Chapter 4. Technology previews
This section describes the technology preview features introduced in Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation 4.11 under Technology Preview support limitations.
Technology Preview features are not supported with Red Hat production service level agreements (SLAs), might not be functionally complete, and Red Hat does not recommend using them for production. These features provide early access to upcoming product features, enabling customers to test functionality and provide feedback during the development process.
Technology Preview features are provided with a limited support scope, as detailed on the Customer Portal: Technology Preview Features Support Scope.
4.1. Disaster Recovery for OpenShift Workloads
The OpenShift Data Foundation disaster recovery (DR) capability enables DR across multiple OpenShift Container Platform clusters, and is categorized as follows:
Regional disaster recovery (Regional-DR)
Regional-DR solution provides automated protection for block volumes, asynchronous replication, and protects business functionalities when a disaster strikes at a geographical location. In the public cloud this is similar to protecting from a region failure.
For more information, see the planning guide and Regional-DR solution for OpenShift Data Foundation guide.
Metropolitan disaster recovery (Metro-DR)
Metro-DR solution ensures protection and business continuity during the unavailability of a data center with no data loss while using multiple clusters synchronous replication. In the public cloud these are similar to protecting from an Availability Zone failure. It offers instant protection of business functionalities, with a near zero RPO.
For more information, see the planning guide and Metro-DR solution for OpenShift Data Foundation guide.
Multicluster monitoring in Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management console
Multicluster monitoring is a single simplified view of storage health and capacity spread across multiple clusters. This multicluster monitoring enables you to manage the storage capacity and monitor the OpenShift Data Foundation clusters from the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management (RHACM) user interface. This monitoring capability applies to both DR and non-DR clusters.
For more information, see Monitoring multicluster storage health.
4.2. Support for Network File System services
With this release, OpenShift Data Foundation supports the Network File System (NFS) service for any internal or external applications running in any operating system (OS), including Windows OS. The NFS service helps to migrate data from any environment to the OpenShift environment, for example, data migration from Red Hat Gluster Storage file system to OpenShift environment.
For more information, see Resource requirements for using Network File system and Creating exports using NFS.
4.3. Thin-provisioning solution for Single Node OpenShift cluster
When OpenShift Data Foundation Logical Volume Manager Operator is set up, the volume group creates thin-provisioned volumes by default. This benefits the Edge users that are limited in storage capacity.
The thin-provisioned volumes use the Logical Volume Manager and provide dynamic provisioning of block storage on a single, limited resources single node OpenShift (SNO) cluster.
For more information, see Provisioning storage using Logical Volume Manager Operator.
4.4. Volume snapshot and volume clone for Single Node OpenShift
With this release, OpenShift Data Foundation for single node OpenShift provides features similar to the Rook-Ceph based OpenShift Data Foundation:
- Creating volume snapshots of persistent volumes that are provisioned by the OpenShift Data Foundation Logical Volume Manager Operator. This enables you to revert to a state at which the volume snapshot was taken.
- Creating volume snapshots of the cloned volumes.
- Restoring the volume snapshots, which creates a new Persistent Volume Claim (PVC).
- Creating clones of a volume to duplicate an existing storage volume that can be used like any standard volume.
For more information, see Volume Snapshot and Volume Clone for Single Node OpenShift.
