Features Released in Software Version 3.0.2-b1081557 (March 2024)

Caution:

Prior to patching or upgrading to the latest release, ensure that all compute nodes are in the provisioned state.

Platform Images

New platform images are made available for Compute Enclave users through Private Cloud Appliance installation, upgrade, and patching.

The following platform images are delivered with this Private Cloud Appliance release:

Oracle Linux 9

uln-pca-Oracle-Linux-9-2023.09.26_0.oci

Oracle Linux 8

uln-pca-Oracle-Linux-8-2023.09.26_0.oci

Oracle Linux 7.9

uln-pca-Oracle-Linux-7.9-2023.09.26_0.oci

Oracle Solaris 11.4

uln-pca-Oracle-Solaris-11-2023.10.16_0.oci

Container Engine for Kubernetes

uln-pca-Oracle-Linux8-OKE-1.26.6-20240210.oci

uln-pca-Oracle-Linux8-OKE-1.27.7-20240209.oci

uln-pca-Oracle-Linux8-OKE-1.28.3-20240210.oci

Container Engine for Kubernetes

Oracle Private Cloud Appliance Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) is a scalable, highly available service that can be used to deploy any containerized application to the cloud. OKE uses Cluster API Provider (CAPI) and Cluster API Provider for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (CAPOCI) to orchestrate the cluster on the Private Cloud Appliance. OKE uses Kubernetes, the open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications across clusters of hosts. Kubernetes groups the containers that make up an application into logical units called pods for easy management.

See Oracle Private Cloud Appliance Container Engine for Kubernetes for information about how to configure the network, create a Kubernetes cluster, create a node pool, expose containerized applications outside the appliance, and provide persistent storage for containerized applications. See the OKE Monitoring folder in Grafana for OKE dashboards.

Instance Principals

An instance principal is a compute instance that is authorized to perform actions on service resources. Applications running on an instance principal can call services and manage resources similar to the way Private Cloud Appliance users call services to manage resources. The instance is a principal actor just as a user is a principal actor. When you use instance principals, you do not need to configure user credentials or a configuration file on the instance to run applications that need to manage service resources.

To grant authorizations to an instance principal, include the instance as a member of a dynamic group. A dynamic group provides authorizations to instances just as a user group provides authorizations to users.

See "Configuring Instances for Calling Services" and "Creating and Managing Dynamic Groups" in the Identity and Access Management chapter of the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance User Guide.

Upgrade History and Enhancements

The upgrade history presents information from all upgrade and patch jobs in a categorized way, providing insight into which version upgrades have been performed, which jobs have been run for each of those upgrades, and from which source (ISO upgrade or ULN patch). Details include build versions, component versions before and after, job completion, success or failure, time stamps, and duration.

Oracle Integrated Lights Out Manager (ILOM) has been included in the upgrade or patch workflow of compute node and management node hosts, reducing the overall process duration and the number of reboots. The upgrade plan has also been refined and covers the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure images provided with Private Cloud Appliance.

An appliance software prerequisite version check is performed during the upgrade or patch preparation phase. The Upgrader service proceeds only if the running version passes this check, otherwise you must install the minimum required version first, before proceeding with the intended target version.

Upgrading or patching to this version of the appliance software also adds the region registry, which contains resources required for the operation of the Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE).

All changes are reflected in the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance Upgrade Guide and Oracle Private Cloud Appliance Patching Guide.

ULN Mirror for Appliance Patching on Oracle Linux 8

The ULN mirror in the data center, which the appliance uses to retrieve new packages to patch components to the latest version, can now be configured on an Oracle Linux 8 server. For detailed information, refer to the chapter "Configure Your Environment for Patching" in the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance Patching Guide.

Backup Space Management

The Backup and Restore Service has been enhanced further to optimize storage space consumption on the ZFS Storage Appliance. When purging backups older than the retention period, the service also removes the large temporary files of previous MySQL database backups that are no longer required.

DRGv1+ Support

DRGv1+ provides VRF/VLAN-backed isolation for network traffic when using a DRG.

Bugs Fixed in This Release

For a list of bugs fixed in this release, see Oracle Support Document 3013714.1 ([PCA 3.x] Private Cloud Appliance X9-2 and X10 release and updates (3.0.2-b1081557)) can be found at: https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/DocumentDisplay?id=3013714.1.