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Image patching - what to do with old files?
Image patching - what to do with old files?
Hi
It seems that I'm the first to post in this thread after the transition to this new forum, and I must say that I like the design of the new community site. Hopefully it will be a place with lots of activity and good answers!
We've currently working on replacing old workstation in our schools with R00L clients and WSM, and so far we've deployed about 100 shiny new clients on three schools within two sites. In the pilot project last year, we where on version 2.X of WSM, and when I had to do an update to the image (WinXP) I just put it in private mode when all clients where turned off and did what changes I had to make in the afternoons.
We are now on WSM 3.5, and I tried to use the recommended patch process instead. It worked flawlessly, but my question is this:
After the patch process, I now have two large images files (25 GB) in the os streaming directory - the "before" and "after" image - in addition to the smaller delta file (60 MB). Can I safely delete any of these files? It has of course finished replicating to all servers.
It just seems to me like it would take a lot of server disk space if I have to keep every generation of the image stored in the streaming directory.
Sorry this became such a long post, I got a bit carried away
mhaase-2015
200 Posts
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June 9th, 2015 06:00
If you do not want to roll back the current image to the old version in the future, you can delete the base image and the patch files from all servers.
I recommend to store a backup copy of the base image on tape etc., so you can deploy it again as a new OS Image if there is ever the need to go back from the "after" to the "before" patch state.
ahaberg
28 Posts
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June 9th, 2015 06:00
Great that it helped you daryy2
I guess this means that you've tested this out and all went well? I haven't tested it myself yet since the servers aren't full (and I've got other things to do), but mhaase's answers seems logical to me.
ahaberg
28 Posts
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June 9th, 2015 06:00
Ok, got it.
I will test this in the near future, let's just hope it works
There should really be a built-in function in WSM to do this, since it won't take many patches before the streaming directory will reach hundreds of gigabytes. With several servers (and more to come) it's also a bit of work to manually delete theese files on each and every one.
mhaase-2015
200 Posts
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June 9th, 2015 06:00
It shows the old version as active as it is rolled out and present on your servers and you can use it to rollback the current deployed state.
From the WSM console, we never delete any files from the disk. For example, when you delete an OS Image from the WSM Console, it will not be deleted from the servers disk. And if you delete files from the disk, WSM will not recognize this either and still thinks the files are there.
Deleting the old image, the delta and any compressed files is not an issue if you need to free up disk space and do not want to undo the patch by rolling it back.
If you are not sure about it, just delete the delta after it has been deployed to all servers and they have merged it in the "after" image, but do not delete the "before" image file, so you can roll back to it if needed.
Caution: Use of the Rollback this OS Image link AFTER you have deleted the "before" image will result in an error when booting devices, as they want to boot from an VDisk which you have deleted manually.
ahaberg
28 Posts
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June 9th, 2015 06:00
Hi mhaase, and thanks for your reply.
So what you're saying is I can delete both the original "before" image and the delta file? If so, should I just delete them from disk without doing anything in WSM first? The reason I'm asking this is because if I go to Operating systems --> OS Image Details and scroll to the bottom, I see the following under [imagename] hierarchy:
Name File name Version Status Enabled
*** ****** 1.0.1 Active Yes
*** ****** 1.0.2 Active Yes
As you can see, both versions are listed as active and enabled (all though I don't know why - can I deactivate version 1.0.1 somehow??), and I'm a bit worried that something might go wrong if I just delete it...