a few seconds. As a result, the management node cluster heartbeat function is no longer affected, and the risk of fencing is eliminated.