Introduction

In vNext we have gotten a long awaited & very welcome new capability: rolling cluster upgrades. Which for the Hyper-V roles is a 100% zero down time experience. The only step that will require some down time is the upgrade of the virtual machine configuration files to vNext (version 5 to 6) as the VM has to be shut down for this.

How to

The process for a rolling upgrade is so straight forward I’ll just give you a quick bullet list of the first part of the process:

• Evacuate the workload from the cluster node you’re going to upgrade
• Evict the node to upgrade to vNext from the cluster
• Upgrade (no in place upgrade supported but in your lab you can get away with it)
• Add the upgraded node to the cluster
• Rinse & repeat until all nodes have been upgraded (that can take a while with larger…