Using OS Upgrades in Patch Remedy 5
Posted: Tue Feb 08, 2022 3:45 pm
How do I configure and use the OS Upgrade feature in Patch Remedy 5?
In previous builds of Patch Remedy there were areas to configure where to get the ISO files, where to cache it, what OS build it was for and so on.
Not any more!
Patch Remedy 5 has simplified the process so that you can get any Windows 10 agent to the latest builds of Windows without any knowledge of the agent. We have simplified the process down to a simple point and click action.
You have 2 options represented as buttons at the bottom of the plugin.
#1 Manually Now Option - (Upgrade Agent Button) This option will look at the agent for an logged in user, if found it will launch the upgrade in a reboot hold status which will prompt the user to allow the reboot once the process has completed stage 1 of the upgrade. If no user is logged in it will proceed with the upgrade to completion.
#2 Schedule Upgrade Option - (Schedule OS Upgrade) This will produce the same result as the manual option but allow you to automate the schedule to any time and date you like.
Each option can be executed on a per agent or per client. You can do stuff like schedule the entire client for OS upgrades then go back and adjust the schedule for a few agents.
When scheduling agents for upgrades, if the (PR) OS Upgrades is checked the Upgrades are disabled on that agent and no upgrade will be scheduled. The scheduled date will remain set but the feature is disabled so automated upgrade is disabled. This will need to be unchecked for the automated services to schedule the upgrade.
The OS upgrade will upgrade the agent to the latest version of Windows 10 automatically with out the need for any other configurations. How does it do this? Patch Remedy defines an agent and draws down from Microsoft the correct Windows Upgrade Assistant. The same ones you use to create the ISO images needed in previous versions of Patch Remedy. We then use PowerShell to validate the agent and process the install using that software.
Once the upgrade has been scheduled and the process has been started , you can see the status of the upgrade in the agent view. The Last Attempt is the date it started executing and the Last Log is the results of the execution of the upgrade. You can see from last log that we started with a OS build of 10.0.19043.0 and now are on 10.0.19044.0. Obviously it was successful in the upgrade.
During the upgrade process we will test to see if a user is logged into console 0, if so we will ask the user if now is a good time to start upgrade. If they select yes, the upgrade continues else it will log and halt.
"I have servers and other Windows OS types under same client, I see they get the same dates to upgrade. What happens when their turn comes up?"
Simply put, nothing.. The automation weeds out all the agents that are not viable and upgradeable agents. This includes any Windows servers, Windows 7 or 8 agents.
There will be in next builds of Patch Remedy 5 the Windows 10 to 11 upgrade followed by the Windows 11 OS upgrade options.