To speed the process of upgrading the cluster, a rolling upgrade option has been introduced to allow an administrator to upgrade multiple cluster members in parallel.

Administrators looking for a quicker alternative to a rolling upgrade when installing patches now have the option of a new patch procedure that favors upgrade speed over cluster high availability. After the first member receives the patch, all remaining members of the cluster receive the patch at the same time, followed by rebooting the entire cluster as a single operation.

Administrators can now request that the cluster application availability (CAA) facility reevaluate the placement within the cluster of registered applications either at a regularly scheduled time, or any time at which they desire to manually balance applications by using the caa_balance command. Balancing decisions are based on the standard CAA placement mechanisms. Similarly, administrators can now request that CAA schedule an automatic failback of a resource for a specific time. This allows an administrator to benefit from CAA automatically moving a resource to the most-favored cluster member without the worry of the relocation occurring at a critical time. The caa_report utility can provide a report of availability statistics for application resources. Administrators can now have the output of CAA resource action scripts redirected so that the output is visible during execution. Lastly, it is now possible to add user-defined attributes to a resource profile and have them available to the action script upon its execution.