Compability hints Client => older Server version

[khoppe]

Hello to everybody,

I faced the problem that a planned server update (2009.4 => 10.4) has failed. In the meantime -as a preparation- we'd done some Client updates, partly as test to the versions 9.7 and/or 10.4, partly only to 9.7 as an act or preparing the update for an offshore location.

While the Live update failed and we'd set back the server to Integrity 2009, SP4, we still have clients on our environment that are updated to 9.7 and/or clients installed with 10.4. Now we faced some effects in the client's behaviour for which no official info from PTC exists, because PTC doesn't check this combinations:

• Client 9.7 connects to Server 9.4 and/or
• Client 10.4 connects to Server 9.4

We found out problems with this functions:

For both Client versions the functions "Create Chart/Report/Dashboard" (GUI + CLI) isn't available (Link is grey = not usable).

Neither in the GUI or via CLI the function "Run Chart" can be used nor "Rund Dashboard" if a chart is included (WebUI works).

Thus my question to all:

Does anybody knows about more functions that doesn't work?

This info would be very helpful to us to decide whether to make a complete rollback of every changed client

as well as to decide how to plan the client upgrade in future.

I'm waiting for helpful hints ....

A successfull 2014 to everybody

Klaus

[JoeBartlett]

Hello Klaus, unfortunately using a newer version of client with an older version of server is not supported. Sometimes only 1 version difference is not bad and some functionality may work, but there are no guarantees. In your case, there is a significant version difference and there have been many infrastructure changes in client and server code between the 2009 SP4 and 10.4 releases.

What I would suggest are these 2 options:

1) Roll back all clients to 2009 SP4

or

2) Install a 2009 SP4 client in addition to the 9.7/10.4 clients. It is possible (and supported) to have multiple versions of clients running on the same machine; you just need to make sure you use the right client to connect to the right server. See the 10.4 Integrity Server Installation Guide for more details about this setup (page 163).

[khoppe]

Hi Josh,

I'm sorry to say but these infos has been already announced from PTC Support, and it wasn't helpful.

Additional I've got the info that no official doc exist describing what I'd asked.

Thus my question into the community whether anybody may have additional infos.

By-the-way: I would never recommend to install two different client versions on one Computer for more than testing purposes. It is too dangerous that a user opens a sandbox with the newer version by mistake.

Another possible error: Shared sandboxes. Once opened with the newer client it is not usable any longer for the older one.

Again my question:

Does anyone know more disabled or wrong working features than that I'd described in my first posting?

Greetings,

Klaus

[matt_giltaji]

Hi Klaus,

We did not have exactly the same scenario as you. In our case, we were testing 10.1 on a test environment and had 9.7 in our production environment.

The major issue we noticed when accidentally using the 10.1 client to connect to the 9.7 server was that the vast majority of functionality in the Admin client threw errors or did not work in one way or another. Luckily we had only rolled it out to a few people in our admin team, so they were capable of using both clients for the few weeks it took to get everything upgraded.

I agree with you that most end users would run into issues by running both versions of the client side-by-side on the same machine. Rollback (as painful as it is) is probably your better option.

Hope that helps,

Matt

[khoppe]

Thanks to all.

It looks like the findings I posted in the beginning seems to be the only functions not working.

Running it for 2 weeks we 've had no complaints regarding the module Configuration Management.

Thus I suppose that the described mis-functions are the only ones ....

Thanx to all