Update your XenServer hosts
With XenServer 8, new features and bug fixes are frequently pushed to the content delivery network (CDN) as available updates for your XenServer hosts and pools, allowing you to benefit from a more efficient release process that delivers new content to you at a faster cadence than was previously possible.
To ensure that you are always on the latest and greatest update, there is no picking and choosing - when you apply updates to your pool, it is updated to the latest, fully tested state. Configure your pool to automatically synchronize with an update channel. This action downloads all available updates to the pool coordinator. You can then apply all downloaded updates by using XenCenter or the xe CLI.
Lifecycle
During its lifecycle, XenServer 8 provides a stream of frequent and easy-to-apply updates, which enable you to consume new features and bug fixes at the earliest possible juncture. You must apply all available updates periodically. As a result, the behavior and feature set in XenServer 8 can change.
For more information, see XenServer lifecycle.
Support
XenServer 8 uses a frequent update model that delivers features, fixes, and improvements to your hosts. We expect you to consume all outstanding updates within six months of their release to remain in support. If the update level of your pool is older than six months, we might ask you to reproduce the issue on the latest update level as part of our investigation.
Note:
Applying updates is only assured to work when the previous state of the pool is less than six months old. If you haven’t applied updates for more than six months, updating to the latest update level is not tested and might not work.
Update process
The XenServer 8 release stream and the content delivery network (CDN) work together to enable you to apply frequent updates to your XenServer hosts and pools from XenCenter.
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We make frequent updates available for XenServer 8 in our secure CDN.
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In XenCenter, see when updates are available for your pool.
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Using XenCenter, initiate the process of applying updates to your XenServer pool.
Update channels
The XenServer 8 release stream consists of two phases, also referred to as update channels:
To receive frequent updates, configure your XenServer pool to subscribe to one of those update channels.
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When updates are first pushed to our CDN, they enter the Early Access update channel.
Early Access is perfect for test environments, allowing you to get the latest updates when they’re released to the public. By opting into receiving updates early, you have the opportunity to trial them before they’re made available to the Normal update channel.
Note:
Early Access is supported for production use. However, we do not recommend it for critical production environments.
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These updates then flow sequentially into Normal, the next update channel.
Unless we have delayed this progression, you can expect to see Early Access updates become available in Normal on a regular cadence. Normal is recommended for production environments.
Occasionally, you might see that updates become available to both your Early Access and Normal pools at the same time. These updates enable us to deliver security patches and critical fixes to all update channels immediately.
Get started with updates
For information on how to configure and apply updates for your XenServer hosts by using XenCenter, see Apply updates by using XenCenter. Alternatively, you can use the xe CLI to apply updates to your XenServer hosts. For more information, see Apply updates by using the xe CLI.
Important:
We do not support the direct usage or modification of the underlying update components in dom0. You can only use XenCenter or the xe CLI to configure and apply updates.