Sunday 4 December 2011

Hotfix Rollup Pack 1 for XenApp 6 released (finally)

After fixing both killer and smaller bugs on XenApp 6 one at a time for what seems like a year and a half (no, wait, actually its over that…) Citrix has released the first rollup pack of hotfixes for the product. 

This is not a feature pack, so there is nothing “new” as such.  Although if you are running a live XenApp 6 farm with no hotfixes installed the “new” thing will be that it will work.  XenApp 6 had a few new features and importantly was tied to Windows Server 2008 R2 (which was much better for Terminal Services than Server 2008 and a hell of a lot more modern than Server 2003) but frankly was not that stable at release.  There are about 22 public hotfixes out at the moment if you don’t install the Rollup Pack but the hotfix apparently includes all of them.  In fact there are 105 hotfixes listed as being included, many of which were only previously released to those who paid for support and had a specific problem, though since they often replaced each other that overestimates the size of it.  Actually, its only about 28mb but if it has the effect on a XenApp 6 farm that the public hotfixes had it will be essential.

Rollout is per server – every farm server from the Data Collectors down (but not Web Interface, License, etc) needs the install.  Advice from Citrix is to start with the Data Collectors and rollout very quickly from there, and if you have a test server (or better a test farm) you should test there before installing it anywhere else. 

Installation of Hotfixes should be uniform across your farm – the last thing you want is users landing on servers with different patch levels.  Installation Manager is basic but will do just fine as it understands MSP files, which is what you have.

We’re testing now – benchmarking shows no real CPU or Memory difference (positive or negative) between a server with all the public hotfixes vs with the rollup pack – at least on a simple tests of about 50 Office 2010 users.  But experience on XenApp recently would show it is best to take the risk and install patches early – personally I’ll have all servers patches to Rollup Pack 1 in a week.  Just in case.  If you are not convinced, check out the list of fixed issues…

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX130473