How to Upgrade a Service Deployed to a Public Cloud

Applies To: System Center 2012 - App Controller, System Center 2012 SP1 - App Controller, System Center 2012 R2 App Controller

Public cloud services can be upgraded in one of two ways: an environment swap or an in-place upgrade. An environment swap places the staging environment into the production environment. As the swap occurs, the existing production environment is moved into the staging environment. An in-place upgrade replaces the existing binaries and settings with new binaries and settings.

When performing an upgrade in-place, the upgrade will be performed one upgrade domain at a time. A deployment is made up of one or more roles, which you can view in the diagram. A role’s instances are automatically divided into the upgrade domains. So if your role has six instances and your deployment has two upgrade domains, the upgrade will occur on three of the role’s instances at a time. Once all the instances in the upgrade domain have been upgraded, the next set of role instances is upgraded. By default the whole process of moving from upgrade domain to upgrade domain is automated. You can optionally specify that you want to manually signal when the upgrade should proceed to the next upgrade domain.

To upgrade a deployed service by swapping environments

1. On the Services page, select the service deployment and then select the Upgrade task. If you are in the diagram view of the service, right-click the deployment node and select Upgrade.

2. The deployment node will expand to show the staging and production environments. To move this deployment into the other environment, select the new environment and click Upgrade.

   Note

   A swap will only work if there is a deployment in the staging environment. If the staging environment is empty, you will not be able to perform a swap upgrade.

To upgrade a deployed service by upgrading in-place

1. On the Services page, select the service deployment and then select the Upgrade task. If you are in the diagram view of the service, right-click the deployment node and select Upgrade.

2. Select the new package and/or configuration file for this upgrade.

3. If a role requires information to be supplied, a red asterisk is displayed next to the role. Click the Role node in the diagram to open the property page. Information on this page can include the instance count, certificate selection, remote desktop configuration, and custom settings.

4. Once all required information has been supplied, click Upgrade.

5. After clicking Upgrade, you will see a confirmation dialog. If you want to manually control when the upgrade continues to the next upgrade domain, select the option on the confirmation dialog. Otherwise the upgrade will automatically move from upgrade domain to upgrade domain until the upgrade is complete.

6. If you selected the manual upgrade option, select the Resume Upgrade task for the service in the Services list view to continue to the upgrade in next upgrade domain. The Resume Upgrade task is only enabled when the upgrade within an upgrade domain has completed.

Managing Services and Virtual Machines in System Center 2012 - App Controller
How to Upgrade a Service Deployed to a Private Cloud