Now we have come to my fourth post on my series of AzureStack multinode experince, previously I have been writing on the importance on the network and certificates for a successful deployment.

This post will describe the success path with updates to be applied and keeping us compliant with the support cycle, you can only be up to 3 updates behind or you will be left without support!

AzureStack Updates

When we got our stack it was deployed with 1709 and during the installation process the OEM-engineers that where onsite added 1710 and 1711. When the 1712 came out we did the update ourselves. Based on our learnings it is good to have ms support standby so start with a support case because to have a more successful run of the update pack you will want to check status and space on the infrastructure VM´s and it is only in a broken glass support session connected to the privileged endpoint on a ERCS node you can get help and verify the state! Probably in future update packs they will address issues and thus making it more stable and resilient and you then will not be needing a support call but better be safe than sorry!

First as the documentation describes, upload the update files to the storage account called “updateadminaccount” where you would add a container (private) with the update:

When all the files are uploaded you can go into the update and start. When highlighting the patch the “update now” link above lights up and you can press it to start the update process!

The whole process takes about 8-12 hours depending on the size of the update and how many nodes you have in your Stack!

We had one hotfix that needed to be applied after the update of 1712 and the learning from that was that the apply failed and failed and failed but not giving a good explain on why but we learned that was because we did not RTFM and uploaded the whole folders content and not just the xml,exe and bin but also a Supplemental Notice.txt (in our defence, the update packs does not contain the text file), so removing that one and then the retry succeeded without any issues!

Happy updating!