New Environment or Upgrade current environment

[sjesse]

Hi

Our current environment has 3 paths into the environment using connection server tagging, with enterprise licensing

UAG 3.3 (2 per path, 6 total)

Horizon 7.4(1 per path)

vSphere 6.5

Appvolumes 2.13

Windows 7

I've been asked to decide if we should just build out the new environment on the latest versions instead of doing upgrades. I'm leaning this way because I'm thinking of setting up the UAGs with the new ha mode, moving radius from the connection servers to the uag, and adding redundant connection servers for each path to setup load balancing here. I do think when we went from 6.2 to 7.4 it was required to do a new environment, but I'm not sure if its the best option in this case.

I only have about 50-100 active users in general, but I'm wondering how larger installation do approach this, because we are close to looking at more towards 500-1000 users in the next few year.

[hellraiser]

In order to upgrade our 7.0.1 environment to 7.7 I built new load balancers, and a new pair of connection servers then migrated users over - seemed to be the safest way, a part of me didn't relish having several hundred people unable to work in the event of something going wrong with the upgrade...  At least doing it this way, I had a way out by simply reverting users to the other pair of load balancers and the other Horizon instance!

JD

[mchadwick19]

I should mention this is only for the Horizon components. vSphere and accessory systems are updated.

Since you are looking to modify the way you set up your infrastructure, I would recommend build new. It's more difficult to work on a live or even semi-live environment to implement architectural changes to the environment.

I've always liked to build new since you can look at new and innovative ways to build the environment and maybe fix some "sins of the past" in doing so. Even when updating dev/test I like to build on automation for the production environments.

Also a good time to implement Win10, since you kind of have to at this point.