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Spendon Gavekort's avatar
Spendon Gavekort
Copper Contributor
Dec 11, 2017

Please add upgrade packages

For anyone on other clouds than Azure, it's incredibly hard to test out these new server releases, since that would typically involve building vms locally and then uploading to the cloud provider - s...
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Spendon Gavekort's avatar
Spendon Gavekort
Copper Contributor
Jan 23, 2018

I was really looking forward to this, until I saw the fine print of today's release: You can only upgrade from 1709, not the GA version. Which leaves me dead in the water.

 

Please provide an update experience from the GA version of 2016 so that any user on any cloud can get access to the insiders builds. We have absolutely no local infrastructure, and I would hate to have to start building local hyper-v clusters just to be able to test a new OS.

Matthew Horan's avatar
Matthew Horan
Copper Contributor
Jan 24, 2018

FWIW, Google's cloud does have 1709 images. We've also managed to "upgrade" a 2016 core installation to 1709 via a sysprep file on AWS, which has worked just fine (though you lose all data). I've also been in touch with Amazon around an official 1709 image, but they've been slow moving. Hopefully we'll see one soon!

 

Here's the https://gist.github.com/mhoran/a7fa0f8810205239b6b945bc667e4b4e that I provided to the setup.exe from the 1709 installer to get 1709 on AWS. You can mount the 1709 ISO using Mount-DiskImage. Once upgraded, I followed the https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/WindowsGuide/ec2launch.html to install the EC2 agent.

  • Spendon Gavekort's avatar
    Spendon Gavekort
    Copper Contributor
    Jan 25, 2018

    Thanks!

    I've contacted AWS thru several channels to get their feedback on the problem as well.

     

    A custom unnattend file looks interesting - tho it's not clear to me how you actually use it. Do you bundle it with a image and use the Image Import service, or do you somehow run 1709 setup on top of a GA 2016 server?

    • Matthew Horan's avatar
      Matthew Horan
      Copper Contributor
      Jan 30, 2018
      Spendon Gavekort wrote:

      Do you bundle it with a image and use the Image Import service, or do you somehow run 1709 setup on top of a GA 2016 server?

      The latter. From a base 2016 AMI on Amazon, you can download the 1709 ISO, mount it with

      Mount-DiskImage

      and then run setup.exe, providing an unattend file via

      setup.exe /unattend unattend.xml

      Note that the fresh install won't have all the necessary drivers to start up on anything other than a t2 instance. Once I got a running base AMI, I booted it up on a t2 and installed the https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/WindowsGuide/Upgrading_PV_drivers.html#aws-pv-upgrade and https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/WindowsGuide/enhanced-networking-ena.html#enable-enhanced-networking-ena-WIN drivers. I was then able to create an AMI after booting on an m5 instance and https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/WindowsGuide/ec2launch.html#ec2launch-sysprep.

       

      • Spendon Gavekort's avatar
        Spendon Gavekort
        Copper Contributor
        Feb 02, 2018

        Nice, thanks for that.

         

        Now the question is just: How do I get a hold of a 1709 image? I don't have an EA agreement or anything like that, because we only use cloud instances so I don't feel that I should have to.

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