v4.15 [July 2025]¶

Release Date: July 2025
Release Updates: Change History

Release Themes: Openshift, Airgap Install, Backup/Recovery, and ESXi9

Executive Summary¶

In this release, RackN has simplified ESXi installation using Digital Rebar. Our new method eliminates the need for custom VIBs, while still supporting secure boot out of the box. This means faster provisioning, fewer moving parts, and full compatibility with VMware’s secure boot requirements.

Release 4.15 introduces full support for installing and upgrading DRP in air gapped environments, enabling customers to securely deploy and manage infrastructure in isolated networks without external connectivity.

Additionally, DRP 4.15 includes a new backup and restore capability for DRP endpoints, allowing operators to safeguard critical configuration and state data and recover quickly from unexpected events.

Finally, RackN’s latest release delivers full support for OpenShift deployments, enabling users to customize and scale containerized environments efficiently. By managing the complete lifecycle of the underlying hardware, DRP accelerates Kubernetes platform provisioning and seamlessly bridges the gap between bare metal and container orchestration.

Important Notices¶

Note

Update containers (if used) Install Context Containers with 'drpcli'

Note

Manager triggers disabled by default. Users may have to enable them. These were potentially performance impacting if not aware they were on.

Release Information¶

New for this release:

See other release notes for previous Release Information. All the incremental fixes to previous releases. See Change History

Vulnerabilities¶

Golang Updates¶

In order to reduce and attempt to prevent supply-chain attacks, RackN watches that golang security streams and updates the components that have issues. This release continues those updates.

Deprecations¶

Bootenv Deprecation¶

Many of the bootenvs that are provided in the various content packs are being marked as deprecated and will be removed in a future release.

These deprecations are based upon unsupported minor releases or end-of-life statements by the vendors.

These include:

VMWare
Debian
Ubuntu
Redhat OS families (RHEL, Centos, Fedora)
Alma
Rocky

The bootenvs are annotated in their documentation and descriptions. See more information at RackN Provided Bootenv Lifecycle.

Image-deploy plugin¶

While not deprecated in th release, the image-deploy plugin will eventually be deprecated by eikon. Users should plan to explore the new functions of eikon while planning removal of image-deploy. RackN is looking for feedback on usage and issues. It is likely to be removed as the default imager in v4.16.

Removals¶

None known

FEATURES¶

Openshift Support and Controls¶

Redhat Openshift continues to explode in the marketplace and with v4.15, RackN provides the beginning of a growing set of resources to operate your Openshift infrastructure.

Three content packs are provided to facilitate your openshift deployments.

Openshift - this content pack provides a set of pipelines and tasks to deploy an openshift cluster using Redhat's openshift-installer and oc tools. DRP will provide DNS, deploy a load balancer, and sequence a bootstrap server to deploy your openshift cluster.
Openshift ACM - this content pack provides additional tasks that can be added to the cluster ot deploy Redhat Openshift ACM.
Openshift OCPV - this content pack provides additional tasks that can be used to deploy the Openshift Virtualization services.

Once installed, the cluster contains the information needed manage and control your openshift cluster. The Libvirt IPMI plugin can be used to inject manifest to your cluster or manage your virtual machines running in the openshift cluster. These tools provide a non-openshift / kubernetes method to management configuration and lifecycle of your virtual machines for environments that are not prepared to run full openshift-based tools.

Finally, to faciliate the installation of the openshift cluster, RackN provides a CoreOS Version 4 bootenv that also supports RHCOS for installation and deployment of the openshift cluster. The CoreOS 4 bootenv allows for dynamic ignition injection and full hardware life-cycle control. This can be found in the CoreOS content pack.

Airgap Install Improvements¶

For the v4.15 release, multiple improvements to the installation process have been provided.

First, the installation script has been updated to handle upgrades and updating components from the catalog (local or airgap) within the version family based upon the DRP version being installed or updated. For example, a v4.15 DRP endpoint will get updated content within the v4.15 release.

Second, in addition to the current internet catalog and ability to build your own airgap bundles, RackN will provide airgap bundles and airgap update bundles. These provide a one stop download for all the content pieces needed to deploy a DRP endpoint. While large, this single file represents all the pieces (isos, context images, content packages, plugins) to get up and running. This install image also can populate a manager for replication to additional internal DRP endpoints. See more information at Airgap Install.

Going forward, RackN will generate weekly update patch images that are the aggregate collection of updated pieces that can be used to upgrade a system. The process assumes allows for installing a base image and apply the latest patch image to get to the most current stable distribution. These patch images are intended to be much smaller than the base image. See more information at Upgrading DRP and Components.

Finally, there are additional pipelines for building DRP endpoints from the installed manager allowing for automation around building out DRP endpoints by managers built from installed bundle. See more information at Endpoint Installing Endpoints.

Backup/Recovery¶

In addition to the installation / update improvements, the DRP endpoint can now be used to back-up and restore other DRP endpoints. Either a stand-alone back up server or as an additional function in a manager, DRP endpoints may be registered and scheduled for backups. These backups can be archived and stored in specified filesystem locations. Additional tasks can be injected into the back up process to encrypt and store the backups off box.

Additionally, DRP endpoints can be recovered by selecting a backup and initiating a restore operation.

This system supports Highly Available deployments and handles rebuilding the cluster after restoration of the backup.

See more information at Backup and Restore.

Improved Decommissioning¶

While RackN pipelines have always had decommissioning capabilities, these have focused on wiping disks and returning a machine back to the environment for consumption for some other usage. It could also be removed from service altogether.

v4.15 adds to this pipeline path, the ability to include reset-to-factory functionality, storing/restoring of license entitlements in the BMC, and batch process to track results of doing a collection of machines.

For more information and how to enable the features, see Decommissioning.

ESXi9 and no-vib support¶

VMWare/Broadcom recently announced ESXi9 General Availabiltiy. With this release, RackN continues its strong support for VMWare ESXi by providing pipeline support for installing ESXi9.

In addition to this support, RackN has update the installation path for all ESXi versions to no longer required signed VIBs for installation support. Secure boot PXE-based installs continue to work without the need for a signed VIB. In fact, no vib is required.

This new architecture allows easy installation of any VMWare ISO by constructing a simple profile override based upon the appropriate bootenv (esxi-install, esxi8-install, or esxi8-install). Provide the iso name and checksum of the uploaded iso while referencing the appropiate bootenv and the system will be able to install the iso using the standard esxi installation pipeline.

For more information see ESXi Provisioning with Digital Rebar or How We Achieved a Vibless Install.

Eikon Improvements¶

Over the course of the release cycle, eikon has received my updates and improvements as it moves to replace curtin. Additional information can be found in Eikon Image Deploy and Eikon Architecture.

Auditor Plugin¶

With this release, the auditor plugin provides users with the ability to see what changes users make through the API. The plugin, when loaded, adds a new object type, audit_entry that contains information about what objects were changed, how they were modified, when, and by whom. These objects generate their own events for tracking purposes.

The UX provides a view into these entries with filtering and object differencing.

For more information, see Auditor.

Supermicro Tools Update¶

Supermicro has deprecated their sum tool in favor of the new saa tool. This release updates the supermicro tooling to continue to use sum, but prefer and drive saa as well.

For more information, see Supermicro

Cloud Init Content Pack¶

While image-deploy and eikon can use cloud-init during the imaging process, the cloud-init functionality is also available as tasks that can be inject into pipelines to start and configure cloud-init. This allows cloud-init to be used for non-image-based installations.

For more information, see Cloud-Init

Proxmox Enhancements¶

Proxmox tooling has been updated to allow for a couple of new features.

VM definitions have been updated to support additional configurations and elements like storage locations, finer grained CPU and NIC descriptions, disk serial numbers, and TPM support.

A new plugin has been added, proxmox-ipmi, that will allow for fake ipmi operations against proxmox VMs. This is similar to the kubevirt-ipmi plugin for Openshift.

UX Improvements (applies to all DRP versions)¶

Visualization Panels¶

The UX can build advanced graphs and charts in dashboards based upon parameter definitions to help visualize tables and other elements.

See examples and usage at Custom Dashboard Components.

General improvements and fixes¶

Table event notification fixes
Audit entry viewer
Group-by function for subnets table
Machines editor apply blueprint wizard for parameter setting
Machines can have more options for add to pool action
Allow clusters and resource brokers to have a template renderer view
Allow machines editor to generate machine actions
Allow actions to have optional and required params
Improve file download support
Fix connection table timeout and reload
Fix license checking for HA_ID as well as DRP_ID
Fix remove group-bys if user starts a search
Add table group to embedded tables
Generate concurrent deletes from tables
Fix "Restart Stage" button to actually restart
Trigger dialog provides parameter help pop-ups
Fix actions dropdown for bulk selections
Delete modal dialog has scroll bars
Always confirm trigger dialog
Fix pipeline view spacing and layout issues
Update HA cluster status view

Other Items of Note¶

Bug Fixes abd Minor Improvements¶

Fix flexiflow, validation, and classification tasks for windows OSes
docker-context allows for parameter expansion in configuration parameters
docker-context injects dr-waltool and additional environment variables for backup support
docker-context supports contexts with extranal registries
Discovery workflows sets detected-secure-boot parameter for secure-boot systems
Manager triggers disabled by default
Bootenv updates for various update OS isos
Add SuSE support
Update Ubuntu autoinstall content
Update prelude.tmpl to include better package manager support
Custom objects can be added to the system without the use of a plugin. These are defined by the new store_object data object.
Fix the utility-connectivity task to not be so repetitive.
flash tasks updated to provide more logging, dell signature support, and HPE updates.
grafana updated to fix jq error and turn off debug by default
hpe-support handles HPE tooling issues in alma9 correctly
image-deploy updates python paths for curtin
Self-runner now runs on all HA members
token info API endpoint for getting information about tokens
dhcp option 119 as comma seperated list of domain names in Subnets and Reservations
non-artifact dr-waltool backup will backup plugins now
performance improvement in patch processing
drpcli can be used as yq as well. Copy drpcli to yq to use as such.

Experimental items are new proto-types that will substantially change in the future. This will continue to see updates through patch cycles.

hyper-v plugin provides IPMI actions for local hyper-v VMs
instances plugin allows for a new objects that can more git-ops operations.
kafka-audit-producer plugin allows for pushing transformed events into a kafka bus.
fix prometheus install bug
raid plugin provides more information for controller support

Repository Layout Change¶

While not directly related to operational code or function that users will see, the repository structure for the content packages and plugins has been separated such that each component lives in its own repository. This will allow for better change tracking and update capabilities.

Each component's version will move independently of other components. See Change History for more details.