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Saturday, July 28, 2012

Solved - Cannot upgrade Xenapp 6.0 to Xenapp 6.5

I was super excited about the new Xenpp 6.5 with so many improvements focused on user experience and more. We have about 40 Xenpp 6.0 servers with over 500 users. So testing this was crucial as once you uninstall Xenapp 6.0 and install Xenapp 6.5, the only way of going back is restoring from the backup. I tried the upgrade utility provided by Citrix to no avail (http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX130614/). Xenapp 6.0 appeared to uninstall just fine but installation of Xenapp 6.5 failed. As many of you might already know there is no direct upgrade path from Xenpp 6.0 to Xenapp 6.5. The utility is merely a script that uninstalls all the components of Xenapp 6.0 and installs 6.5 and joins to the new Xenapp 6.5 farm. 

If i installed Xenapp 6.5 on a brand new server, it worked fine. But when i installed it on a server with Xenapp 6.0, using utility or manually uninstalling and installing it, it failed. After spending hours on research, i still couldnot make it work. There were many other people having the same problem, different solutions worked for different people. However, for me it was no luck. I finally managed to figured out that the problem was something to do with the Xenapp 6.0 not uninstalling properly, although all the components uninstalled successfully. 
Out of those 15 times i tried, this is how it worked for me

1. unjoin the Xenapp 6 server from the farm and uninstall Xenapp 6.0
2. Then uninstall all the citrix components.
 it might ask you to reboot after some of the uninstallations. I just rebooted it once after all the components were uninstalled. 
3. after the reboot, delete all the folders under C:\Program files (x86)\citrix\ except C:\Program files (x86)\citrix\Xentools (only if the VM is a Xen VM - you will have the Xen tools installed). You might get an access denied error for the folder C:\Program files (x86)\citrix\farmGPO. Take the ownership of the folder and then delete.
4. Next, open regedit, and delete all the keys under HKLM\software\citrix




5. reboot
6. Now install Xenapp 6.5 and the installation will succeed

Hope this helps :)

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