Tips for deploying SCVMM 2012 R2 Rollup 2

Last week Update Rollup 2 (UR2) for System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager is released. UR2 contains important fixes for SCVMM2012 R2. Here are some deployment tips for UR2:

• Wait a least couple of weeks before deploying Update Rollups in your production environment. It happens that new Update Rollups contains huge bugs and are pulled back!
• Make sure you have a backup of the SCVMM database before installing UR2
• Install the UR2 by download the VMM management server and VMM admin console packages link (or use Windows Update /WSUS to install both packages). Older packages such as UR1 does not need to be removed. In a SCVMM HA environment install UR2 first on the passive node, perform a failover and install UR2 on the other node.

• After installing UR2 update execute the SQL script listed in the KB2932926 article on the SCVMM database

• In the VMM console check the version by selecting help. The UR2 must be 3.2.7634.0.
• This step is often forgotten. In the VMM admin console perform a cluster refresh (Fabric-Cluster-Refesh). After the refresh job completes the host status is changed in “Needs Attention”. This means that the VMM agent must be updated on all the hosts.

• Update the VMM agent by right click on the host en choose “Update Agent”. No reboot of the host is required. Using PowerShell the Update-VMMManagedComputer cmdlet can be used to update the agent

• After the VMM agent is updated on the host check the version of the agent on the general tab on the host. The UR2 agent version must be 3.2.7634.0.

• With PowerShell you can list all the agent versions by using:

Get-VMMMangedComputer | Select Name, AgentVersion

System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012 R2 builds and versions