Cluster Update Notification and Management

[masgo]

I have installed apticron in order to be notified of available updates. While this works well, I get an e-mail for each node in the cluster. Only one mail would be better.

The next question is: is there a good/recommended way to manage package updates in a cluster?

I think it is quite risky to update many/all nodes at once. First, it creates an unnecessary load spike on the cluster and second, if the updates somehow leaves the system in a faulty state, it would affect multiple nodes at once. Therefore I strive to to updates one after another. For such a daisy chained update automation would be really nice.

Obviously, one could use to GUI to update each node. But the larger the cluster gets, the more clicking is involved.
Using a multi ssh approach like Parallel SSH, Ansible, etc. has the drawback of doing updates in parallel, which might be a bad idea as stated above.

Is there a better solution?
Does Proxmox plan to implement some kind of centralized (or corosync-based) update-notification and update-installtion mechanism?

 

[H4R0]

Install apticron only on a single node, problem solved.

I use ansible, you can setup groups to upgrade half of the cluster first.

I always test a single node first and then proceed to upgrade the remaining ones.

You can use forks 1 to update them one after another.

 

[masgo]

Install apticron only on a single node, problem solved.

This will only work for identical nodes. Having nodes with different hardware causes different packages to be installed and therefore different updates.

I use ansible, you can setup groups to upgrade half of the cluster first.

I always test a single node first and then proceed to upgrade the remaining ones.

You can use forks 1 to update them one after another.

Thanks, I did not know about "forks 1".

Apart from that, I would still prefer if PVE supported updates somehow better. Especially for kernel upgrades which need a reboot, having a centralized update management from the gui would be nice.