If you’ve managed enterprise software, you’ve probably experienced a software upgrade failure. You take the time to build a staging environment identical to the production environment. You test the upgrade more times than you’d like to admit. You schedule the production upgrade during a weekend maintenance window. You have dotted all your I’s and crossed all your T’s.

Then it happens. You can’t explain it, but your production upgrades start failing.

You now have about two days to undo what you’ve done to however many machines that were affected. And it must happen before Monday morning. After all, a failed upgrade to a mission critical application can affect your organization’s operations. That’s not a good way to start a work week.

What if there were a way to re-do the install that was quick and painless, without requiring hours spent in the office over the weekend?

The VDA Restore feature can help. Citrix is excited to announce the general availability of the VDA Restore for single-session VDAs, released as part of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 2106.

When enabled, this feature will create a restore point, using Microsoft’s system restore capability, at the beginning of the installation/upgrade. If the installation or upgrade fails, the software will automatically restore the VDA back to its pre-upgrade state. Installation logs will be written, and an admin can assess why it failed and make the necessary changes to fix the issue. More importantly the VDA will be in a stable, usable state without the need to take more significant and time-consuming corrective actions.

Below is a video of this feature in action. In it there are two scenarios, an upgrade that fails and is restored, and an upgrade that passes.

So why show an upgrade that passes? Well, it’s all about the restore point. We have provided the admin with two options — delete the restore point automatically on successful upgrade or keep the restore point and delete at a later time, like after testing the VDA for functionality. What if the upgrade passes, but the VDA doesn’t function as expected? Well simply restore the VDA to its pre-upgrade state, back to the VDA that existed before the upgrade.

You can find more information on the VDA Restore feature in the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 2106 documentation. Stay tuned to the Citrix blog for more news around new Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops features and enhancements!