News

System Center 2012 Update Rollups Released

• By Kurt Mackie
• 07/31/2014

System Center 2012 R2 received Update Rollup 3 (UR3) this week and Update Rollup 7 (UR7) for System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 was released.

UR3 for System Center 2012 R2 actually supports two new capabilities, in addition to providing the usual collection of product fixes. For instance, UR3 adds support for a new Management Pack for Office 365, which can be used to set up alerts for IT pros when there are incidents associated with Office 365 services. UR3 also adds support for a new Management Pack for Virtual Machine Manager that adds specific host and virtual machine dashboard views. More details about those new capabilities are described in Microsoft's announcement, as well as in an Office 365 blog post.

Various System Center 2012 R2 components get fixed with this UR3 release. There are 16 fixes for Operations Manager (plus two fixes for "Unix and Linux Management Pack issues"), 10 fixes for Orchestrator, eight fixes for Service Manager, five fixes for Data Protection Manager and two fixes for Virtual Machine Manager, according to Microsoft's Knowledge Base article description.

Microsoft also announced the release of UR3 for the Windows Azure Pack. The Windows Azure Pack provides various Microsoft Azure technologies for use with premises-based Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2. This UR3 release fixes about 10 issues associated with the Windows Azure Pack, as described here.

UR7 for System Center 2012 SP1
System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 also received an update rollup this week. Update Rollup 7 for System Center 2012 SP1 fixes five issues in Data Protection Manager, five issues in Operations Manager, four issues in Orchestrator and two issues in Virtual Machine Manager, Microsoft's support article indicated.

IT pros can get these various update rollup releases via the Microsoft Update service or they can manually download them from the Microsoft Update Catalog.

What Are Update Rollups?
Microsoft's "update rollup" lingo seems to have undergone a bit of a change relative to what IT pros may have expected in the past. Update rollups are still defined by Microsoft as just a cumulative collection of "hotfixes, security updates, critical updates, and updates." However, with Microsoft's faster software release cycles, it seems that new capabilities are now supported by update rollup releases. Microsoft's apparent motivation in issuing update rollups is to add "new value," rather than just fix software flaws.

Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Aidan Finn suggests waiting one month before applying update rollups and taking time to read Microsoft's installation instructions. (Microsoft's update releases have caused problems in the recent past.) Microsoft claims that it tests its update rollups internally, but the company still expects IT pros to test them locally before implementing them across a production environment.