7. Keeping Your System Up To Date

This chapter explains how to keep the software on Virtuozzo Hybrid Server nodes up to date.

Important

It is strongly recommended to have all nodes run the same version of Virtuozzo Hybrid Server. At the very least make sure that product versions are only one major update apart. For example, before you update a node to Virtuozzo Hybrid Server 7.0 Update 7, make sure that all other machines in the cluster already run Update 6. The reason is that VMs created on newer nodes may fail to start on older nodes, thus causing issues with migration, restore from backup, high availability, and such.

The components that may need updating are:

  • Virtuozzo Hybrid Server software:

    • Tools and libraries

    • ReadyKernel patch

    • Kernel (typically included in major updates)

  • Virtual machines and containers hosted on the node:

    • Container EZ templates

    • KVM/QEMU hypervisor and guest tools in virtual machines

You can update Virtuozzo Hybrid Server nodes in several ways:

  • Automatically (default)

  • Automatically using smart updates

  • Manually using yum, the standard tool for RPM-based Linux operating systems

All of these methods as well as ways to update the kernel, virtual machines, and containers are described further in this chapter.

In this chapter: