Orka v2.0

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Orka Release Notes
v2.0
February 14, 2022
New features | Improvements | Bug fixes
How to upgrade
Download CLI | API Docs

We’re continually working to provide you with new features, tools, and plugins to improve your overall Orka experience. For the latest and greatest, be sure to update your CLI to 2.0 after your environment has been updated to 2.0. Here’s an overview of what changes have shipped with version 2.0.

New features

Orka 2.0 introduces the following new features:

Apple ARM-based Support (Beta)

As of today, Orka supports Apple ARM-based nodes where you can run your CI/CD workflows. The nodes can be added to existing clusters.

Custom VM Scheduling

It is now possible to choose between two types of VM schedulers based on your preference on how to use the available resources on the nodes. The default scheduler schedules the VMs so that there is a balance between used and available resources on all nodes. The most-allocated one schedules the VMs on the nodes with least possible available resources required to accommodate the VM. This allows for having nodes, which are free of all resources, available -- even when some VMs are already deployed.

Read more about VM Scheduling when creating a VM config or deploying a VM.

Node Tagging

With Orka 2.0, it's possible to create a pool of nodes by tagging them. You can them route VM deployments to specific nodes in your cluster according to these tags. This allows you to require or prefer a VM to be deployed to any node marked with a certain tag.

Read more about node tagging and usage of tags when deploying a VM.

Improvements

Orka 2.0 introduces the following improvements.

GPU option is now available in the Orka Web UI
IO Boost option is now available in the Orka Web UI
It's now possible to use option --expand when running orka vms or orka vms --json and view all the replicas of the scaled VMs
Performance improvements

Bug fixes

Orka 2.0 introduces the following bug fixes.

General bug fixes

It is now possible to delete large quantities of VMs by name without receiving an error
Configuring Orka now works properly under Windows

Known issues

If you deploy a VM on an Apple ARM-based node and try to login to your iCloud account you might receive an error 'The action could not be completed'. We're still investigating the issue, and in such a case the only workaround is to figure out an alternative way to achieve your goals.

If your git-related operations are hanging, and nothing happens on an Orka VM, most probably, your Xcode is stuck in the "Verifying Xcode dialog" state. To ensure this is the case, you can connect to your VM via VNC, start the Xcode application and check if you will get a small window saying "Verifying Xcode".
To resolve the issue, either VNC to the VM and wait for the verification process to complete or execute the following command from the Terminal to disable Xcode verification:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine '/Applications/Xcode.app'

Users running older versions of Orka will start seeing Apple Silicon images when running orka image list-remote. These images are not supported in older versions of Orka, and any attempt to pull them will result in an error. To prevent that, ignore the images or upgrade to Orka 2.0.

How to upgrade

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Scheduled maintenance window required
Orka 2.0 is a new Orka release. For more information, see Orka Upgrades.
This release requires a maintenance window of 2+ hours depending on the size of the cluster.

Submit a ticket through the MacStadium portal.
Suggest a time for the maintenance window that works for you.
The suggested time(s) must be Monday through Thursday, 5am to 6pm PST (8am to 9pm EST).