[Studio onsite + SLMS] Upgrade SP of rolled-out appliances

Archive SUSE Studio / Studio Express
1

Hello,
we use studio onsite in combination with suse lifecycle management server to build and to manage lots of virtual appliances (mostly xen-images based on SLES SP1).
Since we managed to serve SP2-based templates the button “SLES 11 SP2 is now available Upgrade” appears in the welcome-screens of all our SP1-based Appliances and now we want to upgrade all our sp1-based, adapted and rolled-out, productive appliance-instances to service pack 2!

The procedure for maintenance-updates was in short:

  • Refresh Appliances from Studio in SLMS (automatic)
  • SLMS then notices existence of new updates for the appliances
  • generate patch (qa, publish …)
  • login to every appliance-instance
  • run zypper ref and zypper up to install maintenance updates

For SP-Upgrade we tried the following:

  • Press Upgrade-Button in Studio (Studio then notices us about adding SP2-Repositories and a handfull of new packages)
  • Refresh Appliance from Studio in SLMS
  • generate Patch
  • login to appliance-instance
  • run zypper ref and zypper up

Zypper installed a few new packages and updates but the upgrade was not done. We tried ‘zypper dup’ on the appliance instance and there was only one package to update.
/etc/SuSE-release still shows SP1 so we think the upgrade was not done correctly.

Since there ist now SLMS-Forum, i posted this issue here. I hope that is ok.
We still use Studio and SLMS in Version 1.2

Let me know, if you need some more or more specific informations about our environment.
Any help would be appreciated.
Cheers
Markus

2

Hello again,
just wanted to update that Installation of SP2 on rolled-out appliances worked for us in a new test. I think i just forgot a step in our first attempt.
But there is another problem (for us) now.

We currently upgraded our Studio and SLMS to the most recent version 1.3
Now there only is an upgrade-button to SP3 (not anymore for SP2) but only for our SP1-Appliances. The new built SP2-Appliances do not get this offer.
I know that we should do an upgrade of our SP1-Appliances to SP3 directly without big problems, but we have a situation where we cannot upgrade the rolled-out appliances to SP3 because of a dependency of our hypervisor (Citrix Xenserver), that not yet support SP3.

So, is there a possibility to get back the Upgrade to SP2-Button in Studio 1.3?
(Of course we try to trigger the supportability of xenserver and SP3 but who knows how long this could take.
Any help would be appreciated.
Cheers
Markus

3

We had to add all needed SP3-Repositories to Studio. Now it is possible to successful upgrade any appliance to SP3. After using the upgrade-function, studio reports:
Upgraded from SLES 11 SP2 to SLES 11 SP3.
Upgraded from SLES 11 SP1 to SLES 11 SP2.

We then have a link to undo only the last upgrade (to SP3) and fallback to SP2.

4

On 17.10.2013 16:14, fhg mko2 wrote:[color=blue]

We had to add all needed SP3-Repositories to Studio. Now it is possible
to successful upgrade any appliance to SP3. After using the
upgrade-function, studio reports:
Upgraded from SLES 11 SP2 to SLES 11 SP3.
Upgraded from SLES 11 SP1 to SLES 11 SP2.

We then have a link to undo only the last upgrade (to SP3) and fallback
to SP2.

[/color]

Update:
We still have the problem, that our /etc/SuSE-release file will not be
updated with the new Patchlevel-String like mentioned in the first post
(I am fhg_mko2 and Yes, i have login-problems and support isnt able to
fix that, so i try nntp now, sorry for confusion).

The /etc/SuSE-release of an upgraded appliance still shows:

appliance:~ # cat /etc/SuSE-release
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (x86_64)
VERSION = 11
PATCHLEVEL = 1

We made some investigation of this and think that this is because of the
adaption process before slms 1.3.

At that time the adaption process includes some automatic installation
of a ‘release-package’ which contained the files
/etc/SuSE-release
/etc/YaST2/control.xml
/etc/issue, /etc/issue.net and /etc/motd
/etc/products.d/<appliance_name>.prod
(See Chapter 5.1.2 Changes in Appliance Release Package, SLMS 1.2
documentation)

Now the adaption process changed and this file seems not to be used any
more. Can somebody confirm this? If so, how can we get rid of this package?

All of our appliances were built with studio 1.1 and adapted with slms
1.1, every appliance have this ‘release-package’ installed which takes
full control of /etc/SuSE-release.

Since removing of a package is not a supported scenario for slms,
anybody has an idea how we can solve this issue?

Btw. rebuilding the appliances and rolling out again is not an option
(we have about 12 kinds of different appliances with up to 60 productive
running instances of each of them).

Anybody help here?

Sincerely
Markus