Replibit - Release Notes for 8.4.0

Release Overview

Replibit 8.4.0 is a maintenance release. The primary focus of this release is Scale-Out Cloud hardening along with enhancements and bug fixes to other product features.

Major Features Summary

• Scale-out Cloud Hardening
• Product Enhancements
• Security Fixes
• Bug Fixes

Summary of Scale-Out Cloud Hardening

• Enhanced cloud authentication to handle extended character sets
• Randomized replication start time to prevent connection overloads
• Added periodic refresh of Auth tokens during long running replication jobs
• Enhancements to streamline and harden data migration from legacy to Scale-Out Cloud storage

Summary of Product Enhancements

• Changed free-space calculation for USB exports to be more realistic
• Blocked deletion of snapshots on vault during network recovery
• Enhanced replication configuration UI to be more friendly regarding seeding configuration
• Added SupportTUI tools to assist with remote troubleshooting from the command-line
• Back-end support for Microsoft Cluster Shared Volumes (Requires Agent 2.24)

Summary of Security Enhancements

• Disabled TCP/SACK to prevent possible DoS attacks
• Disabled ICMP redirection
• Removed support for weak security ciphers

Summary of Bug Fixes

• AutoVerify self-heal full scan is now honoring backup schedules
• AutoVerify is now more resilient on slower environments
• Replicated snapshots are now always sent with compression
• Encapsulated encryption password to support extended character sets
• Network recovery progress now shown on appliance
• Prevent duplicate backup port address assignments for protected systems
• Prevent retention cleanup from removing the last snapshot in each tier
• Resolved issues with lost connectivity sometime after initially configuring static IP address
• Fixed Nginx issues affecting partners with many appliances and locations
• Vault user quota larger than 2TB not shown in UI
• Cannot delete protected system on vault belonging to deleted customer account
• Improved resiliency of replication progress reporting
• Fixes to telemetry reporting

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New Feature Details

Scale-out Cloud Hardening

Axcient Replibit introduced the Scale-Out Cloud in the previous 8.3.0 release.  Conversion of all existing partner Axcient Cloud vaults to Scale-Out Cloud is ongoing. This 8.4.0 release contains several enhancements, bug fixes, and other patches designed to streamline and harden the migration process based on feedback from the Cloud Engineering team and our experience with the initial phase of the migration.

Read more about Scale-out Cloud here:

Other Product Enhancements

Free Space Calculation

Previously, when attempting to start a seed export or migration over USB media, the free disk space calculation was based on the total size of the source volume, whether it was in use or not.  Originally, such exports were created as thick-provisioned virtual disks and required the full disk space to be available.  Quite some time ago, the export tools were updated and now default to providing thin-provisioned virtual disks.  With this release, the free space calculation has been updated to be based upon used space instead of total disk space, in order to prevent blocking such exports unnecessarily. 

Snapshot Deletion During Network Recovery

Previously, during network recovery operations of protected systems from vault back to the appliance, if transfer of data took an extended time to complete, the job might fail because retention policies on the vault could cause deletion of some snapshots that were expected to be recovered onto the appliance. Now, snapshot retention cleanups which occur while network recovery is in progress are paused until the recovery job is completed, in order to prevent such failures.

Replication Configuration Enhancements

To improve the quality and reliability of seed exports, seed export jobs can no longer be started until after the replication configuration has been saved.  (Clicking ‘Seed’ before saving the configuration will be ignored and no job will be started.) 

Additionally, once a replication configuration has been saved with seeding enabled, attempting to delete the replication configuration before the seed has been ingested by the vault will present a warning popup, advising the user that this action will invalidate any existing USB seed exports. 

SupportTUI Tool

SupportTUI is a new utility with a simple text-based interface that runs from the command line and mimics most of the visual functionality of the GUI in a read-only fashion.  This tool is provided to assist the Axcient support team and makes remote diagnosing and troubleshooting simpler, faster, and easier.

Microsoft Cluster Shared Volumes

This release contains the back-end support features to enable cluster-aware backups of Microsoft Cluster Shared Volumes within a failover cluster environment.  This feature requires Agent version 2.24 (not yet released.)  Additional details and documentation on Cluster Shared Volume support will be provided once the new Agent version is released.

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Auto Update Best Practices

We recommend that Enable Auto Update is enabled on the Settings -> Update Manager page on each of your Replibit devices.

We also recommend that you enable Auto-Enable Remote Assist When Upgrading so that remote access will be available to our development team should something go wrong with your upgrade.

This will ensure that your Replibit devices are updated with the latest software enhancements in a timely fashion, and that the Replibit Support team will have a short window of time to access and repair any troublesome devices without requiring user intervention.