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Upgrade 5.x to 6.x questions

Mike G, User (Posts: 47)
Dec 22, 2014 6:29:25 am EST
Hi Conrad,
We are going to be upgrading our hosts from 5.6.0.5 to the latest 6.x and have some questions. We have obtained a version 6 licence key (Helpdesk) from our v5.x key as per your email. We will be creating our own v6.x MSI installer and Agent (with embedded generated Meta Key) and are planning on running our own GMS (current hosts all using your GMS).

Questions:

-If we upgrade our 2 viewer installations to version 6, can we still connect to all our existing v5 hosts while they have not been upgraded yet? Do we have to upgrade only 1 viewer and migrate the hosts to v6?

-Are there any issues migrating v5 to v6 hosts AND changing to our own GMS? Can we do this all at once or better in stages?

All of our host sites are remote to us. We usually do have the ability to make a direct connection via IP (port forwarding on routers) but would prefer to use the existing Internet-ID based connections to perform the upgrade (too many).

So is the basic plan for us to:

-Bring up our new local GMS
-Install v6 viewers to replace existing v5 viewers
-Build our new MSI installer and Agent (that points to our GMS)
-Upgrade hosts via v6 viewer

Thanks for your continued help!
Mike
Conrad Sallian, Support (Posts: 3013)
Dec 22, 2014 10:30:28 am EST
Hi Mike,

-If we upgrade our 2 viewer installations to version 6, can we still connect to all our existing v5 hosts while they have not been upgraded yet?

Yes, you can. Newer Viewers can connect to older Hosts. So our recommendation is that you first upgrade the Viewer and from within the Viewer - remotely update the Hosts.

-Are there any issues migrating v5 to v6 hosts AND changing to our own GMS? Can we do this all at once or better in stages?

For the program, there's no difference whatsoever what ID server you use. It's just a matter of updating ID settings on the Host and in Connection Properties on the Viewer.

But there is a caveat. The ID and the ID server are two settings that are closely interconnected. You cannot configure the MSI installer so that it changes one of them (ID server in this case) and leaves the other one (ID) intact. In other words, if you update your ID server address on all your remote Hosts you will have to also re-generate IDs and update your address book.

You can do in reverse though. That is:

1. Change the ID server manually on the Hosts that you want to communicate via your GMS. You can do so remotely using the Remote Settings command in the context menu in Viewer when you right-click on a remote connection. New changes will apply only after you restart the Host, see the next step.

2. Upgrade the remote Hosts using the vanilla installer and Remote Install tool. Don't build any MSI package.

3. Once the upgrade is over and the remote Host will restart it  will be available via your GMS rather than via our default server.

Try this with one of the Hosts first. The downside of this strategy is that you'll have to manually change the ID server for each Host, because so far you can't change Host settings en masse other than using an MSI file. And using a custom built MSI file might not work in this case because if you change your ID server your ID (code) will reset too.

-Bring up our new local GMS
-Install v6 viewers to replace existing v5 viewers
-Build our new MSI installer and Agent (that points to our GMS)
-Upgrade hosts via v6 viewer

Good plan. Only back up your address book using the Export Connections feature. You don't want to lose your address book if something goes wrong. And also, see my previous paragraph since the order in which you perform these actions might be different. Again - you can't change the ID server without changing also the ID itself. So you need to think beforehand, how you are going to connect to those computers after you make changes/upgrade.

If you have any questions, I'm here.

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