Issues When Upgrading to Citrix Metaframe 3.0 Presentation Server
 by: John Gall

The article below lists issues we ran into when upgrading from Metaframe XPa to Metaframe 3.0 Presentation Server Enterprise.

Issue:

We installed a licensing server and then installed Metaframe 3.0 Enterprise on a clean Windows 2003 server. Added this server to our XPa farm and made the 3.0 server the Data Collector. Any time a user would click an icon on the web interface the IMA service would blow up on the 3.0 server. This occurred on additional 3.0 servers that were brought up as long as they were data collectors. Changing the farm so XPa servers were the data collectors fixed this issue. The event log logged this when the IMA service blew up Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library : Runtime Error

Solution:

I'm told that there is an issue in the SQL database that causes the 3.0 server acting as a data collector to blow up the IMA service. Our fix was to create a new SQL database. Create a new farm using the same name and republish all the applications. We then uninstalled and reinstalled Metaframe and pointed the servers to the new farm. Rather than an upgrade we rebuilt our entire farm into a clean Citrix Metaframe 3.0 Enterprise environment. While rather extreme this did resolve the issue. We recreated our published applications by hand. You may find a tool for this here http://www.citrix4ge.de/ctxsdk/expimppa.htm

Issue:

When we performed an upgrade on a server from XPa to Metaframe Presentation Server it only upgraded it to Advanced. When we used add/remove programs to add in the installation manager and resource manager the server stayed at advanced edition and never registered its proper edition with the license server. Thus users received errors that the system had reached its license logon limit.

Solution:

Open the management console. Right click the server and choose set edition type. Set it to enterprise then reboot the server TWICE. Check the startup licenses on the licensing server to see that your server is listed as enterprise. What bit us was the two reboots required. The system only asks for one but it took two for the server to register properly.

Issue:

Upon adding a Metaframe 3.0 Presentation Server to our XPa farm changes could only be made to published applications if you pointed your Citrix Management Console at the new 3.0 Presentation server. After the IMA blow up we removed all 3.0 servers from our XPa farm only to find we could change no application.

Solution:

We had to add 3.0 back to the farm and then instruct admins to point consoles at the 3.0 server.

About The Author

John Gall is a full time IT Manager and IT Consultant in Minnesota. He runs several websites as a hobby featuring content similar to that in this article.
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