Swarm Storage 10.2 Release

New Features

• Swarm 10 Performance 

  • The rate at which nodes retire is now improved over both version 10.1 and version 9.6 of Swarm Storage. (SWAR-8386)

  • Swarm has boosted the performance of erasure-coded range reads under high loads. (SWAR-8182)

• Prometheus Node Exporter — The Prometheus Node Exporter preview has configuration enhancements.

  • The service is now enabled by default (metrics.enableNodeExporter=True), which makes basic hardware queries across nodes available without reboot.

  • A new setting, metrics.nodeExporterFrequency, sets how frequently to refresh Swarm-specific metrics in Elasticsearch; it defaults to 0, which disables this export. (SWAR-8408)

• Swarm Management  

  • The new node-level Swarm configuration setting security.securePhysicalConsole allows locking out access to the console's System Menu commands. This security measure is for nodes located where they can be at risk for unauthorized viewing and tampering. (10.2.1: SWAR-5309)

  • To ease upgrades to Swarm 10, the cluster-wide setting ec.protectionLevel is now a persisted setting, so it can be changed on demand using Swarm UI or SNMP. The setting is no longer managed within and across config files, requiring consistency and cluster restarts. (SWAR-8231)

  • For better management of multipart uploads, both castor-system-uploadid and castor-system-partnumber now allow query args to use either hyphens or underscores in the field name, as is supported for metadata headers such as content-type. (SWAR-8274)

  • Swarm raises alerts on objects with persistent feed-related failures, such as objects that cannot be indexed in Elasticsearch or be remotely replicated. To investigate the cause for such failures, examine the details in the logs. (SWAR-8383)

  • The versions query argument on listing queries now accepts versions=previous to limit results to only the past versions of an object. (SWAR-6847)

  • Swarm now accepts named objects whose path name relative to the bucket looks like a UUID (32-character hexadecimal). (SWAR-8199)

Additional Changes

These items are other changes and improvements including those that come from testing and user feedback.

• OSS Versions — See Third-Party Components for 10.2.1 for the complete listing of packages and versions.

  • The Linux kernel is updated to 4.19.37 and the mpt3sas driver is updated to 26.100.00.00. (10.2.1: SWAR-8480)

  • Intel network drivers are updated, ixgbe to 5.5.5 and i40e to 2.7.29. (10.2.1: SWAR-8498)

• Fixed

  • A 3-node cluster does not retire a volume efficiently if it contains objects requiring 3 replicas. (10.2.1: SWAR-8482)

  • Changing the metrics.target host from an Elasticsearch 2.3.3 cluster to a 5.6.12 cluster did not trigger the needed update of the index schemas before new data was indexed. (SWAR-8426)

  • An SNMP shutdown request for a Swarm node instead caused it to be rebooted. (SWAR-8422)

  • Maintenance activities on the Elasticsearch cluster created erroneous reports of an index missing in the Swarm cluster. (SWAR-8413)

  • Swarm now installs the python requests package needed for the metrics migration script that is used during migration to Elasticsearch 5.6. (SWAR-8407)

  • An issue caused Swarm to erroneously report low memory. (SWAR-8399)

  • Swarm search queries hang if the associated Search feed referred to invalid or unavailable Elasticsearch nodes. (SWAR-8200)

Upgrade Impacts

These items are changes to the product function that may require operational or development changes for integrated applications. Address the upgrade impacts for each of the versions since the one you are currently running:

For Swarm 9 impacts, see Swarm Storage 9 Releases.

Watch Items and Known Issues

The following operational limitations and watch items exist in this release.

• Under some conditions, Swarm may start without mounting some of its volumes. If this happens, reboot the node. (10.2.1: SWAR-8597)

• The OS in 10.2.1 cannot mount USB flash drives and so cannot read node.cfg files from them. If you boot Swarm from a USB drive, contact DataCore Support for a corrected version. (10.2.1: SWAR-8501)

• During a rolling reboot of a small cluster, erroneous CRITICAL errors may appear on the console, claiming that EC objects have insufficient protection. These errors may be disregarded. (SWAR-8421)

• When restarting a cluster of virtual machines that are UEFI-booted (versus legacy BIOS), the chassis shut down but do not come back up. (SWAR-8054)

• If you wipe your Elasticsearch cluster, the Storage UI shows no NFS config. Contact DataCore Support for help repopulating your SwarmFS config information. (SWAR-8007)

• If you delete a bucket, any incomplete multipart upload into that bucket leaves the parts (unnamed streams) in the domain. To find and delete them, use the s3cmd utility (search the Support site for "s3cmd" for guidance). (SWAR-7690)

• Logs showed the error "FEEDS WARNING: calcFeedInfo(etag=xxx) cannot find domain xxx, which is needed for a domains-specific replication feed". The root cause is fixed; if you received such warnings, contact DataCore Support so the issue can be resolved. (SWAR-7556)

• With multipath-enabled hardware, the Swarm console Disk Volume Menu may erroneously show too many disks, having multiplied the actual disks in use by the number of possible paths to them. (SWAR-7248)

Note these installation issues:

• The elasticsearch-curator package may show an error during an upgrade, which is a known curator issue. Workaround: Reinstall the curator: yum reinstall elasticsearch-curator (SWAR-7439)

• Do not install the Swarm Search RPM before installing Java. If Gateway startup fails with "Caringo script plugin is missing from indexer nodes", uninstall and reinstall the Swarm Search RPM. (SWAR-7688)

Upgrading Swarm

To upgrade Swarm 9 or higher, proceed to How to Upgrade Swarm.