Horizon 8 2006 Connection Server Upgrade

Upgrading a Horizon Connection Server, will look straight forward as per the documentation, however the most important part is not just following the pre-requisites and compatibility, but also the environment readiness, which includes factors like roll back plan, post upgrade tasks like cleanups. Hence missing out on any of the overall approach of prerequisites and readiness, can lead to upgrade roadblocks and production impact.

Hence the below steps listed are from my experiences from the field in driving such upgrades within customer VDI environments.

Horizon 7.12 to Horizon 8 2006

Upgrade Preparation:-

There are a couple of prerequisites you need to have completed before starting the upgrade.

• Upgrade the Horizon Client software.
• Make backups of connection server (If you have multiple Connection Server instances in a replicated group, make backups and record configuration settings for only one instance in the group.)
• If you have multiple Connection Server instances fronted by a load balancer, remove Connection Server instances from the load balanced cluster one at a time while you upgrade them.
• Snapshot Connection Servers before beginning the upgrade.
• Upgrade the VMware Horizon Connection Servers(in-place upgrade)
• VMware Horizon 7 licensing will not work after the upgrade. You will need to upgrade the license key to horizon 8.
• Upgrade Horizon Agents: Uninstall App Volumes Agent, uninstall DEM Agent, Upgrade Horizon Agent, Install new DEM Agent, Re-install App Volumes Agent.

Note: View Composer Linked Clones and persistent disks are deprecated with the VMware Horizon 8 2006 release. 

VMware Horizon Upgrades to 2006

Upgrade Steps

1. After the download, launch the VMware Horizon 8 Connection Server installer as administrator on a virtual machine.

2. Welcome to the Installation Wizard, Click Next,

Horizon Connection Server installer has new branding.

3. Accept the terms of the license agreement and click Next.

4. On the User Experience Improvement Program screen, uncheck the box and click Next.

5. On the Ready to Install the Program page, Click Install to proceed with the installation.

6. On the Installer Completed page, uncheck the box, and click Finish.

Connection Server waits for all the services to start.

7. Launch the Horizon Administrator Console.

You can disable this protection by adding the following entry to the file locked.properties:

checkOrigin=false

8. Log in to Horizon Console using an account that belongs to the user or group account.

9. After logging in, Enter your VMware Horizon 8 2006 licensing key to activate Horizon 8 in your environment. 

Upgrade Cloud Pod:- Upgrade a Cloud Pod Architecture environment

Use the following process to upgrade a Cloud Pod Architecture environment.

1. Upgrade all Connection Server instances in one pod, according to the usual process for upgrading a single Connection Server instance.
2. Repeat the preceding step for the other pods in the pod federation, upgrading each pod one-by-one.

Stay tuned for further updates..