perfSONAR Announcements

[Andrew Lake <>]

All,

perfSONAR 5.0 is targeted for release on April 17th. 

This is a major release which will remove the current data archive named Esmond and migrate to a new default backend based on OpenSearch (https://opensearch.org/). This version of the software has been in development for quite some time with its first beta last summer. Given the large scope of the changes, the perfSONAR development team has two talks scheduled on Friday March 31st to discuss the update and give people a chance to learn more and ask questions. Details for the two talks can be found at the links below:

- at 11:00 CEST (UTC+2) for a GÉANT hosted InfoShare (https://events.geant.org/event/1401)

- at 14:00 EDT (UTC-4) for a ESnet hosted CI Engineering Lunch & Learn (https://www.es.net/science-engagement/ci-engineering-lunch-and-learn-series/)

If you are unable attend, the talks will be recorded and we will continue sharing information over email and the web in the coming weeks. 

Our goal as with every release is to give most users the option to be as hands-off as possible with the update process unless they choose otherwise. The talks above will do there best to highlight what your upgraded toolkit will look like if you allow the update to happen automatically and circumstances where you may want or need to get directly involved. This includes:

- Hosts with the Toolkit bundle installed will NOT have their Esmond data migrated to the new archive. The data will NOT be deleted, it will still live on disk. Instructions will be provided to move this data to a new system where you can run a standalone Esmond if needed. For reference, current installs delete raw data after 6 months which has been the default policy since the release of Esmond many years ago. If you do not want this to happen then you can disable automatic updates to stay on 4.X: https://docs.perfsonar.net/manage_update.html#disabling-automatic-updates-for-perfsonar-packages

- Hosts currently running a central/standalone Esmond instance or perfsonar-centralmanagement bundle will NOT be automatically upgraded. This gives administrators of these hosts the flexibility to choose when to migrate clients to a new backend, or to run both Esmond and OpenSearch in parallel for a period of time. 

- There is a breaking change to the pScheduler limits file. The deprecated “test” limit type will be officially dropped from support. If you are running the default limits file from the toolkit bundle, then there will be no manual intervention needed. If you have made manual changes to your limits file then you may need to update the file by hand. You can do that before the 5.0.0 release. There is a helper script found here that you can use to check if your pScheduler limits needs to be changed: https://github.com/perfsonar/pscheduler-limit-checker-for-5.0.

In addition to the update considerations above, a few other important notes:

- On the April 17th release date, perfSONAR 5.0 will be available on the CentOS 7, Debian 10, Ubuntu 18 and Ubuntu 20 operating systems. Post-release but by early summer we plan to add support for Alma 8, Alma 9, Debian 11 and Ubuntu 22. For sites running test points and planning to upgrade to any of those systems, we recommend doing so and using the Docker container as a temporary measure until the operating system packages of those distributions are supported.

- There will be no Toolkit ISO image published for 5.0.0. Going forward you can continue to install the base operating system and use the perfSONAR operating system packages to install perfSONAR with yum or apt. 

- Instructions for trying the beta version can be found here: https://docs.perfsonar.net/release_candidates/5.0.0/install_rcs.html. Note that even if you tried the software last summer, there have been a large number of updates since then, so you may want to try a new install. 

We know above is a lot of information and some of these changes will be more disruptive than other recent updates. We will do our best to answer questions and help people through the update process. We look forward to getting the release and think it will enable some exciting new uses of perfSONAR. 

If you have further questions regarding the installation, migration or usage of perfSONAR send an email to support list .

Thanks,

The perfSONAR Development Team