How to upgrade the virtual appliance to a new version of the OpenVPN Access Server?

This depends a bit on how old your Microsoft HyperV or VMWare ESXi virtual appliance is.

If it's really old and has an operating system like Ubuntu 16 or older in it, or Debian, then you should consider the option of just migrating your OpenVPN Access Server data to a newly deployed virtual appliance available from our website.

If however your OpenVPN Access Server virtual appliance is somewhat recent, like less than a year or 2 old, and contains the operating system Ubuntu 18 already, then you can log in to the virtual appliance on the virtual console or via an SSH session, and then install updates for the operating system itself, and then update the OpenVPN Access Server program itself.

Update the operating system (as root user) including latest kernel, and then reboot:

apt update && apt upgrade && apt dist-upgrade
reboot

OpenVPN Access Server comes installed from a software repository these days. In the past it used to be distributed as downloadable installation packages that had to be retrieved and installed to install and update your Access Server. Using the software repository made things a lot easier. Recent virtual appliance images can retrieve updates for OpenVPN Access Server and its bundled clients package simply by running the following commands.

Upgrading Access Server to latest version from our software repository (as root user):

apt-mark unhold openvpn-as
apt update && apt upgrade
apt-mark hold openvpn-as

If all is well your virtual appliance should now have the latest version of OpenVPN Access Server. If somehow this is not the case, it is possible you have a virtual appliance that was not yet using the OpenVPN Access Server software repository. Then we recommend you simply follow the installation instructions for OpenVPN Access Server to install from the software repository. This will ensure any older Access Server versions get upgraded, and your data and licensed state are kept intact. See the VPN Software Repository & Packages page for instructions to install Access Server via software repository.