I had a client who is running OpsMgr 2012 and hasn’t applied an update rollup yet and they were asking if it makes sense to apply UR2 or to wait until SP1 is available.
Relevant links:
- UR2 Download: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30421
- KB link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2706783
- System Center 2012 SP1 – beta was just released on 9/10/12: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34607
The following is my thoughts on the topic:
1) If you haven’t deployed OpsMgr 2012 yet, it’s best to install the latest and greatest including the latest update rollup packs.
2) I have NO idea what the fascination is with both cat pictures and hello-kitty pictures and OpsMgr as of late. I am more of a dog person but I will admit but this one was too cute to pass on (thank you to my colleague who passed this to me when they really really wanted the answer to a question a while back – I offered this to Kevin Holman for his next UR post but he hasn’t seen fit to use this one yet!).
3) If you have deployed OpsMgr 2012 that’s the focus of this blog post.
There are four big considerations on this decision from my perspective:
1) Application of Update Rollups requires updates to agents which means that lots of systems will need to be updated and if you have a significant number of manually installed agents this represents a significant amount of work.
2) When will SP1 release for Operations Manager 2012? With the Beta for SP1 already shipping it seems reasonable that SP1 would ship at latest sometime this year.
3) Are there issues introduced by UR1 or UR2? At this point I’m only aware of one issue which is related to resource pool membership and the inability to remove a management server from a resource pool. This is discussed at https://www.catapultsystems.com/cfuller/archive/2012/09/12/opsmgr-resource-pools–issue-once-ur2-has-been-applied-scom.aspx. [This may or may not be an issue, I am in discussions with a product team member on this topic and I will update the original blog post accordingly.]
4) What is included in the two update rollups and whether what they fix is or isn’t relevant to your environment is the other big factor. See the list below which details what is in UR1 and UR2:
The following is the list of items addressed in in UR2: (taken as a subset from Kevin Holman’s article at http://blogs.technet.com/b/kevinholman/archive/2012/07/31/opsmgr-2012-update-rollup-2-ships-and-my-experience-installing-it.aspx)
· The Windows PowerShell module runspace configuration cache grows indefinitely. This causes memory usage to increase.
· The Set-SCOMLicense cmdlet fails if the management group evaluation expiration time-out has expired.
· The System Center Operations Manager agent may crash on Oracle Solaris root zones that are configured to use a range of dedicated CPUs.
· The UNIX/Linux agent process provider may not enumerate running processes if a process has arguments that include non-ASCII characters. This prevents process/daemon monitoring.
· The .rpm specification file for the agent for Red Hat Enterprise Linux does not specify the distribution.
The following is the list of items addressed in in UR2: (taken as a subset from Kevin Holman’s article at http://blogs.technet.com/b/kevinholman/archive/2012/05/08/opsmgr-2012-cumulative-update-release-1-ur1-ships-and-my-experience-installing-it.aspx)
· Environment crashes in Operations Manager due to RoleInstanceStatusProbe module in AzureMP.
· When multiple (2-3) consoles are running on the same computer under the same user account the consoles may crash.
· Cannot start or stop tracing for Reporting and Web Console if they were installed to a standalone IIS server.
· Connected Group alert viewing is not working but no error is given in console.
· Task result – CompletedWithInfo not supported with the SDK2007 assemblies.
· SeriesFactory and Microsoft.SystemCenter.Visualization.DatatoSeriesController need to be public to allow the controls extensibility and reuse.
· WebConsole is not FIPS compliant out of the box.
· Network Dashboard should overlay Availability when displaying health state.
· Dashboards: Group picker does not show all groups in large environment.
· IIS Discovery: prevent GetAdminSection from failing when framework version was detected incorrectly by IIS API.
· Performance Counters do not show up in Application list view of AppDiagnostics.
· Console crashes when state view with self-contained object class is opened.
· PerformanceWidget displays stale ‘last value’ in the legend due to core data access DataModel.
· Availability Report and "Computer Not Reachable" Monitor show incorrect data.
· Agent install fails on Win8 Core due to dependency on .Net framework 2.0.
· Web Services Availability Monitoring Wizard – Console crashes if wizard finishes before test has finished.
· Several Powershell changes needed:
o Changed License parameter in Get-SCOMAccessLicense to ShowLicense
o Changed SCOMConnectorForTier cmdlets to SCOMTierConnector
o Some formatting changes
· Update Rollup 1 for System Center 2012 – Operations Manager resolves the following issues for UNIX and Linux monitoring:
o Schannel error events are logged to the System Event Log on Operations Manager Management Servers and Gateways that manage UNIX/Linux agents.
o On HP-UX, Operations Manager cannot discover and monitor a logical volume composed of more than 127 physical volumes
o Upgrade of UNIX and Linux Agents fails when using Run As credentials in the Agent Upgrade Wizard or Update-SCXAgent PowerShell Cmdlet
· Update Rollup 1 for System Center 2012 – Operations Manager adds the following feature:
o Support for Oracle Solaris 11 (x86 and SPARC)
In summary, my recommendation is to bite the bullet and apply UR2 if any of the items identified will be relevant to your environment. If not, it’s reasonable to hold off and just apply SP1 when it is available.