Release notes for Awingu 5.5.1

Introduction

Awingu 5.5.1 represents a significant milestone as the latest release of our secure unified workspace. This version introduces a wide range of enhanced security options and other innovative features that greatly enhance the value of your investment.

The key features delivered in Parallels Awingu 5.5 focus on security and maintenance.
 

What’s New

New certificate settings for external HTTPS requests
Allows administrators to manage the identity verification process for Awingu features that send HTTPS requests to external servers. This can be configured by adding additional intermediate or root trusted certificate authorities or self-signed certificates globally and/or per domain or by allowing/blocking connections to untrusted servers per feature per domain.

Support for Microsoft SQL Server 2022
Awingu can now be installed with Microsoft SQL Server 2022 as an external database. 

Additional troubleshooting actions
To improve the ability to troubleshoot issues, two actions have been added:

• Ability to force an immediate time sync with the configured NTP server
• Ability to output the appliance IPs

As with most minor releases, bug fixes are included in this release. If you previously reported issues to Parallels Awingu technical support that were deemed to be bugs, they may have been remedied as part of this release.  

Important changes

Using Google Cloud KMS as an external Vault Provider

Now when using the Google Cloud Key Management Service as an external Vault Provider, the GCE Service Account requires the Cloud KMS Viewer permission.

SSL offloading

The certificates page and the SSL offloading configuration have been combined into the SSL Offloading page.

Deprecations

• Support for SMS Passcode

• Support for VMware ESXi 6.5 and 6.7

• Support for Microsoft SQL Server 2016 and 2017

• Support for Citrix Hypervisor

Using the Awingu REST API

If you automate the Awingu configuration using the REST API, note that the API is not fully backwards compatible. Please test your scripts and modify them where necessary.

Upgrade Instructions

You can upgrade to Awingu 5.5 from Awingu 5.4.4

1. Sign in to Awingu with an administrator account (of an administrative Awingu domain) and check that all services in the Dashboard are green.

2. Make sure the host (hypervisor) is not in a stressed state (CPU and disk IO) and that the memory is not ballooning.

3. At this point, it is highly recommended to backup the Awingu environment:
   
   Create an environment backup in Awingu.
   Shut down the appliance(s) cleanly and take a snapshot/backup.
   Take a backup of the database if you are using an external database.
    
4. Start the appliances(s) up, sign in to Awingu with an administrator account (of an administrative Awingu domain), and wait until all services in the Dashboard are green again.
    
5. Make sure all Awingu appliances in your environment have internet connectivity (access to https://repo-pub.awingu.com ).
    
6. Open the System Settings.
    
7. At the General Information page, in the section Upgrade Version, select 5.5.1 and click Upgrade.
   
   The upgrade can take up to 60 minutes per appliance, depending on the disk and network speed.
   Don't refresh the System Settings page.
   Do not reboot your appliance(s) during the upgrade.
    
8. When the upgrade has completed: Close System Settings and Logout. Refresh your browser before you re-login.
    
9. It is highly recommended to reboot the appliances(s) after a successful upgrade.

Upgrading to Parallels Awingu 5.5

Parallels Awingu 5.3 and earlier are no longer supported as of this update, so it is critical that earlier versions are upgraded immediately. 

Upgrading is a straightforward process and is performed right within the admin console.

For further more granular details about Parallels Awingu 5.5, please consult the admin guide.

Documentation

The following documentation is available for this release:

User Manual 

Admin Manual

Fixed Bugs

• Selecting an application in the sidebar does not always focus the expected window.
• When using the clipboard in Safari, the workspace is unresponsive temporarily.
• When the automatic logout feature is enabled, users are sometimes logged out after one hour of inactivity even though the inactivity timeout is set higher.
• After losing connection, the user is unable to restart the application session in certain situations.
• Unable to login when LDAP Secure Channel binding is enforced.
• Login without admin permissions not working if already logged in and MFA is configured.
• IdP initiated Single Logout is broken in Firefox with Total Cookie Protection.
• Unclear for users why a logout happened when logout was initiated by the backend.
• In some situations, the end time is not filled in for user sessions in the auditing.
• Adding a frontend node may hang when the new appliance hostname can be resolved by DNS.
• The DC/LDAP server field for a domain is too short.
• The appliance validator allows underscores in the hostname.
• There is no API validation on domain host headers.
• Installation fails when using an external Microsoft SQL database with port number higher than 32767.
• The Download packages button can be clicked twice, causing the second download task to fail.
• Reinstalling Awingu from a backup can get stuck in certain situations.
• Upgrades for GCE appliances started on 5.4 to 5.5 failed when appliances were installed using the GCP UI.
• Memcached can contain stale data when restoring from an environment backup.
• An Awingu upgrade can fail due to unavailable disk space.
• Reverse proxied web applications do not have proxy_ssl_server_name enabled.
• Fail to download logs on medium to large environments.

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