Capacity Max: Underneath the hood

Several changes have been made to Capacity Max in the last few months which are not immediately obvious but might prove useful. I've had many things occupying my mind over the last year so I wasn't able to get around to putting anything meaningful together on this topic.

Capacity Max supports up to 750 sites. Prior to M2021.04 it supported up to 250 RF sites and prior to R2.7.0 it was only 15. 

When launched, the CMSS was based on a HPE DL380g9 server. Currently, the DL20g10+ platform is being used - though this too will soon change.

In M2022.03, the CMSS upgrade process was streamlined. Previously, the upgrade process involved four major steps and required three hours per update. Not only has this been reduced to two steps but its now possible to upgrade the CMSS from M2022.03 (or later) to the latest version in one go.

From M2024.01 onwards, if upgrading the CMSS hardware (server swapout), it is possible to transfer the feature licences from the old (to be decommissioned) to the new CMSS. This was possible before but required some special intervention. The procedure to do this, is described in section 6.5 of the System Operations, Troubleshooting and Maintenance Guide (MN003505A01-AR)

In M2023.01, the CMSS "operating system" was changed from VMWare ESXi to RHEL KVM. From a user perspective, there is no noticeable difference though in theory, kernel virtualisation offers better performance. Yes, I know that VMWare is not an operating system but the VMkernel is an OS of sorts.

In M2024.02, to access the status page of any of the CMSS services, a username and password is required. This is setup when the server is powered and connected for the first time. Previously, only the System Advisor required a username and password. If the password is forgotten, you'll need to contact technical support.