Potential update interruptions for SLES instances in Azure b

Starting Friday March 25, 2016 Azure will enter a 2 day*rolling maintenance period that might effect the availability of updates, i.e. “zypper up” may fail, for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 and 11 (and all service packs) on demand running instances and may effect the automatic registration of newly launched on demand instances to the SUSE operated update infrastructure.

During the maintenance window it is expected that systems (our update servers) are shut down no longer than 15 minutes. Our update servers are placed in each region in a fashion that they should not all be shut down at the same time. However, we have no control over this process.

If you have version 6.4.4 or later of the cloud-regionsrv-client package installed,

rpm -qa cloud-regionsrv-client

your instance will automatically find an available update server in the region, if there is one.

The maintenance window schedule is as follows:

[LIST]
[]Australia East
23:00 Friday, Mar 25–11:00 Saturday, Mar 26 (UTC+11)
12:00 Friday, Mar 25–00:00 Saturday, Mar 26
[
]Japan West
23:00 Friday, Mar 25–11:00 Saturday, Mar 26 (UTC+9)
14:00 Friday, Mar 25–02:00 Saturday, Mar 26
[]East Asia
23:00 Friday, Mar 25–11:00 Saturday, Mar 26 (UTC+8)
15:00 Friday, Mar 25–03:00 Saturday, Mar 26
[
]West Europe
23:00 Friday, Mar 25–11:00 Saturday, Mar 26 (UTC+1)
22:00 Friday, Mar 25–10:00 Saturday, Mar 26
[]West US
23:00 Friday, Mar 25–11:00 Saturday, Mar 26 (UTC-7)
06:00 Saturday, Mar 26–18:00 Saturday, Mar 26
[
]Central US
23:00 Friday, Mar 25–11:00 Saturday, Mar 26 (UTC-5)
04:00 Saturday, Mar 26–16:00 Saturday, Mar 26
[]South Central US
23:00 Friday, Mar 25–11:00 Saturday, Mar 26 (UTC-5)
04:00 Saturday, Mar 26–16:00 Saturday, Mar 26
[
]South India
23:00 Friday, Mar 25–11:00 Saturday, Mar 26 (UTC+5:30)
17:30 Friday, Mar 25–05:30 Saturday, Mar 26
[]Australia Southeast
23:00 Saturday, Mar 26–11:00 Sunday, Mar 27 (UTC+11)
12:00 Saturday, Mar 26–00:00 Sunday, Mar 27
[
]Japan East
23:00 Saturday, Mar 26–11:00 Sunday, Mar 27 (UTC+9)
14:00 Saturday, Mar 26–02:00 Sunday, Mar 27
[]South East Asia
23:00 Saturday, Mar 26–11:00 Sunday, Mar 27 (UTC+8)
15:00 Saturday, Mar 26–03:00 Sunday, Mar 27
[
]North Europe
23:00 Saturday, Mar 26–11:00 Sunday, Mar 27 (UTC)
23:00 Saturday, Mar 26–11:00 Sunday, Mar 27
[]East US 2
23:00 Saturday, Mar 26–11:00 Sunday, Mar 27 (UTC-4)
03:00 Sunday, Mar 27–15:00 Sunday, Mar 27
[
]North Central US
23:00 Saturday, Mar 26–11:00 Sunday, Mar 27 (UTC-5)
04:00 Sunday, Mar 27–16:00 Sunday, Mar 27
[]East US
23:00 Saturday, Mar 26–11:00 Sunday, Mar 27 (UTC-4)
03:00 Sunday, Mar 27–15:00 Sunday, Mar 27
[
]Central India
23:00 Saturday, Mar 26–11:00 Sunday, Mar 27 (UTC+5:30)
17:30 Saturday, Mar 26–05:30 Sunday, Mar 27
[]West India
23:00 Saturday, Mar 26–11:00 Sunday, Mar 27 (UTC+5:30)
17:30 Saturday, Mar 26–05:30 Sunday, Mar 27
[
]Brazil South
23:00 Saturday, Mar 26–11:00 Sunday, Mar 27 (UTC-3)
02:00 Sunday, Mar 27–14:00 Sunday, Mar 27
[/LIST]

All our servers are monitored and we will verify they return to proper functionality as soon as possible after the reboot event. This does not effect the functionality of your running instances as a whole, it will only potentially effect the capability to install new packages or retrieve updates for installed packages.

Not Patch Tuesday, so Patch Friday/Saturday? On the other hand, this
prevents the ability to get patches, so maybe it’s Non-Patch Friday/Saturday.

Either way, thanks for the warning. Do you know if something similar
could happen with VMs in other clouds? I have an EC2 and Google Compute
instance, but I’ve never noticed an outage, or warning of an outage, like
this.


Good luck.

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