Commvault Feature Releases explained & Feature Release 11.20
Commvault has released Feature Release 11.20. In the past, Feature Releases were known as Service Packs. Along with this change, Commvault has changed the names of a few other core components. Below an overview of the current naming standard.
Commvault release versions explained
The release version is expressed as a combination of the Platform Release, the Feature Release, and the Maintenance Release. For example, a release version of 11.19.5 refers to Platform Release 11, Feature Release 19, and Maintenance Release 5.
A Platform Release is a major software release. Currently only one Platform Release is available: 11.
A Feature Release (formerly a ‘Service Pack’) is a collection of new features, enhancements to existing features, and enhancements for product stabilization. Each Feature Release also contains a cumulative set of hotfixes that were released after the previous version. Feature Releases are available in a 90-day cycle. Every feature release undergoes full regression testing prior to release.
A Maintenance Release (formerly “hotfix pack”) is a collection of hotfixes that are targeted at resolving specific critical issues that might cause major disruptions to operations or potential losses of data. A new Maintenance Release is available every month.
Feature Release statuses explained
Besides the naming, each Feature Release has a certain status. We differentiate three different statuses at the moment:
- LTS – Long-Term Support Release – A feature release with a support policy of 5 years
- GA – General Availability – A mainstream release with the latest stable code available
- TP – Technology Preview – The latest release aimed at proof-of-concepts or if bleeding edge features are required
For enterprise production environments we always suggest to use a LTS or GA version.
At this time (June 2020), there is one LTS version: 11.16. There are three GA release 11.17, 11.18 and 11.19. 11.20 is currently the TP release.
With each new Feature Release the statuses are updated. This also means that version older than 11.16 are not supported (deprecated) and must be upgraded to a GA release as soon as possible. The current status can always be checked online: http://documentation.commvault.com/commvault/
Highlights of Feature Release 11.20:
- The command center has a new Health report with detailed information and advice for your environment
- A security dashboard is added for additional information about the security of your Commvault environment
- Advanced file-level index with search capabilities for most hypervisors and cloud hosted VMs.
- New advanced options to define a black-out window; eg keep log file backups running
- New option to use the Commvault ContentStore as CIFS or NFS object store. Clients can share data using their native interface without any client software. Can be used for file level backup, dumps, etc.
- Multi-stream NDMP backup and improved ndmp restore speed, also indexing V2 is now supported for NDMP
- New MS-SQL and Oracle log backup feature to reduce RPO for databases with a high transaction rate.
- File system backups can be exported directly from the contentstore without restore
- Live mount for Hyper-V VMs
- Backup and recovery for Azure AD
- A new security assessment report is available to review and evaluate the CommCell security
- Integrated Dr testing when using NetApp open (SnapMirror) replication
