If you’re like me, one of your favorite activities is upgrading Nomad or ConfigMgr to take advantage of new features. In a simple lab environment that’s quick and easy to do, but experience tells us that in production things are not always quite so simple. So what should you do when planning your production Nomad upgrade process?
The first step is to read our recently released Nomad Upgrade Guide. Nomad upgrades are usually easy but you might need to address a consideration or two in the course of your upgrade, depending on your scenario. As with any project, you should start with a reasonably complete project plan including reviewing the changes and determining what might be relevant to you. There are some logistical details such as getting the software itself and possibly new license keys. Realistic lab testing is highly recommended. And many organizations have change control processes that must be planned for. Documenting everything will make the product upgrade itself more predictable and easier to repeat the next time an upgrade is needed.
The technical details can be the most interesting, and depending on your business needs they could include several Nomad components, such as WakeUp and PXE Everywhere. Depending on your circumstances, you might have to adjust your Nomad setup and upgrade scripts to account for 32-bit and 64-bit clients. You might want to ensure that your DPs can generate hashes for both ConfigMgr 2007 and ConfigMgr 2012. Your OSD details may need some small adjustments. You could even purge old cache content, though there can be good reasons to keep it around. There are more options and details than I can go into here, but that’s why we produced the Nomad Upgrade Guide for you.
To get your planning off to a quick start we've made some sample scripts available for download at the same location on 1E.com that you download the Guide from (click here). They’re based on an engagement at a large high-profile organization that I did while I was still a consultant. It was a fairly typical scenario in that there weren't a lot of complications. The steps are quite detailed in the Guide, so you should be able to see specifically what we did. There’s even some troubleshooting pointers in case you have any issues with it. You might have to add to it depending on your scenario, or it might not be applicable to you, but it should give you some good ideas to get started.
Have fun getting into the details of your Nomad upgrade!