Surgient Success

Going forward, does Surgient plan on having a scheduled release of Service packs, or are service packs random as need arises?  Thank you

Klaus

There isn't really a schedule of Service Packs. Surgient works on maintenance issues as they are identified by customers.  When a bundle of fixes passes through QA, and based on need, we release an update.

Thanks Richard for your reply.  A point of confusion, are the Service Pacs cumulative, meaning they contain all the changes in previous Service Pacs

(5.2 SP1 to 5.2 SP2) or are the next major version release a cumulation of all previous service pacs.  (version 5.2 to version 5.3).  Thanks

Klaus

Yes, our service packs are cumulative with the caveat that hot fixes need to be addressed on a case-by-case basis.  You should work with Support to make sure any hot fixes you have will not be undone by applying a Service Pack.

 Major releases address all issues up the current Service Pack on the last release, but new features sometimes obselete things.

Klaus,
Richard and I were talking about the same thing a few hours ago.  I think alot of the folks had the similar question because i saw something else about it out here after our post.  Check out: http://success.surgient.com/forums/p/340/785.aspx#785 
-Matt

I'm more interested in the Surgient application itself, not necessarily in conjunction with other vendors.  Service Pacs are a hot topic, although they provide enhancements and fixes, they can bring down an environment that was up and running as you well know.  Which brings me to a question Richard, as we experienced issues with our upgrade, we had to roll back.  It was a multi step manual process.  Any plans on automating the rollback on future Service Packs with a clean uninstall option?

Klaus,

The original service pack update you had wasn't necessarily optimally delivered.  Because your large configurations were not tested for a week after the update, you were committed to that Service Pack.  Whereas if that were detected during upgrade testing, the rollback would not have been multistep.

The need for rollback would have been avoided by dropping the Undo disks and rebooting - one step.  Instead to go from a newer version to an older version did require some extra steps.  These are public forums so I can't comment on future enhancements we may add regarding automatic upgrades, we are aware this is a possible area of improvement as we are our largest customer too.

Having a backup of the infrastructure VMs helped, and if you remember, the issue with the large configurations still happened after the rollback, hence I left a hot fix in place for you.  I can't explain why you didn't see the problem before the upgrade, it could have been an environmental change that occurred during the week between the Service Pack being applied and the usage of the large configurations.  I don't know.

FWIW, I still haven't reproduced your issue in-house, but I do have contingency for it in the upcoming Service Pack so you may avoid any problems..  It's an interesting issue, btw, and I would be happy to provide your usage scenario to Microsoft for further analysis, if I can reproduce it.

Richard,

You are more than welcome to provide our usage scenario to Microsoft for further analysis.  The hotfix you have added is definitely working.  It is adding about a 20% increase in standup time but that is fine since we are no longer having the mac address contention.  We definitely would like to try the upgrade again with your assistance, possibly after Thanksgiving.  Has anyone else had this issue or are we the first ones to experience this.  It may be a good idea to post the issue in case others have encountered or will encounter it.  Thanks Richard

Klaus