New functionality in IBM Spectrum Virtualize Software

IBM Spectrum Virtualize software capabilities are offered across a variety of platforms, including SAN Volume Controller (SVC), Storwize V7000 (Unified), Storwize V5000, Storwize V3700, Storwize V3500, and FlashSystem V9000.

08-07-2025

https://barrywhytestorage.blog/2025/07/14/introducing-storage-virtualize-9-1-0/

The following new features have been introduced in the 9.1.0.0 release:

• Increase the number of members in a FlashSystem grid to 32.
• AI-based target system recommendations added for storage partition migration through integration with IBM Storage Insights.
• Move volumes between volume groups in the same storage partition.
• Host cluster management in storage partitions.
• Rename volumes, volume groups, hosts, host clusters and storage partitions that are configured for replication or high availability.
• Increase the number of storage partitions to 32.
• Optional assignment of an IP address to a storage partition which will be active on the management system for a partition.
• Link a storage partition to vCenter for an improved management experience for VMFS and vVol environments.
  • vVol environments will be migrated to using storage partitions as part of the upgrade process. Additional steps may be required after the upgrade to complete the migration..
• Expand highly available and replicated volumes with automatic expansion on all systems.
• Policy-based replication recovery volumes in storage partitions will now be online and read-only if there is a valid recovery point.
• Restore a snapshot of a thin-clone to the parent volume or volume group.
• Optional buffer size and warning thresholds for provisioning policies.
• Address volumes by UUID on the CLI and REST API.
• SFTP support to transfer files to and from the system.
• Automatic update of FlashCore Modules (FCM) as part of the system update process.
• Allow many day-to-day tasks to be run during a system update.
• Use case specific SSL certificate support added for key management and internal system to system communication.

Policy Based HA

• Volume resize
• HostCluster
• 3 sites support and orchestration (v8.7.1)
• HA snapshot (including safeguarded v8.7.3))
• HA restore

Improved Replication and Partition Capabilities

Host Cluster object support within Storage Partitions is one of the most frequently requested enhancements for storage partitions. With 9.1.0 you can now import existing host clusters, create new or remove hosts clusters from partitions. In addition, host objects can be added or deleted from host clusters that are within partitions. Creating and removing shared mappings is also supported. Host clusters can be renamed. Uniform and non-uniform host access modes are both supported.

Volumes can now be moved between Volume Groups within the same partition. There is no impact to HA if it is applied to both volume groups. If volumes are currently being replicates via PBR, they must be moved into an non-replicated volume group and will require a full re-sync if PBR is re-enabled.

PBR and PBHA objects can now be renamed. Replicated (PBR and PBHA) volumes, volumes groups, hosts, host clusters and partitions can now be renamed. The rename is propagated to the remote systems with no impact to DR or HA operations.

PBR and PBHA volumes can now be expanded. No impact to HA volumes, a minimal extended RPO may be seen on DR volumes.

Up to 132 replication policies per system (up from 32) to cater for Partition based policies in addition to those outside of partition scope.

Per Partition IP address allocation. The start of a bigger push towards multi-tenant FlashSystem grid, you can now assign a management IP to each partition. For now this allows login to the same system, but as the multi-tenant improvements are updated this will provide partition scope login capabilities.

Deprcated Flash Systems with multiple IOgroup, except for SAN Volume Controller (SVC)

08-04-2025

The following new features have been introduced in the 8.7.3.0 release:

• FlashSystem grid dashboard for visualization and monitoring on all systems in the grid.
• Enhancements to storage partition migration for non-disruptive data movement between systems, including:
  • GUI support for initiating, monitoring and managing partition migration.
  • Support for partition migration with disaster recovery.
  • Partition migration while managing snapshots and Safeguarded Copies.
• SCSI Persistent Reserve support for iSCSI hosts in partitions.
• Support for highly available snapshots, including snapshot restore without loss of HA.
• Enhancements for monitoring high availability and disaster recovery, showing progress and estimated completion time for volume group and partition synchronization.

25-02-2025

The following new features have been introduced in the 8.7.2.0 release:

• Support for iSCSI hosts in HA partitions.
• Support for SCSI Persistent Reservations for volumes in storage partitions.
• Support for internal key management for encrypted data-at-rest.
• Single point of administration for health reporting for objects in a FlashSystem grid.
• Support for more than 16 NVMe over Fibre Channel hosts.
• Policy-based replication can be configured on image mode volumes to allow for a migration from external storage, while maintaining any existing replication on the virtualized storage during the migration.
• Volumes or volume groups that are replicated or in highly available storage partitions can be restored or refreshed from a snapshot.
• Improvements for better granularity for iSCSI 2-way CHAP authentication and FIPS compliance for iSCSI hosts.
• Support for VLAN tagging on management networks for Service IP addresses.
• Support for creating a standard child pool in a standard parent pool without specifying a quota.
• Host offline alerts can be enabled or disabled on a per-host basis.
• Enhancements for Ransomware Threat Detection by introducing volume group awareness for systems with IBM FlashCore Module (FCM4) firmware 4.2 or later.

The following features are no longer supported from 8.7.1.0 and later:

• Remote Copy; this includes Metro Mirror, Global Mirror, HyperSwap and Volume Mobility.
  • These features have been superseded by Policy-based replication and Policy-based HA. Systems using Remote Copy cannot upgrade to 8.7.1 or later.
  • Replication capabilities are removed from the FlashSystem 5015 and FlashSystem 5035 as these do not support Policy-based replication or Policy-based High Availability.
• Multiple I/O groups:
  • FlashSystem grid is the new way to scale-out FlashSystem and SAN Volume Controller systems. Systems with multiple I/O groups cannot upgrade to this version.
  • SAN Volume Controller (but not FlashSystem) will allow multiple I/O groups to be configured on the next long-term support (LTS) release.
• Ethernet-based clustering
• iSER host attach
• Nondistributed RAID

04-06-2024

The following updates are available in version 8.7.0:

  Policy-based high availability enhancements, including local access read and writes
  Non-disruptive workload mobility driven by Storage Insights

IBM is announcing FlashSystem policy-based replication and high availability that is designed to provide easy-to-use, high-performance solutions for disaster recovery (DR) and high availability (HA), by enabling the system to automatically deploy and manage replication between two systems with minimal overhead, higher throughput, and lower latency.

Version 8.7.0 enhances policy-based high availability with local access reads and writes. It also delivers software support to enable flash grid and non-disruptive workload mobility features on Storage Insights.

• Introduction of Flash Grids.
• Enhancements for Ransomware Threat Detection and Snapshots by introducing Filesystem awareness for ransomware detection and Storage Insights Pro entitlement Information.
• Introduced support for Policy-based High Availability and Policy-based Replication for the IBM FlashSystem 5045.
• Policy-based high availability allows for hosts to have a location defined, allowing for local-site I/O access to avoid cross-ISL traffic.
• Adds support for Policy-based replication to be used on a different partnership for different volume groups while Policy-based High Availability is configured.
• Automatic download of compatible security patches to the system.
• Automatic update of candidate FlashCore Modules.
• Improvements to the GUI Performance Monitoring screens.
• Introduced the ability for VMware and other operating systems to detect that they are connected to Flash type storage.
• User-configurable default grain size for new Volume Group Snapshots and FlashCopy Mappings.
• The ability to convert thin-clone copies to clone copies.
• Fast path Ethernet and VLAN support for Management IP addresses.
• Increase in the number of Ethernet partnerships with RDMA.
• Updates/guides to provide Performance statistics using the REST API.
• TLS connection to send syslog notifications and messages.
• New filename format for software packages.
• Policy-based high availability can now be used with AIX.

Deprcated FlashSystems and SVC without NPIV enabled

• Support for ransomware threat detection.
• Support for internal TCT backup scheduler.
• Support for migrating storage partitions non-disruptively between systems.
• Support for merging storage partitions.
• Support for creating storage partitions and importing existing volume groups.
• Support for additional CHAP algorithms for iSCSI hosts.
• Support for new SSH security level.
• Support for IBMi in Direct Attach mode when NPIV has been enabled.
• Newly-created systems prioritise the user experience of new features by disabling some capabilities within the system. The disabled capabilities can be enabled if needed using the CLI or GUI.
• The default experience for replication is policy-based replication and policy-based high availability instead of Remote Copy. Remote Copy features are disabled on new systems unless enabled.
• New features such as policy-based HA, vVols replication and storage partition migration support a maximum of one I/O group in a system. Adding a second I/O group requires support to be enabled.
• Support for FlashSystem 5300.

• Introduction of new SSH security level 4. The changes between level 3 and level 4 are:

Removal of all diffie-hellman key exchange algorithms

      Removal of chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com cipher
      Removal of ssh-rsa and ssh-rsa-cert-v01@openssh.com host key algorithms and replacing them with with rsa-sha2-256 and rsa-sha2-512

The following new features have been introduced in the 8.6.2 PTF release:

• Support for asynchronous policy-based replication with VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols).
• Support for asynchronous policy-based replication on systems with 4 I/O groups.
• Increase replicated capacity using policy-based replication to 4 PiB per I/O group on SAN Volume Controller SV3 hardware.
• Support for performing a disaster recovery failover test and then resuming replication without significantly extending the recovery point (RPO) using policy-based replication.
• Support use of iSER for high-speed replication over IP links.
• Support for up to 32,500 volumes on FlashSystem 9500 hardware.
• Enhancement to enable snapshot of a single volume, in addition to snapshot of a volume group.
• Ability to restore volume group snapshots directly to production volumes.
• Capture of daily energy statistics for reporting in Storage Insights.
• Enhancements to RAID rebuild time.
• Ability to recover encryption keys in the event of hardware loss or replacement.
• SNMP enhancements.

• Add support for NVMe over TCP hosts
• Support for 28 ethernet ports per node (including onboard ports)
• iSCSI performance improvements
• Support 1024 iSCSI Hosts per IO Group
• Allow snapshots of mirrored VDisks
• Support for TLS 1.3
• Support Email servers (SMTP) that require authentication
• Sending statistics to Storage Insights to enable threat detection
• Eventlog and Auditlog streaming for Storage Insights
• Migrate from Remote Copy to PBR without losing DR
• Increased number of snapshots

• Safeguarded Copy supports two-person integrity (TPI) with resilience to network time protocol (NTP) attack timer
• IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud currency release for Amazon Web Services (AWS)

• Support for internal root certificate authority (CA)
• Increase FlashCopy bitmap space to 4 GiB
• Support for IBM Storage Insights integration
• Enhancements to transparent cloud tiering
• Support for the system to directly download updates from Fix Central
• New security level for SSH protocol to disable SHA1
• Enhancements to controller direct attach configuration
• Enhancements to lssystemlimits

• Support for Policy-Based Replication

• Support for Safeguarded snapshot
• Support for multifactor authentication with Duo Security
• Support for secured IP partnerships
• Support for additional HyperSwap configurations in Ethernet networks
• Support for 48 NVMe drives per array in distributed RAID 6 configurations
• Support for Fabric Device Management Interface (FDMI) on Fibre Channel adapters
• Enhancements to priority flow control
• Enhancements to the locksuperuser CLI command
• Enhancements to provisioning policies
• Support for an increased number of snapshots (FlashSystem 9500)
• Enhanced IP replication performance
• Policy-based asynchronous replication provides radically simple data resiliency with extremely low RPOs
• Encrypted IP replication using IPsec provides secure connections over native IP links
• Multifactor authentication support extended to include Cisco Duo Security
• Safeguarded Copy enhanced with new snapshot management and built- in scheduler

The following new features have been introduced in the 8.5.1 release:

• Safeguarded Copy external policies
• Snapshot function
• Internal Snapshot policies
• Increased number of supported hosts per I/O Group to 1024 (on FS7200, FS9100 and FS9200)
• Enhancements to transparent cloud tiering
• Embedded VASA Provider for native support of VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes
• Support for Mutual TLS (mTLS) authentication
• Support for additional host side NVMe/RoCE adapters

This release provides all of the software functionality of Spectrum Virtualize software to FlashSystem 9500 and SVC hardware, adding NVMe RDMA support and multifactor authentication, as well as enabling the use of FlashCore Modules and 100GbE.

The final CD release for the year is actually a cloud only release. It enhances the Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud (SV4PC) capabilities, bringing the software support up to include the features up to 8.4.2 but most notably now allows deployment on Microsoft Azure.

• Safeguarded Copy provides secure, immutable snapshots
• Support for 15,000 volumes (on platforms that previously supported 10,000 volumes)
• Volume Mobility (non-disruptively move volumes between systems)
• Increased Remote Copy bitmap capacity for FS7200, FS9200, SAN Volume Controller SA2 and SV2
• Support for expanding the size of a volume that has FlashCopy mappings
• Multiple IP addresses (and VLANs) per physical Ethernet port
• Multiple IP replication partnerships
• GUI support for drive firmware update test utility

• Address cyber threats with Safeguarded Copy
• Immutable, isolated copies acting as logical air gap (up to 15 000 point in time)
• Separate privileges for admins of production data and Safeguarded Copies
• Early threat detection with activity, patterns and operations monitoring
• Quick recovery to minimize impact
• DataReduction Pool performances enhancement

• Provisioning Policies - define volume properties in advance
• System-wide DNS
• Record opt-in for data sharing
• Increased synchronisation rate for mirrored volumes
• Increased timeout for RESTful API authentication
• Support for CipherTrust Manager

• DRAID 1
• Support for 3-Site Orchestrator in remote-copy and HyperSwap configurations
• Up to 12 SCM drives now supported
• DRP Child Pools
• Monitor (least privileged) role added

• VMware support for FC-NVMe
• Monitor role available for data collection by Spectrum Control v5.3.7 or later

• DRAID Expansion
• HyperSwap Volume Expansion
• Support for FlashSystem 7200 and 9200 systems
• Support for SVC models SV2 and SA2
• Support for FCM Next-Gen XL
• Support for Storage Class Memory drives
• Support for SNMP v3
• Enhanced Volume Protection (enabled by default)
• Enhanced audit log
• STAT Tool in GUI
• Secure Erase
• Data Reduction Pool performance enhancements
• Data Reduction Pool support for IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud
• Four-node support for Amazon Web Services-based (AWS) IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud
• Support for software-based compression on AWS

• Multi-tenancy capability with Object-Based Access Control
• Support for AWS in Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud
• Support for Storwize V5100 systems
• Support for 4-port 32Gb FC adapters
• Improvements to Data Reduction Pools performance
• Improvements to IP Quorum
• Improvements to Local HyperSwap
• Improved Out of Space Handling
• Improvements to host status presentation in CLI to better indicate redundancy of host-volume connectivity
• Removal of support for DSA-based host key algorithms when using SSH login

• NVMe over Fibre Channel support on 16 Gb Fibre Channel adapters
• Full IP-based quorum
• 64K host mappings
• IBM Spectrum™ Insights call home transport protocol
• Single copy vdisk expand with format
• iSER support for host attachment with 25 GbE adapters (IBM SVC Model SV1 and IBM Storwize V9000 Model AC3)
• Clustering support over Ethernet using remote direct memory access (RDMA)

• Support for deduplicated volumes
• RESTful API support
• Enhanced Call Home

• Data Reduction Pools (new pool with deduplication)
• Data reduction pools also support server environments that use the SCSI UNMAP command. This command is used by software to indicate storage capacity that it is no longer using. Data reduction pools release this capacity and return it to the available capacity pool.
• 25GbE iSCSI Host Support - A new dual port NIC card with native 25GbE ports for iSCSI. Available for all the current generation Virtualize products only.
• NVMe - Hardware ready-ness statements. The new 25GbE and existing 16Gb FC adapters are both NVMe-oF capable, and Statements of Direction were made that this will be available in a subsequent software update.
• Support for using compression on all volumes in a system (up to 10,000 per system)

• Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud
• Thin-Provisioned Mdisks
• Port Grouping and Scalability for iSCSI
• Allow username for iSCSI host attach authentication
• Support for 25G iSCSI ports (8.1.1.1)

• Remote Support Assistance (RSA) provides secure connection for remote support with audit logging
• Increased memory support for the controllers to improve performance (256 GB support per SVC node and 128 GB per V7000 Gen2+ canister)
• SVC hot spare node support with hot upgrade capability
• Updated GUI look and feel
• IBM Security Key Lifecycle Manager (SKLM) coexistence with USB encryption key management and SKLM clone server support
• Pause capability in concurrent code upgrade (CCU) enables flexibility during code upgrades
• Health Checker provides customised, rules-based configuration recommendations
• Spectrum Virtualize systems can now upload snaps directly to IBM, if appropriate network firewall rules are configured (Note: Blue Diamond support for this feature is not yet available)
• Removes support for first generation platforms - V3500-2071, V3700-2072, V5000-2077/8, V7000-2076, V840-9846/8-AC0 (CG8) and SVC CF8 & CG8

• Host cluster I/O throttling: I/O throttling can be managed at the host level (individual or groups) and at managed disk levels for improved performance management.
• Host groups with GUI support: Host groups can be more easily managed through the GUI, adding more management flexibility to existing CLI support.
• Increased background FlashCopy transfer rates up to 2GB/s (before 64MB/s): This feature enables you to increase the rate of background FlashCopy transfers, providing faster copies as the infrastructure allows. This takes advantage of the higher performance capabilities of today's systems, processing the copy in a shorter period of time.
• Port Congestion Statistic: Zero buffer credits help detect SAN congestion in performance-related issues, improving support in high-performance environments.
• Resizing of volumes in remote mirror relationships: Target volumes in remote mirror relationships will be automatically resized when source volumes are resized.
• Consistency protection for Metro/Global Mirror relationships: An automatic restart of mirroring relationships after a link fails between the mirror sites improves disaster recovery scenarios, helping to ensure the applications are protected throughout the process.
• Host multi-pathing drivers will be instructed to fail-over to the alternate node, before a node goes down for upgrade, to enhance multi-pathing failover behaviour

• More flexible data protection with transparent cloud tiering to leverage the cloud as snapshot targets and restore snapshots from the cloud
• Improved data economics through advanced functionalities for lower endurance flash drives, support multi-Tier Storage Pools with Tier 1 Flash Drives (previously known as Read Intensive drives)
• Improved security with support for encryption key management software, support for IBM SKLM Encryption Key Manager
• EasyTier Warm Promote will notice data in a Nearline tier that becomes hot within 5 minutes
• Scalability with support for high-density expansion enclosures
• Due to memory constraints, Storwize V7000 Gen1 control enclosures with one or more compressed volumes cannot be upgraded to V7.8.0.0 or later.
• Ability to non-disruptively upgrade V5010/V5020 systems to V5020/V5030
• Ability to non-disruptively upgrade V7000 Gen 2 systems to V7000 Gen 2+

• Manageability with CLI support for host groups
• Scalability with support for up to 10,000 virtual disks, depending on the model; and up to 20 Expansion Enclosures on SVC DH8 and SV1 models and on FlashSystems V9000
• Reliability, availability, and serviceability with DRAID Component in Doubt (CID) and support for read-intensive flash drives
• Performance with DRAID multi-threading
• Flexibility with iSCSI virtualization support for XIV Gen 3, Spectrum Accelerate, FlashSystems A9000 and FlashSystems A9000R arrays
• Licensing flexibility with monthly licensing for IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) software
• Improved support with Enterprise-Class Support (ECS) for IBM San Volume Controller

• Reliability, availability, and serviceability with NPIV host port fabric virtualization, Distributed RAID support for encryption, and IP Quorum in GUI
• Flexibility Virtualization of iSCSI-attached and Fibre Channel-attached external Storage arrays
• Performance with 64GB read cache
• Data economics with Comprestimator in the GUI
• Licensing of compression formally added to the External Virtualization software package of Storwize V5030
• Software licensing metrics to better align the value of SVC software with Storage use cases through Differential Licensing
• IP Link compression to improve usage of IP networks for remote-copy data transmission.

• Real-time Compression for in-line, real-time compression
• Stretched Cluster and HyperSwap for a high-availability solution
• Easy Tier for automatic and dynamic data tiering
• Distributed RAID for better availability and faster rebuild times
• Encryption for internal and external virtualized capacities
• FlashCopy snapshots
• Remote data replication
• V3500 and V3700 systems with 4GB of memory cannot be upgraded to V7.6 (RAM upgrade is required)

• Centralizing management of storage volumes to enable administrators to manage storage volumes from a single point
• Improving utilization of storage capacity with virtual volumes to enable businesses to tap into previously unused disk capacity
• Avoiding downtime for backups, maintenance, and upgrades
• Performing data migration without disruption to applications
• Enabling all storage devices to be organized into storage pools from which virtual volumes, whether standard, compressed, or thin- provisioned, are created with the desired characteristics
• Delivering automation of storage management with SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center, Tivoli Storage Productivity Center (as applicable by platform), and Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager (as applicable by platform)
• Increasing the performance efficiency of storage pools with Easy Tier
• Restoring data access quickly with near and remote copy capabilities across Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and IP networks
• HyperSwap capability in IBM Spectrum Virtualize Software V7.5 delivers high availability and disaster recovery in one solution. HyperSwap reuses capital investments in order to achieve a range of recovery and management options which are transparent to host operations.
• The ability to increase the number of FlashCopy relationships is supported with Spectrum Virtualize Software V7.5 by an increase in the bitmap space allocated for FlashCopy.
• Spectrum Virtualize Software V7.5 also now supports direct 16 Gbps Fibre Channel (except for AIX), Mircosoft Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX), VMware vSphere 6, and the underlying infrastructure for VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols).

• Real-time Compression running with dual instances
• Global Mirror increase in round-trip latency and distance between sites
• Increase in number of FlashCopy consistency groups
• T10 DIF
• Protect volumes on delete
• SMI-S 1.6 support and NIST SP 800-131A compliance

• Easy Tier for use on multiple tiers
• Automatic re-striping of data across storage pools
• Real-time Compression enhancements
• Cache architecture improvements (during upgrade to 7.3 cache is disable)
• Nine expansion enclosures with Storwize V5000 and Storwize V3700
• Storwize V7000 and Storwize V5000 new software license structure and pricing

05-2025

version 8.4 EOS 12-2024
All other previous versions are EOS