The Situation 

A leading UK based Legal IT Support and Cloud Solutions provider had been re-platformed after an acquisition to a leading UK PaaS provider hosted Datacentre. Much of the legacy Citrix environment remained in an unsupported version and did not meet the PaaS providers base requirements. The current Citrix solution was still operational and used across several of the customer base, meaning that to perform the upgrades, an out of hours team was required with short upgrade windows per customer to minimalize any user impact.

The Task 

The customer legacy Citrix versions needed to be captured and upgrade paths established by the internal support team and provided as work packages to the upgrade team. A clear rollback process also needed to be in place due to the time restraints.

• The customer base was split into work packages.
• Upgrade versions were targeted per customer dependent on their legacy Citrix versions.
• Assign the customers a targeted upgrade date to allow for maintenance windows to be blocked out.

The Action 

Work closely with the PaaS provider Infrastructure team and platform team to ensure the workloads for the planned customer upgrades were performed within the maintenance window and operation for start of business the follow day.

• Capture current Citrix versions.
• Transition out of support Citrix versions to supported Citrix versions.
• Lock the customer base into a maintenance window to perform upgrades.
• Perform an In-place upgrade to minimise client downtime.
• Target Citrix upgrade components: Citrix NetScaler/VPX   XenApp, XenDesktop, Storefront, PVS, Director, Studio, Delivery Controllers.

The Result 

All scoped customers Citrix environments were successfully upgraded within the maintenance window leaving the Citrix infrastructure within supported versions and with the ability to use new features to enhance the end user experience.