Upgrading Hyper-V R2 to SP1
With Service Pack 1 now released for Hyper-V R2 it is about time to start deploying it and updating your VMs. As with anything there is a process to follow to ensure that everything goes smoothly and that the virtual machines can take advantage of all the features available in SP1. We’ve already covered these new features in articles on Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX so lets look at what you’ll need to do to get SP1 installed on your hosts and what needs to be done at the guest level to enable those features.
Standalone Hyper-V Server
This is the most straightforward of installations but it will also incur the most downtime. The following process will allow you to get SP1 installed with the least downtime possible.
- Save state of all running VMs
- Install SP1 on the host server
- Reboot
- Resume state of all running VMs
Clustered Hyper-V Servers
This is still a straight forward process and thanks to clustering and Live Migration you shouldn’t experience any downtime. The following process will allow you to get SP1 installed on all nodes in the cluster.
- Live Migrate all VMs from Node 1 to the other nodes in the cluster
- Apply SP1 to Node 1
- Reboot Node 1
- Live Migrate previous VMs from other nodes back to Node 1
- Repeat on all nodes in the cluster
Hyper-V R2 SP1 Virtual Machines