Month: January 2018

Update Quest RapidRecovery Agents silently

Jeff Miles 2 Comments

I’m in the process of upgrading AppAssure 5.4.3 agents to the latest version of Rapid Recovery, 6.1.3. This is done following the Core upgrade.

So far my progress has been pretty seamless. In testing I confirmed that I could push the install with a “No Reboot” force, and the agent would continue to operate normally until the next system reboot (which will occur as part of monthly Windows Updates).

This script is in no way ‘complete’, as in it could be made much better. Additional logging on success or failure, parallel processing, etc could all be done -however for simple purposes it worked quite well.

# begin a transcript to log the output to file
Start-Transcript C:\Temp\AgentUpgradeLog.txt
# Define the list of systems to update
# Gather list of older version from Rapid Recovery Licensing Portal
$systems = Get-Content -Path C:\Temp\AgentServers.txt
 
foreach($system in $systems) {
#Write-Host "Testing connectivity to $system"
$rtn = Test-Connection -CN $system -Count 1 -BufferSize 16 -Quiet
 
IF($rtn -match 'True'){
 Write-Host "ALIVE - $System"
 copy C:\Temp\Agent-X64-6.1.3.100.exe \\$system\c$\temp -confirm:$false
 $executable = "C:\temp\Agent-X64-6.1.3.100.exe"
 $session = New-PSSession -ComputerName $system 
 # Key here is the /silent and reboot=never switches
Invoke-Command -Session $session -ScriptBlock {Start-Process $using:executable -ArgumentList "/silent reboot=never" -Wait}
 remove-pssession $session
 Write-Host "$System - upgrade steps completed"
 sleep 5
# Found that we had agent services not starting following the upgrade
 get-service -name "RapidRecoveryAgent" -computername $system | Start-Service
 }
 
else
 {
 Write-Host "DOWN - $System"
 }
 
}
 
Stop-Transcript

 

Update drive label with no letter

Jeff Miles Leave a comment

In the process of re-organizing naming structure of a set of Cluster Shared Volumes, I had a need to rename the volume upon an iSCSI disk that was presented to the cluster.

Originally I sourced this article which requires a drive letter associated with the volume in order to find the proper object.

Following that, I came across this article which had the syntax I needed in the last post.

Here’s the script I used successfully:

$drive = gwmi win32_volume -filter "Label = 'Old Name'"
$drive.Label = "New Name"
$drive.put()

Intel Network Connections (ProSet) update or removal

Jeff Miles Leave a comment

Short-version: be very careful removing the Intel Network Connections software!

I’m working on a task to update NIC drivers and firmware on a Dell PowerEdge R630. It was decided during this process to remove the Intel ProSet software along with it’s generated sub-interfaces for VLAN purposes, and instead utilize switch-port configuration.

I went to uninstall Intel(R) Network Connections from appwiz.cpl, which contains ProSet. On this server, its version was 19.3.0.0. However, I quickly received an error stating that I needed to remove any Teams and VLANs. No problem, I was going to do that anyways so I went into the advanced properties of my NICs and removed the VLAN sub-interface. I wasn’t using any Intel teaming, but rather LFBO within Windows Server.

When I tried again, it still gave me the same error. I decided to try “Modify” on the uninstaller instead, and remove ProSET only.

This was successful, but then when I tried to install the latest version, it said it couldn’t update with this error:
Product: Intel(R) Network Connections — The installed version of Intel(R) Network Connections is not supported for upgrades. You must uninstall it before installing this version.

So I tried the full uninstall again, and this time it worked! Great, I’m thinking “Now I can proceed with the latest version”.

Except it removed ALL NIC config, including IP settings and advanced properties like Jumbo Frames and RSS buffer sizes.

Thankfully I had good documentation of the previous setup, and that should be your biggest takeaway if you’re reading this: always consider “what’s the worst that could happen” and then plan to mitigate that thing.

For future hosts, I left the old version of the software installed and manually updated drivers from the .INF files. Interesting to note, if you already have a higher version installed like Version 22.7, this behavior isn’t seen – you can install an update on top of it without having to uninstall.

 

 

 

Rapid Recovery – Force Snapshot selection empty

Jeff Miles Leave a comment

Using Rapid Recovery 6.1.3, on a Core protecting agents with a very low SLA, I wanted to take a manual snapshot.

When I went to do so, I found the selection list empty.


This is because none of the volumes on the agent were scheduled for protection.

I temporarily added a schedule, forced a snapshot, and then removed the schedule.

I think this is terrible design – there are legitimate reasons to avoid a schedule for some resources, and requiring configuration changes in order to instigate a snapshot introduces risk to un-managed change in an environment.

It goes further though; as this KB indicates, when you have volumes all scheduled and want just a single volume snapshot, you have to remove the schedule (better hope you took note of the settings) and then re-add it afterwards.

There are many little things like this I’ve seen in the AppAssure/Rapid Recovery product since being introduced to it that are quickly souring my opinion, especially coming from a Commvault environment which is extremely flexible and powerful.