The Delphix Engine 4.2 provides a bounty of features, bug fixes, and performance improvements.
New Hypervisor and Cloud Support
In Delphix Engine 4.2, there is now support for running in private OpenStack clouds on the KVM hypervisor as well as in the AWS GovCloud security zone. All existing Delphix workflows are supported in both of these new environments.
MSSQL Clustered Databases
Delphix Engine 4.2 offers new support for provisioning virtual databases (VDBs) to SQL Server Failover Cluster instances. SQL Server Failover Cluster instances are now discovered when adding a Windows Failover Cluster target environment, as described in Adding a SQL Server Failover Cluster Target Environment. For additional information about provisioning a VDB to a SQL Server Failover Cluster instance, see Provisioning a SQL Server VDB.
Oracle Live Sources
Prior to Delphix Engine version 4.2, users ran reports against VDBs that they created with the Delphix Engine. Although this workflow helped them offload the reporting load from production, the data in the VDBs was not updated constantly. If users wanted newer data, they had to stop their reporting applications, refresh their VDBs, and resume. With LiveSources in the current release, you can run reports against data that is constantly being updated. There is one read-only live data feed per source database that is linked as a dSource on the Delphix Engine. You can point your reporting applications to this live feed. Additionally, a LiveSource will provide you all Delphix functionality provided by a dSource, such as creating VDBs. For detailed documentation, refer to Oracle LiveSources.
Virtualizing Unstructured Files
Prior to Delphix Engine 4.2, the workflow for using Unstructured Files began by pulling some pre-existing external data into a dSource on the Delphix Engine. With the current release, you can use Empty vFiles to begin your project from scratch inside Delphix Engine. Empty vFiles are not provisioned from dSources; you create them from scratch with no initial content. As you create the initial content of your project, you can take advantage of Delphix Engine features such as snapshots and rollbacks. For more information, refer to Creating Empty vFiles from the Delphix Engine.
Enhanced Replication User Experience
Prior to the 4.2 release, replication was managed by two separate dialog windows in the user interface (UI). The first, the Replication window, handled the creation and manipulation of a replication spec (replication on the source). The Namespaces window allowed you to view existing namespaces (replication on the target) and initiate failover. With the current release, these two separate user interfaces have been collapsed into a single UI which is responsible for managing replication on both the source and the target. The new UI also supports configuring multiple specs on the source, which was not supported in the UI in earlier releases. Moreover, the concept of a replication spec is now referred to as a "replication profile," and namespaces are referred to as "replicas." For more information, refer to Replication User Interface.
Prior to the 4.2 release, users could not link source databases that were backed up by unsupported backup software. In this release, we introduce a new feature that allows you to configure Delphix to manage the backups for your databases. When the Delphix Engine manages the backups of a dSource, it takes regular, copy-only full backups of the source database, which implies that activating the feature will not interfere with existing backup management solutions. You can configure the frequency at which the Delphix Engine takes these copy-only full backups by specifying a SnapSync policy for the dSource. You can change the SnapSync policy for a dSource at any time by visiting the policy screen; there, you can either select a new SnapSync policy or modify the existing policy. For more information, refer to Supported Operating Systems, Server Versions, and Backup Software for SQL Server.
Jet Stream Usage UI
In the 4.2 release, the entire Jet Stream usage screens have been rebuilt from scratch. The Jet Stream usage screens display the space usage information through a set of interactive graphs and tables. Through these screens, administrators and end-users can get insight into how space is being used in the system and how much space can be freed by deleting various Jet Stream objects. For more information, see Understanding Jet Stream Usage Management.