Are any of the MDS limitations in MDS R80.20 are addressed in R80.30EA?

[Vladimir]

I am not lazy, but am pressed for time.

If someone looked into it, please share your findings.

Douglas Rich‌ has summarized most of the issues we were facing with R80+ MDS:

1. All Customers are in a single Database, no more clear separation of data.

2. You can't backup Customers CMA Databases individually.

3. You can't migrate the Customers CMA to another MDS.

4. You can't migrate the Customers CMA to a Smart Center Server.

5. You can't onboard/migrate any Customer who has already upgraded to R80.xx to an R80.xx MDS.

Are any of those limitations addressed in R80.30 EA?

If not, is there an extension of R77.30 for MDS customers under consideration?

I understand that there is a 1/2 a year still left until EOL, but with MDS it takes a while to coordinate MDS trials and migrations.

Thank you,

Vladimir

[PhoneBoy]

TL;DR: No

See this comment from Eran Habad‌ on the situation.

[Vladimir]

Thank you.

I'll follow that thread for updates.

[Douglas_Rich]

Thank you Dameon

[Eran_Habad]

Hi Vladimir Yakovlev‌,

My name is Eran and I'm a group manager in the R&D of Check Point, my group is responsible for the core infrastructure of the Management server and also for the Management APIs. I would like to address your post and to share some more information about the architecture of R80.x and also about our plans ahead, so you (and other readers) could have a better visibility on the design and roadmap of the Management server in R80.x.

In R80, we introduced a new Management server with a brand new architecture. We revolutionized the infrastructure of the Management server to achieve new capabilities and to provide based on those capabilities features such as multiple admins and multiple sessions, locking, API & openness and more which we believe are fundamentals in the evolving world of security (and security management). 

As part of those changes, the Management server was re-implemented using new technologies and is based today on a relational database (PostgreSQL) and a full-text search engine (Solr) rather than sets of files as before. The main process is CPM, which is a java process designed as a multi tenant application where every Domain is a different tenant and all tenants are completely separated from each other. Every communication between the CPM process and the database is made in the context of a specific tenant and is completely isolated to achieve data separation.

Regarding the abilities you mentioned in #2 through #5 I can update that all those backup and migration flows are under advanced stages of development and testing under my group. We know they are essential and we develop them with high attention. We will soon reach the EA phase for those features, and I invite you and everyone else on this thread to reply to my comment so R&D could approach you in the next few months and provide you an EA build on top of R80.20 so you could test it and share your feedback. All features will be integrated later this year to a main train version that will be released.

Hope my reply was informative enough, feel free to reach me out if you want me to clarify something further.

Regards,

Eran

[Vladimir]

Hi Eran Habad. Thank you for engaging with us and sharing an ongoing efforts and future plans.

For those of my clients who are looking to move to R80++ and are presently running MDS, which would be a more prudent course of action: to wait until these features are in the main train or to undertake the migration to the current version?

Given significant difference in capabilities between current release and the one you are working on, I am hesitant to suggest two migrations to essentially two major releases within a year and would like to hear your opinion on this subject.

The EA with these clients is pretty unlikely, but I can inquire anyway.

Regards,

Vladimir