What's New in Version 5.6.x

This topic summarizes the new features and important changes in HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise 5.6.x compared to HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise 5.5.x.

What's New in Version 5.6.x

The following is a summary of the new features in HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise 5.6.X. The items in this list are relative to the previous general availability 5.6.0 release of HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise.

Support for Kubernetes version 1.25.x/1.26.x

Kubernetes version 1.24.x entered maintenance mode and End of Life in July 2023. To provide access to the latest Kubernetes versions, HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise5.6.x or higher version supports the following versions of HPE provided a CNCF-certified distribution:
  • 1.24.8-hpe2
  • 1.25.12-hpe1
  • 1.26.7-hpe1
See Support Matrixes for complete Kubernetes versions.

Prepackaged ML Ops Applications

Starting from HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise 5.6.4:
  • Airflow operator, Kubeflow operator, and Spark operator are not included in Prepackaged ML Ops Applications. Also, See Prepackaged Applications for details.
  • If you try to open Kubedirector notebook is removed. If you try to open notebook, A blank window will be opened without any functions.

CSI version update in HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric on Kubernetes

Starting from HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise 5.6.2, Data Fabric CSI version is FUSE POSIX CSI v1.2.8 by default. See CSI column in Container Versions for HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric on Kubernetes for details.

OS Support

HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise 5.6.1 or higher version adds support for SLES 15 SP4 on HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise control plane (Controller, Shadow Controller, Arbiter, Gateway) nodes and Kubernetes nodes. Only rolling upgrade of nodes (one node at a time) is supported. In-place OS upgrade is not supported. See OS Support.

HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric on Bare Metal Support

HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise 5.6.1 or higher version adds support for registering HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric on Bare Metal 7.2 as tenant storage. see Support Matrixes.

OS Support

HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise 5.6.0 or higher version adds support for RHEL 8.x on HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise control plane (Controller, Shadow Controller, Arbiter, Gateway) nodes for fresh installations. See OS Support.

Support for RHEL 7.x to RHEL 8.x major OS upgrade will be available in the future release.

Updated Versions of Open Source Components

HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise 5.6.0 or higher version supports the latest versions of open-source components, including, but not limited to:

  • Airflow
  • ArgoCD
  • Istio v1.14.5
  • Kubeflow
  • Open Policy Agent Gatekeeper
  • Falco
  • NVIDIA GPU Metrics
  • NVIDIA plugin
  • Kubernetes Dashboard

For more information about supported add-ons, see Support Matrixes.

Mandatory Certificate Renewal for Kubernetes Components

HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise 5.6.0 or higher version provides a manual workflow for renewing the security certificate of various Kubernetes components. For more details on the Kubernetes cluster certificate management, see Procedure for updating Kubernetes cluster certificates.

GPU status per K8s pod/namespace

Starting HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise 5.6.0, per pod/namespace GPU utilization metrics are collected into Elasticssearch. This can be later queried or displayed using ElasticSearch Kibana dashboard or Prometheus dashboard.

HPE Ezmeral ML Ops Enhancements

HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise 5.6.0 or higher version includes the following enhancements and changes to the HPE Ezmeral ML Ops features:

Enhanced User Experience
Users can now view detailed information about deployed models through the HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise UI. For information, see Viewing Model Information.

Apache Spark Analytics Enhancements

HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise 5.6.0 or higher version includes the following enhancements and changes to Apache Spark on HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise:

Support for Apache Spark 3.3.1 compatible with HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric on Bare Metal version 6.2.0 to 7.2.0

Includes secure access to read and write data from HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric based on the user identity.

Version Updates
  • Spark is upgraded to version 3.3.1
  • Hive Metastore is upgraded to version 3.1.3
  • Spark History Server is upgraded to version 3.3.1
  • Spark Thrift Server is upgraded to version 3.3.1.
Support for Hadoop 3 and enhanced S3 features

Spark 3.3.1 supports enhanced S3 features introduced in Hadoop 3.x.