Chapter 2. New Features

With this release, disaster recovery with stretch clusters is generally available. In a high availability stretch cluster solution, a single cluster is stretched across two zones with a third zone as the location for the arbiter. This solution is deployed in the OpenShift Container Platform on-premise data centers. This solution is designed to be deployed where latencies do not exceed 5 ms between zones, with a maximum round-trip time (RTT) of 10 ms between locations of the two zones that are residing in the main on-premise data centers.

For more information, see Disaster recovery with stretch cluster for OpenShift Data Foundation.

OpenShift Data Foundation supports the Network File System (NFS) service for any internal or external applications running in any operating system (OS) except Mac and 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 Creating exports using NFS.

With this release, OpenShift Data Foundation provides a security enhancement to secure network operations by encrypting all the data moving through the network and systems. The enhanced security is provided using encryption in-transit through Ceph’s messenger v2 protocol.

For more information about how to enable in-transit encryption, see the required Deploying OpenShift Data Foundation guide based on the platform.

With this release, you can use the unmanaged OpenShift Data Foundation on Microsoft Azure on Red Hat OpenShift, which is a managed OpenShift platform on Azure. However, note that OpenShift 4.12, 4.13 versions are not yet available in Azure on Red Hat OpenShift, hence the support here is only for OpenShift Data Foundation 4.10 and 4.11.

For more information, see Deploying OpenShift Data Foundation 4.10 using Microsoft Azure and Azure Red Hat OpenShift and Deploying OpenShift Data Foundation 4.11 using Microsoft Azure and Azure Red Hat OpenShift.

This release supports and provides a flexible hosting environment for seamless deployment and upgrade of OpenShift Data Foundation.

For more information, see Deploying OpenShift Data Foundation on any platform.

With this release, installer provisioned infrastructure deployment of OpenShift Data Foundation using bare metal infrastructure is fully supported.

For more information, see Deploying OpenShift Data Foundation using bare metal infrastructure and Scaling storage.

OpenShift Data Foundation topology provides administrators with rapid observability into important cluster interactions and overall cluster health. This improves the customer experience and their ability to streamline operations to effectively leverage OpenShift Data Foundation to its maximum capabilities.

For more information, see the View OpenShift Data Foundation Topology section in any of the Deploying OpenShift Data Foundation guides based on the platform.

OpenShift Data Foundation now provides access to a service account in every OpenShift Container Platform namespace to authenticate with Vault using a Kubernetes service account token. The service account is thus used for KMS authentication for encrypting Persistent Volumes.

For more information, see Data encryption options and Configuring access to KMS using vaulttenantsa.

In Openshift Data Foundation single stack, you can either use IPv4 or IPv6. In case OpenShift is configured with dual stack, OpenShift Data Foundation uses IPv4 and this combination is supported.

For more information, see Network requirements.

When creating a bucket replication policy, you now have the option to enable deletion so that when data is deleted from the source bucket, the data is deleted from the destination bucket as well. This feature requires logs-based replication, which is currently only supported using AWS.

For more information, see Enabling bucket replication deletion.

This feature provides reference information to understand the health of disaster recovery (DR) replication relationships such as the following:

For more information, see Monitoring disaster recovery health.