Managing Updates and Revisions in your System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager environment
Managing Updates and Revisions in your Virtual Machine Manager Environment
I’ve recently spent some time at one of my favourite* customers (* they have a freezer full of free ice creams) who happen to have a very large SCVMM environment. One of the admin headaches they have is ensuring their environment has the latest patches and Service Packs deployed and that all their System Center apps are running the same version
NB: If you are running different versions of System Center 2012 across your environments you may experience problems such as the SCVMM - OpsMgr connector not functioning correctly, this could be due to the mismatch. You should also note that when we release Rollup Updates for System Center, there is often a preferred order of deployment which aims to prevent such issues occurring, make sure you read the deployment info carefully.
In order to keep on top of this, you need to have a solid process in place to identify the servers and obtain the version info which will then allow you to deploy the relevant updates, this is especially important if you have lots of Admin Consoles installed across your environment. One of the easiest ways of dealing with this is by enabling your WSUS or Config Manager environment to deploy Rollup Updates by ticking the box in the WSUS Admin console for standalone WSUS or by setting the option in the Config Manager Console. If you are not able to use this option for whatever reason then the steps below will be useful. Even if you do deploy the Rollup Updates automatically, the steps below are still worth implementing as they allow you to report on versions across the estate.
Identify VMM servers and installed versions
To ensure we have all our SCVMM components running at the same version, we first need to understand what the latest version is; fortunately we have a Wiki that tells us the various iterations of SCVMM and it can be found here…
Now that we know the latest version info, we can compare that to our installed versions:
Now, the best way to check these versions. If you’re using Config Manager (which you should be, if you’re licensed for SCVMM then you are probably licensed for Config Manager too, so what are you waiting for?) then you can use the following queries to identify which versions are installed in your environment…
NB: Bear in mind that the queries below relate to SCVMM 2012 SP1, if you’re using an older version, the DisplyName in Add/Remove Programs will be slightly different.
Query to list servers that have the 64bit version of the VMM Admin console installed:
select
SMS_R_System.Name, SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS_64.DisplayName,
SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS_64.Version from SMS_R_System inner join
SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS_64 on
SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS_64.ResourceID = SMS_R_System.ResourceId where
SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS_64.DisplayName = "Microsoft System Center
Virtual Machine Manager Administrator Console (x64)"
The output should look similar to this shot taken from my test lab...
Query to list servers that have the 64bit version of the VMM Server role installed:
select
SMS_R_System.Name, SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS_64.DisplayName,
SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS_64.Version from SMS_R_System inner join
SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS_64 on
SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS_64.ResourceId = SMS_R_System.ResourceId where
SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS_64.DisplayName = "Microsoft System Center
Virtual Machine Manager Server (x64)"
The output should look similar to this…
Once you have a query to identify the versions you can start to deploy the required updates, which in my case looks like I need to deploy Update Rollup 2.
3.1.6011.0 equates to System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager SP1 RTM and I should be running at 3.1.6020.0 after installing Update Rollup 2 which can be found here…
At the time of writing this article, Update Rollup 2 is the latest update applicable to System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager SP1, be sure to look for the very latest version on the wiki as Rollup Updates are released approx. every quarter.
NB: A note on deploying Rollup Updates
The installation process for Rollup Updates may vary per release, be sure to read through the installation instructions for each update.
This post just covers SCVMM 2012, it's quite likely you'll have Config Manager, Ops Manager and maybe Service Manager running in your environment. In which case, I'd recommend generating the same queries for all your other System Center apps to give you a clear view of the version state of your environment.
Hope this helps!
Leigh