Chapter 6. Developer previews

This section describes development preview features introduced in Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4.7.

Developer preview feature is subject to Developer preview support limitations. Developer preview releases are not intended to be run in production environments. The clusters deployed with the developer preview features are considered to be development clusters and are not supported through the Red Hat Customer Portal case management system. If you need assistance with developer preview features, reach out to the ocs-devpreview@redhat.com mailing list and a member of the Red Hat Development Team will assist you as quickly as possible based on availability and work schedules.

Cloning or restoring a snapshot with the new read only access mode

With the Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4.7, you can create a clone or restore a volume snapshot with the readonly (RXO) access mode. For more information, see Creating a clone or restoring a snapshot with the new ROX access mode.

Multi-cluster disaster recovery

Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage provides multi-cluster asynchronous replication of storage volumes across two OpenShift Container Storage clusters serving two Openshift Container Platform clusters. Any stateful application, including its stateless counterparts need some preparation prior to deploying the same on a peer cluster.

Availability of different storage classes based on the media type

Users now have the ability to use mixed media in their clusters to reduce cost while providing the well performed devices to important workloads and slow devices for other workloads.

Flexible devices

Users now have the flexibility to determining which devices they can use. Red Hat supports as a development preview any drive size up to 16TB without any configuration change on bare metal installations.

Support for write-ahead logging PVC for OSDs

OpenShift Container Storage now supports deploying an OSD while separating Bluestore’s rocksdb database and rocksdb write-ahead log onto different devices. OSDs are less performant on HDD due to minimal IOPS when compared to SSDs. This allows the user to increase the performance by using SSDs for the metadata for a given OSD in HDD.