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had nothing but headaches upgrading to 21h2 from 1908.. Required vda cleanup/removal, performing the upgrade, install new vda.. and still blows up. can only imagine the pain when they say they want to upgrade this to win11

I’ve seen some customers do this but they spend a lot of time on the process - removing components, upgrading OS, deploying components all over again - you wanna have some pretty robust task sequences to manage this… rebuild is always preferred but not always realistic

I think the plan is to go from either 1909 or 20H2 (can't recall which) to 21H2. I'm considering telling them to just run the latest VDA cleanup utility first to play it safe, even though I've never had an issue with in place upgrades myself.

most of our customers are using SCCM for managing persistent W10 VDA's and before a major upgrade the VDA is getting removed and reinstalled. this is mostly because of all the possible bloat a user can generate. on the other hand I never had an issue with an inplace upgrade on non-persistent VDA's.

I done it but it’s messy. I like to rebuild if I can. Now that depends on if they have thing documented for applications reinstalls. I seen that a lot of them really don’t.

Gawd this shits me to tears - customers who don’t automate their VDA / gold image builds and therefore runs into all sorts of issues when doing OS upgrades. In-place upgrades to persistent makes sense - hopefully those VMs are being managed with something like Endpoint Manager, but non-persistent should be a re-deployment via an automated gold image build.

Tell us how you really feel @Aaron Parker

For us, SCCM handles persistent, and I believe all of our non-persistent stuff is in App Layering, so those should be clean every time.

Something Citrix should fix with the VDA installer. It’s such a mess - an EXE that containers 8(?) MSIs?

That also applies to the CWA installer... at least 8 MSIs, one for each component.