We are making an effort to do a better job at patching our servers which is resulting in rebooting our servers more frequently. I’m currently doing this manually and I’m aware MSSQL needs to reboot before the Epicor application server can come up but I’m not sure how to know when MSSQL is ready. That is I reboot MSSQL server wait for it to come up then I reboot our Epicor application server but it seems like I’m not waiting long enough as Epicor won’t auto start I have to restart the application pool usually several times before it will start. This is manual and tedious. I assume others have this figured out, how are you rebooting Epicor after patching so it comes up the first time? Is anyone automating this such that I can install updates and Epicor servers reliably?
We do ours monthly and I use Windows Admin Center and except for patching sql replication before the live server and doing dev then test then production last I don’t pay attention to sql or app server order. Epicor should reconnect from IIS to sql no matter what order you do them in.
I usually have dev, test and live sessions of Epicor running during updates and they just go offline and then resume when the app servers are back and will throw a server error when sql is restarting
What messages are you getting in the event viewer when restarts are failing?
I got this when I bounced the test db server just now.
Hi Greg,
That looks like the error we see. Unfortunately our Epicor application server won’t autostart, as an example I installed some patches last week on both servers(SQL and Application server) and didn’t realize it was auto-restarting. The end result was Epicor was offline until I realized what happened and opened IIS on the application server to stop and start the application pool. My hope is to find a solution so IIS will try to autostart the application pool, and if SQL is offline it will attempt periodically until it can start the application pool.
Is what I’m observing typical and if so is there a way to make this more automated?
Here is the app pool configuration. It’s set to autostart and alwaysrunning which is what I thought controlled this but keep in mind I’m very unfamiliar with IIS.
I have always used a domain service account for the app pool and the 12 instances of Epicor I have all auto start without issues.
This is from the link below.
Here is the setting so that the application sever starts automatically after a reboot:
In IIS:
Click on Application Pools.
Then your live, production application pool.
Basic Settings.
Tick “Start Application Pool Immediately”.
See the attached screen shot.
We suggest you do not do this for Test or Pilot application pools unless you are in a critical phase of a project.
The Taskagent is a Windows service, so that setting is in the service properties, set it to ‘Automatic’ - see attached screen shot.
If the App Pool or Service errors and fails to start, try this: Set the Taskagent Windows Service to ‘Automatic (delayed start)’.