Guest article by Hal Lange

I was working with a customer that was an original Norskale customer.  They were running VUEM 3.1   I started the process of upgrading to Citrix Workspace Environment Management (WEM).  I upgraded all the components and it seemed to have no issues.  I started trying to connect the clients and weird issues started to appear.  The client would keep saying unable to connect to the broker environment.  The logs showed errors regarding the VUEM Agent Monitor Sync is erroring.  When running the AgentCacheUitlity, it would produce an error regarding VUEM Agent Monitor Cache failed.  The cache would show that things were being downloaded and the agent performance optimizations would still apply and work.

The brokers were giving no indication of any errors.  After further analysis, it looks like the DB is not fully upgraded.  I restored the DB to the 3.1 version and began the upgrade process again.  This time I started by upgrading to 3.5.2 first, then testing.  After upgrading to 3.5.2, I tested the client after reinstalling the 3.5.2 client.  Everything is working at this point.  At this point, I upgraded to 4.0.2 and had no issues.

What I have learned from this exercise is that the DB needs to be at the schema level for 3.5.2 before upgrading to the Citrix version of WEM.

Here is a list of other known upgrade issues from the Norskale error.

Prior to version 3.0:
All components must be uninstalled completely, reboot the system, and then install the new version.  At this point, the DB can be upgraded and brokers and clients will work accordingly.

Version 2.x to 3.x
Must uninstall version 2 and then upgrade to 3.0 before continuing to upgrade to 3.5.2

Version 3.x
Each component can be upgraded without the uninstall process without issues.

Version 3.x to Citrix WEM 4.x (excluding 4.3)
Must upgrade the VUEM components to VUEM 3.5.2 before continuing to the WEM versions.

*To get to Citrix WEM 4.3 you must upgrade to a lower version of 4 first

Version 4.x
Each component can be upgraded without the uninstall process without issues.

If you have any questions, please send me an email.

Thanks

Hal Lange