Saturday, November 03, 2012

Citrix Xenserver: Apply Multiple Updates

As a result of reorganizing the servers in my lab, I had to reinstall Citrix Xenserver.  I should have downloaded 6.1, but decided to keep it at 6.0 and apply the updates that I already had on the NAS.  All went well with the install, I moved all my VMs and templates to this machine, and retasked the other machine.

When I went to load the updates, a funny thing happened... It refused to load more than one, and expected to reboot after each.  After a moment of thought, I realized that I had probably never tried to load two at a time before.  It seems like something that should be simple, but the procedure is not obvious.

Here's how:
  1. Highlight a server, click the "General" tab, and expand the "Updates" pane.
  2. In the "Updates" pane, notice which updates have already been applied.
  3. On the menu bar, click "Tools", "Install Software Update", and "Next".
  4. Click the "Add" button, select the lowest numbered update, and click "Open".
  5. At this point, its tempting to add another update, but don't: yet.
  6. Click "Next", select one or more servers, and click "Next".
  7. A check will be run against the update.
If the check succeeds, click "Previous", "Previous", and repeat from step 4.

If the check fails, then two things.  First, click "Cancel" and start the entire procedure over again, but don't add the update that failed the test.  Second, don't blame me-- I didn't create the interface.

Once you've added all the relevant updates, click "Next".  You'll have the choice of performing post install steps automatically or manually.  What this really means is reboot now or later.  If you select manually (reboot later,) it is possible that some of the updates will fail, but that's actually okay.  When an update succeeds, it appears in the "Updates" pane as Applied.  If it fails, it appears as Not applied.

To get activate the not applied updates, repeat steps 1, 2, and 3, but instead of step 4, highlight the not applied update.  Continue through the rest of the steps, making sure to do automatic, as recommended.

3 comments:

  1. Thanks, this works! Too bad they didn't create an "upload" button on the add multiple updates page...

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  2. doesn't seem to work on xenserver 6.1. Maybe it's my xencenter version? I'm running 6.1 build 872. It only installs the last hotfix that I select. I tried to apply 3 at one time and only the last one (highest hotfix) was applied.

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  3. Ditto, on 6.0.2, only installs the last update. Coming from vSphere and VUM, Xen is a hot mess.

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