7.1. Updating Virtuozzo¶

7.1.1. Updating All Components¶

The easiest way to update all components of the Virtuozzo software is to run the yum update command. yum will do the following:

1. Access Virtuozzo repositories.
2. Check for available updates for tools, libraries, EZ templates, Virtuozzo kernel, and the latest ReadyKernel patch for the current kernel. If a new Virtuozzo kernel is available, check for the corresponding ReadyKernel patch as well.
3. Install the updates on your system.

7.1.2. Updating Kernel¶

Updating the Virtuozzo kernel requires updating the vzkernel and vzkernel-devel packages:

# yum update vzkernel vzkernel-devel

7.1.3. Updating KVM/QEMU Hypervisor in Virtual Machines¶

Virtuozzo can update KVM/QEMU hypervisor live in running virtual machines that have KVM/QEMU version 2.6.0 or newer.

To do this, install the vz-qemu-engine-updater package and update the qemu-kvm-vz package:

# yum install vz-qemu-engine-updater
# yum update qemu-kvm-vz

Updating qemu-kvm-vz starts a 10-minute timer (to give yum time to complete the operation), after which the vz-qemu-engine-updater tool is started and begins updating KVM/QEMU in each running virtual machine, one at a time.

Immediate updating may not be possible in several cases:

• yum is currently locked on the node (in this case, no VMs can be updated automatically until the lock is released),
• a VM is changing states (e.g., from running to stopped),
• configuration changes are being applied to a VM,
• a backup of a VM is being created, or
• any other prlctl operation is executed on a VM.

The KVM/QEMU updater will skip such VMs and queue them for a later update. The updater will perform a set number of retries to update VMs that have been skipped, each retry after a set delay. If retries are exhausted or the update fails for some reason, the virtual machine is left running with the outdated KVM/QEMU.

To manually disable automatic updates, mask the updater service:

# systemctl mask vz-qemu-engine-updater.service

To re-enable updates, unmask the updater service:

# systemctl unmask vz-qemu-engine-updater.service

To check if virtual machines have been successfully updated, view the log file:

# journalctl -u vz-qemu-engine-updater
<...>VM MyVM (was using qemu-kvm-vz-2.6.0-28.3.6.vz7.30) has been successfully updated.
<...>Finished updating VMs.
<...>Successfully updated QEMU engine for all running VMs.

To configure the number of retries, the delay between them, and other parameters, refer to the vz-qemu-engine-updater.json man page and edit the /var/lib/vz-qemu-engine-updater.json configuration file.

7.1.4. Updating EZ Templates¶

You can update an EZ template like any other RPM package using the yum update command. For example:

# yum update centos-6-x86_64-ez
...
Updated:
  centos-6-x86_64-ez.noarch 0:4.7.0-1
Complete!