Upgrading XPe to PS 4.0

[MaxxFusion]

I currenlty have 8 Windows 2000 servers running XPe FR3 and am looking to upgrade to PS 4.0. I attended a Citrix seminar today held by MTM and was strongle advised not to do inplace upgrade. Rather I should tear everything down and start from scratch with a fresh install. Now I for one am not a big fan of upgrades but in this case it would be a huge job to rebuild all 8 servers at once. I have a lot of applications on each server.

I am looking to hear anyones expericences when upgrading to PS4.0

Thanks,
Frank

 

[kerrycorcoran]

I would suggest a fresh installation. The one thing I would approach differently is not building all 8 servers, but rather create a single server to the exact specifications you want and than image it.

My current farm, MFXPe 1.0 w/ Fr3 is 30+ servers. I have never built more than a single image, ALL of my servers are simply miaged from the single base image I create. Now I do a large amount of testing anytime I modify the base image, but once testing is complete I simply roll that image out to the other server and it works like a champ.

Hope this helps.
Kerry

 

[MaxxFusion]

Wow 30s servers huh? Thats alot. That will be a big weekend project for you.

Luckily I have a new server I was going to add to my farm. I have been loading it with Win2k3 and all my apps. My plan is to get it ready up until the point I need to load PS4.0. I will then make an image of the server. Then I will load it on another server, then load citrix. Then I will make my image from that for all other servers. This way I will only have to do my win2k3 and apps load once.

What do you use to make your images? Right now I am using an old version of Power Quest. I have been looking for something newer.

Thanks for your reply.

 

[thossler]

I just upgraded to 4.0 an it was a snap.. I deployed a new citrix server with 4.0 and also setup my liecense server all on a different farm, then once that was all up and running I upgraded my remaining 4 servers and then did a chfarm and had no issues what so ever...

 

[BryonB]

I just upgraded a test server, and haven't noted any issues yet. You have to install a bunch of stuff before you can do the install though:

Windows Installer version 3.1
Mirosoft .NET Runtime version 1.1
Java Runtime version 1.4.2.06 or higher

It's probably a good idea to make sure your servers are fully updated with the latest Microsoft Service Packs/Updates first also. My server was running Windows 2000 Server SP4, but didn't have all the patches. I had trouble after installing the Windows 2000 SP4 Rollup version 1 update - had to tweak a registry key before I could log into the server through Citrix again. (HKLM\SOFTWARE\Citrix\CtxHook\AppInit_Dlls\Smart Card Hook\FilePathName - had to change the value to a non-existent dll name.)

The Citrix part of the install went really easy once all the other stuff was in place.

 

[terrywilson]

We are in the middle of moving from XP to PS4. You definitely want to do a new farm approach; its a good chance to clean up old print drivers etc and look at how you do things currently and where you can improve.

We went to a new farm and then started with one server, got it built and configured and then brought across a pilot group (Lesson learnt; do a bigger pilot and run it for longer). Then as we moved users from one farm to another we were able to reimage the server from the XP image to the PS4 image.

Good Luck!