Last week, on 12th August 2022, IBM has released IBM Cloud Pak System 2.3.3.5. Earlier this year, on 6th May, IBM Cloud Pak System 2.3.3.4 was released. We’ll see in this post some of the changes that were introduced in these two versions.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux support
IBM Cloud Pak System 2.3.3.4 is the first release to support Red Hat Entreprise Linux (RHEL) 8 for workload virtual machines. More precisely, IBM Cloud Pak System 2.3.3.4 supports RHEL 8.4 and IBM Cloud Pak System 2.3.3.5 supports RHEL 8.6. As usual, IBM provides base OS images for these two operating systems that can be directly used to deploy new virtual machines on IBM Cloud Pak System.
Also note that an updated version of the Red Hat Entreprise Linux 7.9 OS image provided by IBM is released with IBM Cloud Pak System 2.3.3.5.
Finally, even if you can still run virtual machines based on Red Hat Entreprise Linux 6.10, it is strongly recommended to migrate your workloads to RHEL 7 or RHEL 8 because Red Hat Entreprise Linux 6 is deprecated.
Security fixes
For these two releases of IBM Cloud Pak System, a focus has been put on fixing security issues. While IBM Cloud Pak System 2.3.3.4 is already fixing 51 CVEs, the 2.3.3.5 release additionally closes 62 PSIRTs and 114 CVEs. You can find the list of these CVEs here (for v2.3.3.4) and here (for v2.3.3.5).
You can see that these fixes are applicable to many components of the stack, including Log4j, VMWare vCenter, IBM Db2, IBM Java SDK, Intel processors, Node.js and cryptographic algorithms used by IBM Cloud Pak System.
Still on the security topic, you can also notice the following points:
- IBM Cloud Pak System 2.3.3.4 or earlier supports SHA-1 based key exchange methods, whereas IBM Cloud Pak System 2.3.3.5 supports SHA-2 for the backup and restore function.
- Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2 version update is supported in IBM Cloud Pak System 2.3.3.4 and 2.3.3.5. TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 are no longer supported to work with these releases of IBM Cloud Pak System.
IBM Db2
IBM Cloud Pak System 2.3.3.4 and 2.3.3.5 supports IBM Db2 11.5.7 but IBM Db2 11.1 is deprecated from IBM Cloud Pak System 2.3.3.4 release onwards. New versions of the IBM Db2 patterns are available.
However, there are also some changes regarding IBM Db2 licenses with IBM Cloud Pak System 2.3.3.5:
- Db2 license is changed to
Db2 Standard EditionandDb2 OEM High Capacity Add-onfor IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM). - In IBM Cloud Pak System and IBM Cloud Pak System Software, the
Db2 Advanced Editionlicense is not available. You must bring your own license (BYOL) and must provide it during deployments. - In IBM Cloud Pak System Software Suite, the
Db2 Advanced Editionlicense is still available.
Other changes
You can find a good summary of the improvements, changes and deprecations in the “What’s new” page of the IBM Documentation for IBM Cloud Pak System.
IBM Support website provides useful links regarding these two IBM Cloud Pak System releases at https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/related-information-ibm-cloud-pak-system-releases. If you’re still running IBM Cloud Pak System 2.3.3.3 interim fix 1 or earlier, the upgrade process to 2.3.3.5 is in two steps, even if they can be chained, i.e. you need to upgrade to 2.3.3.4 before upgrading to 2.3.3.5.
Finally, please note that this release is available for IBM Cloud Pak System W3500, W3550 and W4600 (Intel x86-64) models. This release is not available for the IBM Cloud Pak System W3700 (POWER) model, nor for the IBM PureApplication System W2700 (POWER) and W2500 (Intel x86-64) models.
IBM Cloud Pak System 