Updating agents from VBR console following an upgrade

[comical_uk]

Hi all

I wonder if you could give me the benefit of experience. I remember being told by a colleague that although you can just upgrade the agent and it will only pick up the new CBT driver when it is restarted and its 'better' to do the upgrade as close as you can to when the server is going to be rebooted to reduce the possibility of any issues

that may be sound advice but makes it a lot more difficult when you have multiple parties involved arranging things

how to other people arrange upgrades? do you just set it from the console and then let it get sorted out by the next reboot whenever that is or do you try to line the timings up just in case that act of upgrading introduces any instability

I have also been asked whether the server would display any message saying that it requires a reboot. I wouldn't think so but I'm trying to confirm that one aswell

Thanks, Gary

[Mildur]

Hello Gary

From out of my mind, you have to reboot after CBT driver update before a backup job can run again against the upgraded machine.

I suggest the following approach:
1. Disable the auto upgrade in the protection group
2. Update the backup server to new most recent version
3. Manually upgrade agent + driver for a single machine (a test machine if you have one available)
4. Wait for the next backup session to make sure if an immediate reboot is required or not

After your test, you will know if you can just upgrade agent and driver on all machines and wait for a reboot in the next maintenance window or if an immediate reboot is required to continue with backups.

When I was working for a service provider a few years ago, I disabled auto update on all my protection groups.
I run manual upgrades of agents before we had our regular maintenance window for these machines.
We decided to not deploy the CBT driver for most of our machines. We deployed the CBT driver mainly for machines with large databases and reFS filesystem. The default Changed Block Tracking Mechanism was good enough for most of our Windows machines.

Not deploying the CBT driver allowed us to update the Veeam Agent with almost no reboots.

Best,
Fabian