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MetaFrame Presentation Server 3.0 2

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nix45

MIS
Nov 21, 2002
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Has anyone upgraded from MFXP to MF3 yet? We have upgrade assurance so this would be a free upgrade for us. Is it worth the hassle? Any problems with MF 3.0?

Thanks,
ChrisP, RHCE
 
Too early to tell what kind of bugs will be encountered. I have heard about a couple of private hotfixes that haven't been made public yet, but do not know if they are critical or not.
 
Is it too early to upgrade to? Has anybody done it yet?

ChrisP, RHCE
 
I found the upgrade to be very smooth.

I like the new Access Suite Console, and the new licensing makes everything a lot easier; I set up a test farm of 12 servers, which I upgraded to MPS3.0. The first two I did manually, then did an unattended install on the remaining 10, after I'd checked that the 2nd server had joined the farm and become licensed. It happened immediately - I was quite impressed! But then my test servers are all on the same subnet. When I branch out I may see issues - but I need a month's burn-in before that happens.

I checked the link above, and the articles all refer to either misconfiguration or a change in farm configuration. The latter is useful to know, and I will try some tests in that area. The former looks like a case of RTFM :)

I did find an issue on the license server - it seems that the license files have to be copied to LS if you want to get the cmd line tools to be able to read them. You could always add an environment variable, but why doesn't the installer do that? I like the lmstat tool, as I'm not a fan of web front ends - but the figures tallied, so I guess the GUI is OK. I like the way you can restrict access to named users.

So far so good, but it'll be a while before I let real users on them!

Hope this helps!

 
Thanks guys. If anyone else has any experience in doing this upgrade (especially) in a production environment), please share you thoughts on it.

MFXP works pretty well for us right now, but we're really hoping that MF30 will give users a better experience when viewing Flash websites over an ICA connection. We've solved this problem for the most part by enabling content redirection, and giving out Linux workstations with Mozilla and the ICA client installed, but we'd still like to see this improved like its supposed to be in MF30.

Also, we're hoping that MF30 allows per-user shadowing policies. Its an all or nothing in MFXP, only the policy with the top priority will take effect.

Thanks,
ChrisP, RHCE
 
I'm still wondering how Citrix justifies allocating a MetaFrame connection license to someone who is NOT utilizing Citrix specific features, i.e. the features an RDP Client uses are no different whether or not MetaFrame is installed.

Maybe a VNC connection will also use a MFCL...

No big deal, just interesting.

Patrick Rouse
Microsoft MVP - Terminal Server
 
Just curious to know if anyone has done the upgrade and if it's worth it.
Also, will my ICA clients (ver. 7 I believe) still be able to connect?
 
I just upgraded a 4 server MFXP FR3 farm to 3.0 and it was easy. You have to setup a licensing server, download your license files and install them on the license server before migrating your first server.

I took one server offline (removed from published application sets) at a time and ran the setup program, which took about 10 minutes per server. I considered using the Installation Manager, but had only done Office Installs & Feature Releases this way, never a migration to a new version. I'll have to tinker with this in a lab environment.

Old clients still connect just fine, but all of the clients here were 7.x or higher.

Patrick Rouse
Microsoft MVP - Terminal Server
 
I'm planning to migrate my 17 server citrix farm from XP to MF3 also...There is no specific business requirement that requires the upgrade however, like above, our license supports the free upgrade.

We have users that disconnect sessions and then reconnect on other machines at different resolutions. This is supported by ICA client 8.0 however I believe you need to be MP3 for the feature to work.

I implemented a small production farm on MP3 two weeks ago. Basically, it consists of 1 server which is using a local Access Datastore. The one server is also the license server. It's on the same subnet as our primary MFXP farm. One thing to be careful of is that when I installed the farm it changed a particular registry key back to default (HKLM\System\Current Control Set\Control\TerminalServer\Wds\icawd\thin16\MaxLVBMem)on all Servers!. No big issue, I simply changed it back, but I'm wondering:

1) Why it reverted settings on servers on a totally seperate farm
2) What else it possibly changed and I'm waiting to find. ;)

Citrix state that they do not recommend running different versions of Citrix side by side for too long, however no reasons why. :)

I would have thought hundreds of organisations would have upgraded by now and I could have easily found more information about migration. The MFPS3 admin guide details very little about migration. They state how to upgrade, however I want to introduce the "new PS3" farm side by side and then migrate one server at a time so I can roll back if required.

Has anyone else upgraded since their last post?

- aatari
 
For us, 3.0 was a requirement, because of doctors using convertivle tablet PCs that switch the screen resolution & display from landscape to portrait when they filp their screen into tablet mode.


Seems to work quite well.

Probably better to isolate your test environment from the production environment, to avoid the problem you encountered.

Patrick Rouse
Microsoft MVP - Terminal Server
 
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