Announcing Morpheus 5.4.5

We are pleased to announce the release of Morpheus 5.4.5. This is the latest LTS or Long Term Support release of Morpheus Cloud Management Platform. This post highlights what’s new in Morpheus 5.4.5.

This release includes several key enhancements and updates:

• Credential Store Enhancements: This release enhances the credential store feature by adding support for additional clouds, option lists, and more.
• Granular Cypher Access: Added support for creating granular access policies to manage access to cypher secrets.
• ServiceNow Integration Enhancements: This release includes several enhancements that provides a tighter integration between the Morpheus service catalog and the ServiceNow portal.
• Efficient IP IPAM Support: Added an integration plugin for the Efficient IP SOLIDserver IPAM/DNS solution. This enables Morpheus to leverage the Efficient IP solution for IP and DNS management as part of a workload’s lifecycle.
• Platform Maintenance: This release includes a handful of removals, feature deprecations and updates.

This release also includes additional enhancements, general improvements, and bug fixes. The Morpheus 5.4.5 release notes include additional details about this release.

Credential Store Enhancements

The credential store provides a means of decoupling credentials from integrations (cloud, automation, etc.) in the Morpheus platform. This enables the reuse of credentials across multiple integrations in the platform. This simplifies the creation and rotation of credentials in the platform.

This release of the Morpheus platform extends the cloud integrations supported to all of the Morpheus cloud integrations. In addition to adding support for all cloud integrations, the following additional integrations have been added.

• Additional Cloud Integrations: Credential store support for additional cloud integrations such as OCI, GCP, Nutanix and OpenStack has been added.
• HTTP Automation Tasks: HTTP automation tasks now support using credentials stored in the credential store. This enhancement enables the ability to use existing credentials across multiple HTTP automation tasks.
• Remote Target Execution: The platform supports the ability to run automation tasks on remote systems or targets. This enhancement enables users to use credentials stored in the credential store for accessing the remote target.
• Option Lists (REST and LDAP): This enhancement adds support for using credential store credentials with REST API and LDAP option lists. This eliminates the need to directly add the credentials to every option list.

Granular Cypher Access Policies

Cypher is an embedded secure datastore that provides a place for platform users to securely store sensitive data. This release enables the creation of policies for granting access to cypher secrets at a granular path based level.

The video below details getting started with the new cypher access polices in the platform. Additional details on the new cypher access policies are available in the documentation.

ServiceNow Integration Enhancements

The ServiceNow integration in the Morpheus platform provides a dynamic catalog, integrated incident management, and cmdb integration. This update enhances the dynamic catalog integration between Morpheus and ServiceNow.

• Customize default workflow attached to exposed catalog items: Added support to customize the default workflow attached to the exposed catalog items without the changes being reset during the nightly sync operation.
• Customize the title value for the Morpheus category: Added support to customize the title that appears in the ServiceNow portal for the Morpheus catalog integration.
• Sync default Input values for exposed catalog items: The default values for Morpheus service catalog items are now synced to the ServiceNow catalog item.
• Sync help blocks for Input values on exposed catalog items: This simplifies the ServiceNow request form by passing the help blocks associated with the inputs in Morpheus to be presented with the inputs in ServiceNow.

Efficient IP IPAM/DNS Support

The Morpheus platform simplifies the process of requesting and reserving IP addresses from IPAM solutions during the provisioning of a workload. This release adds a new codeless integration for the Efficient IP SOLIDserver IPAM/DNS solution. This enables Morpheus users running Efficient IP to integrate the two platforms for IP address and DNS record automation. The integration was built using the Morpheus IPAM/DNS plugin integration. The Efficient IP plugin must be installed to use the integration. Additional details about the plugin are available in the community forum.

Platform Maintenance

The Morpheus platform provides 90+ codeless integrations out of the box which enables a fast time to value. The ongoing assessment of platform features and integrations is necessary to provide the best possible platform experience. This release includes a handful of removals, feature deprecations and updates.

• Venafi Integration Removal: The Venafi integration that provided a simplified SSL certificate creation and deployment workflow has been removed from the platform.
• AppDynamics Integration Removal: The AppDynamics integration that provided a simplified AppDynamics agent install has been removed from the platform. A more robust integration is planned for a future release of the Morpheus platform that provides a richer feature set.
• A10 Load Balancer Deprecation: This release deprecates the A10 load balancer integration. Removal of the integration from the platform will occur in a future release.
• Cloud Foundry Deprecation: This release deprecates the Cloud Foundry cloud integration. Removal of the integration from the platform will occur in a future release.
• Combo Cluster Rename: Previous versions of the Morpheus platform included a “combo” cluster in the clusters section of the platform. This release changes the name to “KVM/Docker” cluster to better describe what the feature does. The KVM/Docker cluster enables users to run Docker containers on a KVM cluster right next to KVM virtual machines.
• Bare Metal Cloud Type Deprecations: The Dell, HPE, and SuperMicro bare metal cloud types have been deprecated with the intent of removing them from the platform at some point in the future. These cloud types served as visual placeholders for the physical servers.

Other Enhancements

There are several other notable updates and enhancements added in the 5.4.5 release of the Morpheus platform. Please consult the changelog for full details:

• Policy updates: Enabling governance is a core part of the Morpheus platform. This release adds additional governance policies for limiting virtual servers, adding additional scopes for load balancer pool policies, and limiting the number of server pool members.
• F5 Load Balancer integration enhancements: This release adds support for specifying a custom configuration data location as well as path based VIP assignment.
• IPAM/DNS Plugin support: Plugins in the Morpheus platform enable users to extend the functionality of the platform to meet specific business use cases. This release has added support for creating custom IPAM and DNS plugins. This is beneficial for customers that want to add support for IPAM/DNS platforms that are not currently available as well as service providers that are running home grown IPAM/DNS solutions.
• vSphere Disk Storage Type Selection: vSphere administrators often deploy virtual machines using different disk types to improve the performance of mission critical workloads. This enhancement adds the ability to natively select the disk type (thick lazy zeroed, thick eager zeroed, and thin) for a vSphere virtual machine on a per disk level during provisioning.
• AKS/EKS/GKE Cluster Pricing info: Deployment and management of cloud managed Kubernetes services from AWS, Azure and GCP is a native feature in the Morpheus platform. This enhancement extends this functionality by displaying the pricing information during the deployment of an AKS, EKS or GKE cluster within the platform.
• NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Formerly AVI) support: Morpheus simplifies integrating workloads with load balancers such as F5, Citrix NetScaler, etc. This update replaces the AVI load balancer integration with NSX advanced load balancer. This is in response to VMware phasing out the AVI brand in favor for NSX Advanced Load Balancer. Additionally, we’ve added support for the most recent API version.

Join the Morpheus Community

Join the Morpheus community and engage other Morpheus community users to learn more about ways to use the platform. Also, downloading the Morpheus Community Edition lets you fully experience the Morpheus platform including nearly all features and capabilities! Register at Morpheus Hub and try it in your home lab or test environment today!