Installing SP1 For OM12: Patience Is A Virtue…

The System Center 2012 – Operations Manager Engineering Team has posted a blog article about an issue you might bump into when upgrading OM12 RTM environments to SP1.

In this article they tell you to be PATIENT when running this upgrade for the first time in any Management Group.

Why?

The Issue
When upgrading the first Management Server in a Management Group, some changes are made to the Operational database.

Since all Management Servers share the same database, those changes only need to be made the first time you install SP1 on the first Management Server of any given Management Group. So when SP1 installation is started, it communicates with the Operations database to determine if it’s the first installation or not. When it is, the changes will be applied to the Operations Database.

Basically meaning to be patient with the installation of SP1 and to WAIT for the first Management Server to have SP1 installed before starting the next installation. If you don’t the Operations database will get the same treatment twice and issues are most likely to occur…

I couldn’t wait so I started theSP1 installation on multiple Management Servers at the same time… 
Ouch! When you’re out of luck changes are the Operations database isn’t happy any more. How to know that for sure?

1. When trying to view the Task Status in the OM12 SP1 Console you’ll get an error message;
2. When right clicking an any Alert you get another error message;
3. The Management Server Health Service Watcher State is gray for all Management Servers.

OK, now what? A total reinstall?!
Gladly enough this situation is recognized by the System Center 2012 – Operations Manager Engineering Team. In this posting they tell you how to solve this issue.

Recap
Run the SP1 upgrade per server and only upgrade the next server when the previous upgrade has ended successfully. Otherwise changes are you bump into issues like the one mentioned here.