System Center Update Rollup Party Day, 8 UR's Released

An Update Rollup is a batch of patches that have accumulated between major revisions of the product and it gives you the ability to deploy all the updates in one fell swoop. If you've kept up on updates or hotfixes as they were made available, you probably have most of these applied anyway, but check the KB articles to verify. If you're installing any of the System Center 2012 R2 products for the first time (or reinstalling in a lab), it's a great idea to apply the Update Rollup prior to using the newly installed products so you'll experience none of the annoying problems identified between revisions

Microsoft has released 8 Update Rollups this month and while they are all important, you might take special notice of the Rollups for Windows Azure Pack. An October update delivered during Patch Tuesday broke some functionality of the Windows Azure Pack and this Rollup includes those fixes. Once the Windows Azure Pack Rollup is applied, the MVC Security Update 2992027 will install without problems.

Here's the UR's released:

Update Rollup 4 for System Center 2012 R2 Data Protection Manager

Update Rollup 4 for System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager

Update Rollup 4 for System Center 2012 R2 Orchestrator - SPF

Update Rollup 4 for System Center 2012 R2 Service Manager

Update Rollup 4 for System Center 2012 R2 Service Reporting

Update Rollup 4 for System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager

Update Rollup 4 for Windows Azure Pack

Update Rollup 4 for Windows Azure Pack Web Sites Version 2

BTW: Long-time System Center users might be wondering just what Service Reporting and Orchestrator SPF are. These are new in the list. John Ballard explains it this way:

What follows from here is a quick explanation of why this happens.  Back in the summer of 2012 we were getting ready to ship System Center 2012 SP1, in which Service Provider Foundation made its v1.0 debut.  Prior to release, our product management team took some feedback from customers which suggested that the family of products in the System Center suite had grown large enough.  So, rather than debut SPF as a full-fledged suite component in its own right, we would bundle it with System Center Orchestrator as "additional software" (which basically means it can be installed many times on many machines, appropriate for a scalable web service--suggest you have a lawyer read the "additional software" notice if you want to go deep on that concept).  We chose Orchestrator at the time because: 1) SPF was initially conceived to be the API surface for multiple System Center products even though that ended up not happening for lots of good reasons; 2) the SPF API is key middle-of-stack integration technology, and SPF could be considered thematically consistent with integration packs for anything else that Orchestrator can talk to.

Same thing with SR (Service Reporting), also a child of Orchestrator in terms of packaging, licensing, and update.