Software upgrade strategy



  • Over at work, they've been running a mission-critical Virtual Desktop Infrastructure system on top of a platform that has left the vendor's support period at least 2 years ago. They kept chugging along with it for a while, but lately more and more issues have started to pop up that could no longer be resolved in the normal way.

    So a project was started to upgrade the VDI platform to a newer version, which is currently supported by the vendor. As the underlying hardware is outdated, the project encompasses a full-on replacement of the entire stack. So far, so good.

    However, the choice was made to not upgrade to the latest version of the VDI platform but the version before that because "you never know how stable the latest version is", yada yada.

    The vendor's current version was released last year and will be in full support until somewhere in 2020. The version that they're now going to upgrade to has entered into extended support two years ago and will no longer be supported at all from May 2017 onwards.

    Money well spent, I'd say. :wtf:



  • Becase conservatism and reasons and all that noise. 😄

    Do you have to support this in any way? If so, I feel your pain... (been in the same situation many times)



  • All I'm doing is writing some software which people use inside that VDI system. Luckily, they will be upgrading IE as well so I can now do fancy stuff like gradients and border radiuses 😃


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @AlexMedia said:

    fancy stuff like gradients and border radiuses

    You'll be ready for the meta.d experience then…



  • @AlexMedia said:

    upgrading IE

    Where I work, we're still stuck on IE9 due to compatibility with the core software provider that the business can't do without. Oh, and everything's "certified" with IE10/IE11 except when it's not, such as at least one critical core app I've identified that won't run at all (not even in compatibility mode) in those versions.

    Add to that: I don't know what they're going to do going forward, now that Microsoft has abandoned ActiveX and IE entirely for Edge. All core apps use ActiveX controls. Going to be a fun next couple of years.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @redwizard said:

    Add to that: I don't know what they're going to do going forward, now that Microsoft has abandoned ActiveX and IE entirely for Edge. All core apps use ActiveX controls. Going to be a fun next couple of years.

    Do those ActiveX controls need use the local system? The best approach (if they don't actually need system access) might be to move to a server-based application with front-ends delivered as JS apps.

    Like Discourse. (Oh, wait…)


Log in to reply