Upgrading Avantra Agents

You have the option to upgrade Avantra Agents manually or automatically (recommended).

Upgrading Agents Automatically

Avantra Agents are able to perform Agent Self Updates. These updates can be initiated centrally from the Avantra UI, so the installation of patches and new versions becomes easy in all Avantra environments. You need the Trigger Agent Updates Permission in order to perform automatic updates.

You can also trigger the update of the Java runtime for agents from within the same area of Avantra.

Procedure: Automated upgrade of Avantra Agents (Linux & Windows)

The Agent Self Updates work as follows:

  1. There is just one(!) upgrade package for the Avantra Agent which is valid for all supported operating systems. This is the file called agent-23.0.n.bin available for download from the Avantra Customer Hub.

  2. You can upload the packages using Avantra WebUI and the Avantra Agents retrieve the packages through the Avantra Server and avantra-gateway infrastructure.

  3. Avantra WebUI provides an interface that allows you to select the Avantra Agents to be upgraded. You can either choose items from the Server list or define an ad-hoc Selectors.

    Select Administration  Agent Updates from the top-level menu. Select the Packages tab. Choose Upload from the toolbar.

    Choose the packages from your computer and start the upload.

  4. Select Administration  Agent Updates from the top-level menu. Select Select Systems for…  Agent Update from the toolbar.

  5. Fill in appropriate values for the Selectors and push OK.

  6. Choose the appropriate version from the drop-down list and set the flags on the Servers you want to update.

  7. Confirm your selection by pushing the Start Agent Update button.

  8. The Status tab contains the latest status information about the recently scheduled agent updates. You may want to choose the value Running and Errors from the drop-down list in the toolbar to watch the update progress.

  9. Once the download has finished successfully, the package is extracted, the Avantra Agent is stopped, old files are replaced, and the newly installed Avantra Agent is started.

In order to avoid too many Avantra Agents trying to download the packages at the same time, the update requests are queued. Only update-simultaneous-downloads update requests are triggered at the same time and there is a delay of schedule-wait-time before the next bunch of update requests is triggered, etc. These two parameters can be configured as described in Change Properties for the WebUI.

While the whole process usually works very smoothly, there are a few items to observe:

Small is beautiful

If you plan to upgrade your Avantra Agents, start with one or two Physical Servers first and test the upgrade procedure as well as the new Avantra Agent. If you feel comfortable with the new version, continue with the rest of your Avantra Agents. By default, Avantra Agents running already on the target release are not upgraded, unless you enforce this.

Downgrade

If the upgrade process went well, but the new Avantra Agent does not work as expected, you can also use this feature to downgrade Avantra Agents to the last known good version.

Version Information

On Microsoft Windows systems the version information shown in the Programs and Features dialog of the control panel will not be updated. This should not cause concern.

See Troubleshooting Agent Updates in case of any issues.

Manual upgrade of Agents (Linux)

Procedure: Manual upgrade of Avantra Agents on Linux

  1. Log into the server and stop Avantra agent services. You can stop your Avantra services either using systemd or via the Avantra rc file (systemctl is recommended)

    $ sudo systemctl stop avantra-agent

    OR

    $ /opt/avantra/agent/rc.agent stop

  2. Switch user to the service user running your Avantra agent and change into the avantra directory. The example below assumes the service user is called avantra and Avantra is installed to the directory /opt/avantra.

    $ sudo su avantra
avantra$ cd /opt/avantra/

  3. Download the installer file agent-[version].bin and make it executable

    avantra$ curl -o agent-23.0.n.bin 'https://........link...from...customer...hub....'
avantra$ chmod +x agent-23.0.n.bin

  4. Perform the upgrade of your Avantra agent

    Note that we use the --start=no flag in this case so we can manually restart our Avantra agent after the upgrade using systemctl. If you are using the rc files to start and stop your services, you do not need the --start=no flag.

    avantra$ ./agent-{product-release-n}.bin -- --start=no

  5. Restart your Avantra agent (either using systemctl or the rc.agent file)

    For the systemctl option, first we exit back to a sudo-capable user.

    avantra$ exit
$ sudo systemctl start avantra-agent

    OR for the rc.agent method:

    avantra$ /opt/avantra/agent/rc.agent start

Manual upgrade of Agents (Windows)

Simply install the new version of Avantra Agent as described in Installing the Agent on Microsoft Windows.