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gneville1985
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Airwatch Upgrade best practice

Hi
We have our Airwatch environment in 9.1 version, unfortunately it was not upgraded in the last 2 years. Currently we are looking to upgrade the version to 9.7. We would like to know the options and issues faced during such a big jump.

Please advice
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AlexandrGubarev
Contributor
Contributor

Hello,
9.1 is very old version and as I know you will need be upgrade version by version 9.1 --> 9.2 --> 9.3 --> 9.4 etc. Nobody can tell you how it will happen 🙂
We have upgraded from 9.6 to 9.7 and we was have a problems with SMTP notification and we came back to 9.6 from back up. Now we have 9.6.0.10 (iPhone X supported), stable version at this moment.

My recommendation, you need upgrade from 9.1 to 9.2 waiting one/two days, create a backup of current version and the upgrade from 9.2 to 9.3 ect.
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KEVINSCHELLINGE
Contributor
Contributor

We had 9.1 before we upgraded. I went back and forth for weeks trying to figure out what to upgrade to and how to do it. I subscribed to these forums, they are extremely helpful and everyone here has your best interest when they respond. I ended up letting my company know that the amount of variables that can go wrong were beyond my comfort level. We seems small compared to some other companies with about 750 devices attached. If they detached because I missed a detail, that could have been disastrous. 

This is just my experience , you must decide your best options - but I had my company pay for professional services I was set up upgrade to 9.6, during the install the professional services let me know about 1810. This is only a few weeks old, but we upgraded and had little issues. Most of my older issues before the upgrade disappeared, and our only issue now is related to our fragmented database.

Watching the upgrade, I am glad I hired them to do it, there were a lot of steps that I would not have thought to do.
If you do it yourself, make sure your ask questions here, read other posts, and listen to the crew here as well as your research, they are extremely helpful. Support will also point your in the direction of what needs to upgrade and in what order. If you screw it up, I'm told they will help you try to fix. If you decide to enlist professional services, pay attention and maybe further upgrades you will know what to do so you can do them yourself. That is my plan, further upgrades I will be doing.
I hope this helps. This is just my experience. Do your research and be prepared, backups and snapshots if applicable. Good Luck!
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PatriciaGoncalv
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hello, I'm going to update from 9.1 to 9.7 on the 13th, then report how it was.
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KonstantinosLei
Contributor
Contributor

Hi Patricia. Looking forward to your update. It would be nice if you could share some key points and how you handled issues. Good luck!
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gneville1985
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thank you guys  for the update

@Patricia looking forward for your update
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chengtmskcc
Expert
Expert

Perhaps my blog posts might help? I covered the entire process and more.

https://goo.gl/qsMR24
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PatriciaGoncalv
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Aquiline good afternoon,
Sorry for the delay in response, but the customer had to postpone the update for today.


For the upgrade, the customer was with the console in version 9.1 and went to 9.7.0.3


Process:
-Validate the requirements of the version to be installed;
-Stop all AIrWatch services on console and device servers;
-Run incremental database installer from 9.1 to 9.2 with user with the required permissions;
-Run the Incremental Installer from 9.2 to 9.3;
-Run the database installer from version 9.7;


-In the console so there is no conflict with old versions in case a previous updating has already been done on the server, I uninstalled the services and removed the old installation folder;
-I ran the version 9.7 services installer;
After installation I rebooted the server;
-I did the same process up for the device server;


Update occurred without any problem and successfully.


I hope it helps 🙂


 


Information on version 9.7


After the upgrade the console configuration profiles were only delivered to devices assigning with smart groups


The same was true for apps

chengtmskcc
Expert
Expert

Nice work Patricia. However, I don't think the below is unnecessary at all. The installer will always back up the current version before the upgrade in case rollback is needd. Of course, it's best to revert the server from snapshot assuming it's a virtual machine and start the upgrade again.

' -In the console so there is no conflict with old versions in case a previous updating has already been done on the server, I uninstalled the services and removed the old installation folder;'
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KonstantinosLei
Contributor
Contributor

Out of curiosity, what would a roll-back process for on-prem look like? I have been looking for documentation on this and couldn't find anything.

K
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chengtmskcc
Expert
Expert

If your AirWatch environment is completely virtualized, you would have created snapshots of all the VMs and taken a full backup of your AirWatch database.

In the event that a rollback is required, you simply:

- Restore database from latest backup
- Revert VMs from snapshots
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