perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Andrew Lake <>]

All,

A couple days ago we released the first release candidate for perfSONAR 4.0. We still have some time before we release the production version, but once we do it will introduce many changes, and as such we wanted to give everyone a rough support timeline of the various pieces for the next 18 months. We will fill-in actual dates as milestones, such as actual release dates, become known based on how well testing goes, etc:

September 2016: 

    - perfSONAR 4.0 RC1 released 

    

October 2016: 

    - perfSONAR 4.0 RC2 released 

    

November 2016: 

    - perfSONAR 4.0 final released

    

May 2017: 

    - perfSONAR 3.5.1 end-of-life

    - No longer providing new web100 builds

    - No longer providing NDT with perfSONAR

November 2017:

    - perfSONAR 4.1 released, will not be available for CentOS 6

    - BWCTL support dropped

May 2018: 

    - perfSONAR 4.0 end-of-life

    - CentOS 6 support officially dropped

    

A few takeaways from the above timeline:

- The current timeline means you have roughly 6 months to update to 4.0 if you want to stay on a supported version. Auto-updates work for going to 4.0, so for about 75% of the known deployments you should get the new version within a day or two of the final release later this fall. This is consistent with the timeframe we have done for previous releases. If any of the releases slip we will also push back the end-of-life dates, as our main goal is to give people adequate time to upgrade while limiting the support burden on the development team. 

-  It also means you have 18 months to migrate from CentOS 6 to CentOS 7 if you want to stay on a supported platform. This can NOT be done by auto-update, and requires a new install of CentOS 7. We will be providing tools to copy configuration and data from CentOS 6 to CentOS 7 to help with the transition.  Also note, this is a much larger cushion than when we had for the transition from CentOS 5 to CentOS 6 a few years back, where we gave only 6 months and never had a version of the software that ran on both platforms. This time you will have 18 months of 4.0 working on both.  

- Currently there are no plans to change supported Debian versions, but that may change. We will update the timeline appropriately if it does, and give everyone ample notification.

- We are dropping web100 support 6 months after 4.0 is released. This is something that has been contemplated for awhile now and the fact that there is no web100 patch for series 3 kernels, like that on CentOS 7, makes this a good time to make that transition. 

- We will not be including NDT on the toolkit or other perfSONAR bundles anymore since it requires web100. We do not make this decision lightly, but our user surveys the past few years and discussions with many in the community seem to indicate that NDT is not a primary driver in using perfSONAR and the support burden coupled with the burden of requiring a non-standard kernel outweighs the benefit in the perfSOANR context. This is not to say it doesn't have utility in other contexts. NDT has a loyal following so it is possible it will live-on in other venues such as M-LAB, but not directly as part of perfSONAR.

We realize this is a lot of information and we will be sending it out again as we get closer to release to important dates or as things change. Please let us know if you have any questions.

Thank you,

The perfSONAR Development Team