Best Practices for Upgrading to vSphere 5 in a Citrix Provisioning Environment
Summary
This article describes the steps for upgrading to vSphere 5 in a Citrix Provisioning environment.
This applies to Provisioning Services version 5.6/5.6SP1/6/6.1 and VMware vSphere 5.x
Requirements
- A working Provisioning Services environment.
- Admin access to Provisioning Services server.
- Admin access to Provisioning Services targets.
- Rights required to make changes to target devices and the host.
Procedure
- Reverse image vDisks.
- Change NIC on target to VMXNet3.
- Enable Interrupt Mode in Bootstrap used by target devices.
(vSphere 5.1 doesn’t require interrupt mode – Enable Interrupt Mode only applies to vSphere 5.)
- Upgrade host ESX server(s) to vSphere 5.x
- Upgrade VMware tools.
- Reinstall Provisioning Services target software.
- Create image of updated machine.
- Reinstall XenDesktop Virtual Desktop Agent (if installed) while vDisk is in Private Mode.
- Note: You can change vDisk to standard mode and deploy to targets.