Manage.citrix.com

The last option on this screen is the Upgrade option, if you want to automate the upgrade of your old Citrix environment to 7.6 this is where you want to go.

So after you select that option the process is shown, the most important part of the upgrade is the preparation. So read and understand what they will do to your environment before you continue.

The projects you have running or configured are shown in the lower part of the screen, I still have none there.

So first task is to add a project and examine what are the possibilities. Click on Add Upgrade Project to start your new project. You get several options;

• Upgrading XenDesktop 5.6 to XenDesktop 7.6
• Upgrading XenApp 6.0 to XenApp 7.6
• Upgrading XenApp 6.5 to XenApp 7.6

So let’s assume you have a XenApp 6.5 environment running and you want to upgrade to 7.6. Select the last upgrade option and click on ADD. I named the project XA76 but any name will do there, if you have more projects configured a description might be handy I think.

Citrix offers two option to do the upgrade:

• Fully Automated
• Partially automated

Fully 

Below is a nice graphical overview of the steps Citrix takes to migrate your environment. First you need to create a new 7.6 site (or perhaps you have one already), next the applications and policy settings are analyzed. You will be able to choose which settings you want to migrate at this stage.
The policies and applications you chose are migrated to the new environment, and your done 🙂

Citrix will connect to your environment over 443, they will only use 443.

Partially

The option is to pick the partially option and do the migration yourself. The analyzing is done like the automated option but the migration is done with downloadable powershell  scripts.

You don’t need to be connected to the Citrix Workspace Cloud when doing the migration with this option. For people who want to be in control (me) this is the way to go.

Continue

So first we select our 6.5 environment or if you didn’t have connection setup yet from  Citrix Workspace Cloud you can do that here. I selected All Existing Machines and went further.

Next step is to select the controller of the 6.5 environment, Citrix Workspace Cloud works with controllers that communicate with the Workspace Cloud. Well here I ran into a problem for I don’t have a 6.5 environment for over a while anymore… Last years Citrix was pushing everyone to upgrade and move on. We did just that and moved all our customers to newer versions and products.

My own lab is also on a new version and I don’t see why I would install 6.5 just to test this.

The next step is to select the 7.6 environment. After you select the new environment you will be asked to enter the credentials needed to communicate with the controllers.

Steps after these are :

• Select the analyzed applications that you want to migrate
• Select the polices you want to migrate