Installation Notes

Install Update

Please read the following release notes carefully, before continuing. When installing this update on a Collax V-Bien cluster the following steps have to be performed:

/ Important information

Please have a look at the Collax V-Bien 6.5.28 Release Notes if the nodes have Version 6.5.26 or above and haven’t been updated yet. For this update, it is necessary that both nodes are set in maintenance mode simultaneously.

Procedure

1. Click at High Availability within the Dashboard.
2. Select the other (not the local) and change into the Start Maintenance dialog.
3. Now, put this other node into maintenance mode by confirming the query in the dialog. Wait until the maintenance mode is reached. Depending on the number of virtual machines and hard disk, this can take some time. Virtual machines will be migrated live, which can take a few minutes depending on the size of the RAM. The progress will be displayed in the list of background activities.
4. Close the dialog.
5. In the list of nodes, select again the other node whose software is to be updated by right-clicking it.
6. Change to System Update ….
7. Click Check for Updates. The completion will be displayed as “100%”.
8. Click Download and Install. This function will download the latest software packages from the update server and install them. The completion will be displayed as Install - 100%.
9. Close the dialog and set the node to active.
10. Please repeat this procedure for the local node.

Issues Fixed in this Version

Security: Meltdown and Spectre - Serious processor security hole

Security researchers have discovered massive security holes in processors that were developed by security experts These holes were published under the name Meltdown or Spectre. Meltdown is the vulnerability, that allowed unprivileged processes the reading of kernel memory. Spectre is the security hole that exploits that CPUs execute many commands speculatively in advance, resulting in memory areas, that can be tapped. This update installs a kernel in version 4.4.110, with Kernel-Page-Table Isolation Implementation (PTI). This will create a kernel option “CONFIG_PAGE_TABLE_ISOLATION” enabled, which prevents kernel mapping in user mode. With PTI, a process only sees its own storage area.

More information on Meltdown and Spectre here .

Freezing VM after backup

When backing up virtual machines, in certain cases the operating system could freeze, causing the VM to be restarted. Through intensive testing and reverse engineering, Collax development was able to pinpoint the culprit in flawed program code within the software component QEMU 2.4 and inside the program code of the kernel and fix it by removing the respective patches. With this release, the backups of the affected virtual machines will work properly again under all circumstances.

Notes

V-Cube+: Windows Setup notes Error Message 0x80300001

If Windows Server 2008 R2 and above is to be installed on Virtio hard disks using the Virtio driver CD for Windows, Windows reports the error code 0x80300001. The error message occurs if the partitions are recognized and the user clicks the button Next. The message means, that the installation CD of Windows needs to be inserted again.

Restore virtual harddiscs

From Collax V-Bien version 6.8.15 on the internal path for virtual harddiscs changes and a restore from previous backups isn’t possible anymore without manual intervention. In case of a baremetal resore please use the previous verion or don’t hesitate to contact support.