Upgrade path for Citrix WEM 4.2 to 4.7 Current Release

Upgrade path for Citrix WEM 4.2 to 4.7 Current Release

Upgrade version path for Citrix WEM 4.2 to 4.7 Current Release

Recently I was asked about the recommended steps to upgrading Citrix WEM 4.2 and I couldn’t recall if Citrix supports and had validated a direct upgrade from 4.2 to 4.7.  After looking through all the documentation, I was able to confirm my initial thoughts that we will probably need to do an incremental upgrade.  In the documentation, Citrix states they have only tested upgrades for the 2 previous versions when a new version of WEM is released. I’m assuming the upgrade probably works successfully, but when you are several versions behind I think a more cautious approach is better to help ensure a successful upgrade.

Considerations to think about when planning the upgrade path for outdated versions:

  • Supported, tested and validated by Citrix
  • Documented upgrade procedures by Citrix (https://docs.citrix.com)
  • Size of Citrix environment and usage (24/7 or standard business hours)
  • How to reduce possible impact to end user experience during or after upgrade
  • Minimize possible outage or rollbacks risks
  • Time to validate upgrade was successful

This upgrade path recommendation below is mainly based on Citrix’s tested upgrades listed in the documentation and reducing risk. Additionally since all environments are different you will need to determine which upgrade approach will work best for you and your organization.

Citrix Workspace Environment Manager Infrastructure Upgrade Version Path:

 

Citrix Workspace Environment Manager Agent Upgrade:  

Here’s just one possible upgrade path that you could take for the WEM Agents. I’m aware that this is decent amount of extra work and time to roll out image updates for each Citrix WEM Agent update, but the main point of this post is to hopefully reduce risk of a failed upgrade.

Upgrade the Citrix WEM agents to the same version as the infrastructure if you are going to do a phased upgrade and leave the infrastructure servers on an older version for awhile before eventually upgrading to 4.7.

  • Upgrade WEM Agents from 4.2 to 4.4
  • Upgrade WEM Agents from 4.4 to 4.5
  • Upgrade WEM Agents from 4.5 to 4.7

A couple of notes about the Agent versions and upgrades are noted below.

*By design, agents are backward-compatible within the same major release version.

*The Workspace Environment Management database, infrastructure service, and administration console must all be on the same version. If you need to roll-out Workspace Environment Management agents incrementally (for example, when upgrading), the use of agents which are no more than two versions older than the current release is supported but has not been tested.

*Additional information: https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/workspace-environment-management/current-release/upgrade.html

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