Updating multiple instances of an installed application

[vs2010junkie]

I am currently planning on creating a multi-instance installation using Advanced Installer so that I can support a multi-tenant environment. Therefore, I will end up installing 10 or more instances of my installation package on the same host machine.

However, I would also like to leverage the capabilities of Auto Update via Advanced Installer to apply updates to the individual installation packages as well.

Would I be able to apply my updates to all of my various instances using the model I just described or is some other solution warranted?

[mihai.petcu]

Hi and welcome to Advanced Installer forums,

Unfortunately this behavior is not supported with multiple instances.

Here a similar thread that details the behavior.

As we are considering adding an improvement regarding this for a future version, can you please give us more details and exemplify the behavior you are looking for?

All the best,
Mihai

[vs2010junkie]

We would like to host multiple instances of our installed product on a single server. We are currently deploying an ASP.Net 3.5 Web Application, therefore, each instance of our product has its own separate virtual directory and application pool as well as its own isolated application pool and corresponding configuration files. We frequently release patches, hotfixes and updates for our product and have scheduled maintenance windows for applying these updates on the server. Since every installation of our product is configured slightly differently in terms of their virtual directory names and configuration file information, we would like to be able to apply updates to all of these various applications without losing any of this specific configuration information. The set of .Net assemblies that we utilize are being patched, but other configuration information such as the settings in IIS and the Web.config will need to remain intact.

The current Update scenario does not provide a solution to update all of these instances simultaneously with a common set of shared assemblies to be applied across all of the various instances. We need this functionality in order to properly leverage the patching capabilities available in Advanced Installer. Essentially, we would like Advanced Installer to function in a manner similar to Windows Server Update Services which allows patching multiple systems simultaneously by storing all of the updates in a single centralized repository and then deploying the updates to all of the systems in parallel.

[mihai.petcu]

Thank you for your feedback, I have forwarded the details for our development team's consideration on a future version of Advanced Installer.

All the best,
Mihai

[vs2010junkie]

Another possibility to solve this issue would be to support changing the UpgradeCode as well as the ProductCode for multi-instances. In this manner, each instance would be uniquely identifiable on the system and the update/upgrade process should process each installed instance individually as if they were unique products rather than the same product with the exact same UpgradeCode.