Apply a File Director patch

File Director software can be updated by applying a patch, supplied by Ivanti, which can be uploaded through your appliance.

In this section:

Important information

Apply a patch to a standalone appliance

Apply a patch to a cluster

Additional notes

Important information

Before applying any update to File Director you are advised to take a backup or snapshot of your virtual machine(s), your database, and the appliance configuration. See Backup and restore
We recommend appliances are forced offline via the Maintenance mode flag (or manually via the load balancer) and brought back online following the patching process. This is to stop any traffic from the load balancer.

See also Release-specific information in the Upgrade help topic.

Maintenance mode

Maintenance mode status is recommended for appliances before starting the patching process as a database schema upgrade may be required. When a schema upgrade is required, it is performed by the first node to be upgraded. From this point on, all older nodes are blocked from communicating with the database, which causes their health monitors to fail and be marked as offline by the load balancer.

Client device session tokens (log on states) are held in appliance memory. When the cluster is patched, these are lost, which means that the clients need to reauthenticate on their next connection with the appliance (generally within 30 seconds unless notification checks are disabled). Because all this traffic will be directed at the first single updated appliance that shows as online to the load balancer, the resultant traffic could saturate this appliance and result in an unbalanced configuration.

Apply a patch to a standalone appliance

  1. Refer to the Important information above.
  2. Log in to the File Director Admin console.
  3. Select Home > Version.

    In the Status section, details of the current patch version are displayed.

  4. Click Choose File and navigate to a File Director patch file.

    The screen updates to list the components that the patch is updating and their version numbers. Click a patch to view further details.

  5. Select the required patch and click Deploy Update file.

To complete the patch install, the server automatically reboots. Connected devices are unable to communicate with the server for few minutes whilst the reboot completes.

Apply a patch to a cluster

This process explains how to apply a patch to all nodes in a cluster. Note that if clustering is enabled and a patch server has been set, patches are applied via the Cluster tab.

You can apply a patch to a cluster using any nodes as long as one of the nodes in the cluster is the patch server. To make the current node the patch server, select Cluster > Status and click Promote to Patch Server.

1.Refer to the Important information above.

2.Log in to the web Admin console on any node in the cluster.

3.Select Cluster > Update.

4.In the Status section, details of the current patch version are displayed.

5.Click Choose File and navigate to a File Director patch file.

6.Click Upload.

The patch is displayed in the Updates section of the screen along with all patches that have been previously uploaded.

Select a patch and click Delete to remove it from the list and from the patch server.

7.Select the row in the table of the required patch and click Deploy Update.

To see the components and release notes for a patch, click the patch name.

Additional notes

Updates are applied in parallel to all components across the cluster that are not the same version as the patch.

Nodes may require a reboot following an update - follow the instructions displayed.

Nodes that are offline are not updated and display with a warning icon in the Status screen. Reapply the patch when the node is online to update its components. This does not affect any nodes that have already been updated.

The progress of the update is displayed and you are informed when the update is complete.

Depending upon the File Director version you are upgrading from, you may be required to restore your appliance configuration from the pre-upgrade backup. See Backup and restore.

Disable maintenance mode on each appliance and test client connections to File Director.

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