RAS 19.4 Auto-Upgrade

The Auto-update feature will speed up the upgrading of RD Session hosts, VDI guests and remote-Pcs agents.

This functionality can be enabled on the host pools.

Host Pool > Properties > Auto-upgrade tab

Known issues:

• 2XRemoteInstaller service remains installed
  
  When using the auto-upgrade feature to upgrade agents from version v19.3 to versions v19.4+, the 2XRemoteInstaller service may end up remaining installed after the auto-upgrade operation completes on the agent.
  While this does not cause immediate issues on its own, if the agent is manually downgraded afterwards to v19.3 or lower, the installed service will run after a machine reboot, and attempt to reinstall the newer agent version if the RASAgentInstaller MSI file is still present in the Temp directory.
   

• Cancelling Auto-upgrade schedule with “force logoff” option turned on
  
  When a v19.3 agent is in a maintenance window, and the “force logoff at the end of drain mode“ option is turned on for that maintenance window, cancelling the schedule will cause open sessions to log off and the auto-upgrade operation to continue on the agent, instead of cancelling as normal.
   

• Hostpools remaing in “Auto-upgrade initiated“ for the entire maintenance window duration
  
  When upgrading v19.3 session host agents to v19.4 using the auto-upgrade feature, these agents will not send a schedule complete notification to the Connection Broker.
  This will cause the hostpool state to remain in the “Auto-upgrade initiated“ state until the schedule duration fully passes and the schedule times out.
  This should not affect load balancing as the hostpool state is what is affected.
   

• Windows 11 Session Hosts do not do the auto-upgrade operation
  
  Due to a bug with the session caching on v19.3 agents, certain windows 11 hosts may detect the presence of a console session after a machine reboot, and the auto-upgrade operations may not start while this session is detected.
  
  Workarounds:

  • Starting an RDP session with the host and then logging off seems to remove the console session from the cache, and allows the auto-upgrade operations to continue.

  • Fixing the audit process filter list entry from “cftmon.exe“ to “ctfmon.exe“ allows the process monitor on old agents to ignore the processes causing the console session to be added to the cache and should fix the issue (after a host reboot).