Chapter 1. What changed in this release?

1.1. Major changes in version 1.5

Be aware of the following differences between Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Virtualization 1.5 and previous versions.

Deduplication and compression support with Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO)
Configuring VDO at deployment time lets you reduce the amount of storage space required for data. You can configure Gluster bricks to use deduplication and compression, and monitor and configure notifications for VDO capacity usage so that you know when your storage is running out of space. The space saved by using Virtual Disk Optimization is displayed on the Brick and Volume detail pages of the Cockpit UI. See Understanding VDO and Monitoring VDO for more information.
Configure disaster recovery with failover and failback
Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Virtualization now supports backup, failover, and failback to a remote secondary site. See Configuring backup and recovery options for an overview and information on configuring disaster recovery. See Recovering from disaster for the recovery process.
Scale using the user interface
New nodes can now be prepared and configured in Cockpit. See Expanding the hyperconverged cluster by adding a new volume on new nodes using Cockpit for details.
Upgrade using the user interface
Upgrade your deployment using the Administration Portal. See Upgrading Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for details.
Manage your storage and virtual machines in Cockpit
You can now view and manage your storage and your virtual machines from Cockpit. The Red Hat Virtualization Adminsitration Console is still required for some more complex tasks, such as geo-replication. See Managing Red Hat Gluster Storage using Cockpit for more information.
Configure different devices and device types
Previous versions of RHHI for Virtualization expected each virtualization host to be set up the same way, with the same device types and device names on each. As of version 1.5, you can specify different device and sizes as appropriate for each host and size arbiter bricks appropriately.
Updated user interfaces

Cockpit and the Administration Portal have seen a number of updates to their user interfaces. Operations are now better organised and easier to find, and a number of new options are available.

  • Specify additional hosts during Cockpit setup instead of adding them manually after Hosted Engine deployment.
  • Reset brick configuration after reinstalling a virtualization host.
Deploy on a single node
Single node deployments of Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Virtualization are now supported. See Deploying RHHI for Virtualization in the data center for support limitations and deployment details.
Convert virtualization hosts
Red Hat Virtualization hosts can now be converted into hyperconverged hosts. See Converting a virtualization cluster to a hyperconverged cluster for details.