What's New in DataCore Puls8 v4.6

This section highlights the new features, capabilities, and major improvements introduced in this release of DataCore Puls8.

The items below summarize what's newly added:

Shared ReadWriteMany Volumes with the Built-In NFS Driver

DataCore Puls8 now includes its own NFS CSI driver, providing ReadWriteMany (RWX) volumes backed by Replicated PV Mayastor without deploying or maintaining a separate NFS server. Each volume gets a dedicated NFS server pod that the driver provisions on first mount, exporting a Replicated PV Mayastor block volume as a shared filesystem that many pods across many nodes can write to at once. The driver supports snapshot and restore, online volume expansion, and adoption of an existing Replicated PV Mayastor volume as the backend.

Enterprise Identity and Encryption for NFS Exports

NFS RWX volumes support the full Kerberos security ladder - krb5 for authentication, krb5i for integrity, and krb5p for on-the-wire encryption - alongside LDAP identity resolution through an integrated SSSD sidecar. Keytabs can be supplied directly or generated automatically from kadmin credentials, and export behavior is controlled per StorageClass through squash mode, access mode, anonymous UID/GID, and export root permissions.

NFS Volumes Protected by the Lifeline Controller

The Lifeline Controller now rescues pods running on NFS RWX volumes as well as Replicated PV Mayastor volumes. When a node fails, both the NFS server pod and your annotated application pods are moved to a healthy node, so clients are not left waiting on a server that is never coming back.

Cluster Event History with the Eventing Aggregator

DataCore Puls8 now collects and retains a queryable history of storage events through the new Eventing Aggregator. Events are published to NATS JetStream and persisted to Loki, or to an ephemeral volume when Loki is disabled, and can be queried with kubectl puls8 mayastor get events using filters for component, pool, volume, replica, rebuild status, and state. Events are also captured in support bundles and can be analysed offline from a system dump with --from-file, without access to a live cluster.

Manage Storage and Licensing from the Headlamp Plugin

The DataCore Puls8 Headlamp Plugin moves from read-only dashboards to full day-to-day operations. You can now cordon, uncordon, drain, label, and delete nodes; create and manage storage pools; act on volumes and volume snapshots; and switch between storage engines from a single view. The plugin also adds in-browser license management - activate a trial, activate or renew an issued license, view status and expiration, and deactivate - plus one-click support dump collection and download.

More Efficient Volume Layout with V2 Metadata Labels

Replicated PV Mayastor introduces a V2 on-disk label layout that reduces the per-replica metadata partition from 4 MiB to 3 MiB, aligns the data partition to a 4 MiB cluster boundary, and aligns volume capacity to 1 MiB boundaries. The layout version is negotiated automatically across the cluster, so the control plane never creates a label a node cannot read. Existing volumes remain on the V1 layout and require no migration; newly created volumes adopt V2 once every node supports it. Refer to Creating a DiskPool.