Manual Upgrade of Writable Volume

[michael_borland]

I am trying to get some instructions.

Current WV 2.11 and I want to test upgrading to 2.12.0.  Any idea how I can update just a single WV before I update the rest?

[Ray_handels]

There is no need to upgrade the Writable volume if you upgrade the agent. I would say test with 1 writables after you upgraded the agent and check to see if it works.

Make sure to upgrade to 2.12.1 though, otherwise you could end up with writables that have issues with printers not being attached.

If you do want to upgrade for example the snapvol.cfg you can attach it to a basic machines that does not have the Appvolumes agent installed, give the writable a drive letter and edit it from there.

[michael_borland]

Thanks.  Actually VMware Support called me back today and gave me the instructions.  They described mounting the writable template on a non AVM agent machine (similar to your advice), pull the 6 files off that can be used to upgrade the provisioned WVs.

Funny you say 2.12.1, since that's the problem we've been dealing with recently.  The 2.12.1 agent caused massive problems with Office 2016 email attachments (MSI install on master image with KMS) and office doc downloads from the internet.  They were being blocked. Somehow the agent was interfering with the Windows Attachment Manager and caused the OS to think they were unsafe.  Log off and back on to a pool running 2.12.0 and everything worked fine. Totally weird and frustrating.

We ended up staying with 2.12.1 on the server, but reverted to 2.12.0 agent and WV with 4 exclusions added to the WV sysvol.cfg to fix the printers.  All is working fine now, even with AppStacks.  VMware claims to fully support this configuration, even on 7.1 (which is our next fun adventure).

Appreciate the reply Ray.

..mb

[fdrietatns]

So just pull the files off the template and put it in a zip then upload that zip to the writables from the AVM?

[Ray_handels]

If you want to automatically update the writables, yes. But do keep in mind that it will upgrade all writables. It will do this during attachment of the writable. So if a writable is never attached after you upload the zip file into the manager that writable will not be updated.

In this case it was only to change 1 writable manually. I would still suggest attaching it to a machine without the Appvol agent and manually edit it there,

[fdrietatns]

Thanks Ray!

I need to do both, one to update/test my custom template and the other to deploy to existing volumes.

Just not all too familiar with the zip process.

As an aside, is the VHD writable files (other than [system]) the same as the vmdk based? I don't particularly want to install the manager to get the template files before the scheduled upgrade.

[Ray_handels]

For as far as I know, no. You would need to copy those files there and thus upgrade the manager. I don;t think you could edit the vhd file.

On the other hand you only need the snapvol.cfg, I would say give it a try, it might just work. Make sure to only copy the snapvol.cfg though, just leave the other files.

EDIT!

Yes you can get the files from that vhd. Just attach the vhd within the manager, give it a drive letter and your good to go.

[fdrietatns]

You can pull the VHD out of the ISO under /Hypervisor/In-Guest VHD/yadda yadda, then open it with 7ZIP to pull the wirtable files.

I'll run a compare on the VMDK and VHD files (of the same version) and see what happens.

Thanks again!