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How do I upgrade my Active Directory Connector or Virtual Appliance?

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Matt Prytuluk
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Overview

 

New software versions for Virtual Appliances (VAs) become available automatically and are usually applied without any user intervention required. However, you must have two VAs in order for automatic upgrades to take place. This ensures high availability of DNS services to your network during upgrade.

If you would like to find out more about the upcoming versions, including release notes, see Active Directory Integration – Appendix B. Click Follow and updates to the document will be e-mailed to you automatically.

As an Umbrella Admin, you can configure the schedule during which upgrades take place. We usually recommend this be done during non-business hours.  

These instructions also describe how to upgrade a single VA, which will result in downtime for your internet connectivity as there is no failover for high availability with a single virtual appliance.

IMPORTANT: In order for new versions to be automatically installed on the VAs we require that a minimum of two VA are installed; otherwise, the only way to upgrade a VA is to click Upgrade in the Umbrella dashboard. Performing an in-place upgrade of a single VA will result in up to 15 minutes of downtime during which time you will not be able to perform DNS queries on the network and effectively will not have internet service.

We require that you have two VAs in place so that there is no downtime or interruption in service during the upgrade process.

  

How the upgrade process takes place

  

In order to ensure the VAs are updated in an orderly manner, the upgrade for the VA is controlled by commands from the Umbrella API that the VA are connected to. This means you cannot decide which VA is upgraded automatically. If you wish to upgrade a particular VA first, please do this manually as described later in this section.

Logic is built into our API to prevent two VAs at a single site from upgrading at once or upgrading when one of the VAs is in an error state. The following checks are performed:

  1. First, the API first checks if there is only a single VA in Site. If there is only one VA, the API does not offer a command to autoupgrade. 
  2. Next, if there is a secondary VA for the Site but it is in an ERROR state, the first VA will not autoupgrade. 
  3.  The API checks to see if a second VA for that Site is already upgrading and if it is in a mid-upgrade state, it will not autoupgrade during that window of time. If we have ordered a VA to upgrade and have not heard back that it has complete, this qualifies as mid-upgrade state.
  4. Lastly, if all the prerequisite checks have been met, the VA is upgraded.

Note:

If there are error states in Virtual Appliances on different Umbrella sites, they may affect upgrading on sites with healthy VAs. Please ensure you address any errors with VAs in your environment if you are having VA upgrade issues.

 

 

 

Automatic Upgrade for Two or More Virtual Appliance

  

To view the version of your VAs can be seen in your dashboard and change the schedule: 

  1. Login to the Umbrella dashboard and navigate to Settings > Sites and Active Directory.
  2. In the Version column, note the versions of the VA and AD Connectors.
  3. Change schedule time settings as required and click Set.


    Time is UTC -08:00 based and the update window always show 01:00 PM UTC -08:00 as the end time.

 

Manual Upgrade for a single Virtual Appliance

 

 

  1. Login to the Umbrella dashboard and navigate to Settings > Sites and Active Directory.
  2. In the Version column, note the versions of the VA and AD Connectors.

    If a VA or AD Connector is out of date, you will see a yellow triangle alert:

    alert-triangle.jpg
  3. Hover over the version number and click to expand the window.

    hoverover.jpg

    A green upgrade button displaying the latest version becomes available. In our example, the latest version is 1.3.12. The Virtual Appliances are several releases behind as they did not autoupgrade.
  4. Click Upgrade VA.
    green-upgrade-button.jpg

    Before upgrade begins, a window opens reminding you that this upgrade will result in the loss of DNS service for the duration of the upgrade. We highly recommend that you perform an upgrade during non-business hours or, preferably, that a second VA for this site is deployed in order to automate the process of upgrades without introducing any down time.  
  5. Click Upgrade Virtual Appliance.

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