What’s New in Digital Rebar v4.15

The release of Digital Rebar v4.15 focuses on strengthening enterprise capabilities in core infrastructure automation areas: platform control, lifecycle management, secure networking, and support for air-gapped environments. Central to these improvements are the new processes for managing ESXi with Secure Boot, enhanced air gap support, including better backup and restore and easier Digital Rebar installation and updating, and expanded OpenShift integrations.

Here’s a breakdown of what’s new:

Better Air-Gapped Installations and Updates of Digital Rebar

One of the most requested features has been robust support for fully disconnected environments. v4.15 introduces a streamlined Digital Rebar install and upgrade experience for air-gapped systems. New airgap-specific bundles simplify installs in isolated infrastructure while improved updating processes ensure version consistency across all system components. 

Backup and Restore for DRP Endpoints

v4.15 improves on how Digital Rebar backs up and restores, including inside of air-gapped systems. Operators can now configure a designated backup server that handles scheduled or on-demand backups across DRP nodes, including HA and non-HA configurations. This feature enables automated, version-controlled recovery processes.

Ephemeral VMware Control Without Embedded Agents

Digital Rebar now supports complete lifecycle automation for VMware ESXi systems without requiring persistent VIBs. Through a combination of out-of-band management and ephemeral in-band agents, users can manage VMware much more easily, even with systems using Secure Boot. These improvements give Digital Rebar users full governance, audit, and automation control over VMware systems.

Ready-to-Use OpenShift Cluster Deploy Workflows

v4.15 expands Digital Rebar’s integration with OpenShift. Customers can now deploy and scale OpenShift clusters with embedded hardware lifecycle automation, bridging the gap between Kubernetes orchestration and underlying bare metal infrastructure. 

CLI and DRP Usability Enhancements

Command-line interfaces remain central to Digital Rebar workflows, and v4.15 brings improvements to both the CLI and DRP interfaces. These refinements help teams debug, test, and manage systems more effectively. The enhancements directly support automation at scale, especially in complex, multi-site environments.

System Events and API Extension Enhancements

Digital Rebar v4.15 includes deeper integrations around system events and API performance. Event handling is a key extension point in Digital Rebar, and improvements here increase the stability and observability of customer-managed environments. These changes also pave the way for more reliable integrations with external systems and workflows.

Improved Plugin and Content Management

With v4.15 also comes a significant improvement in the handling of plugins and workflow content. These changes help customers better manage updates and lifecycle control for custom and RackN-delivered content. The result is improved system performance and a more scalable method for deploying advanced infrastructure automation components.

Read the Docs for More on Digital Rebar v4.15

If you want to learn more about these features, take a look at our documentation on v4.15. All of our features for this release are based on customer use cases and feedback. If you have any requests for future releases, please get in touch. We would love to hear from you.