The 16th of March was a good day. The NLVMUG was going on in the Netherlands (great event!) , great weather and Horizon 7.1 went GA. And I wanted to get my TestLab up and running with that version, and take a little peek if there are any of my’s in the upgrade. See what and where things are changed. So why not write-up this pirate’s adventure….

Upgrade Procedure and Interoperability

Before the upgrade it is important to know in which order the bits are to be upgraded, are we doing an in place or new VM deployment and does new versions still work with other components in the environment or are those also needed to be upgraded or break the upgrade.

The upgrade procedure is more or less the same as with the previous ones:

Check the status of the components. If there currently are health issues, fix them before the upgrade. Or use the upgrade to try to fix your issue if they are named as a fix in the release notes.

Get out your password manager for database passwords and so on.

Complete backups and snapshots. Don’t forget databases and such!

Disable provisioning and upgrade Composers. Provisioning can only be enabled when all components are upgraded.

Disable connection server and upgrade connection server. If you have more you can do one at a time to leave your users the option to connect. Disable connection server in Horizon admin and load balancer.

Optional Upgrade Paired Connection Server and Security Server. Disable connection and prepare security server for upgrade in the Horizon Admin, and in load balancer. First upgrade the paired connection server and then the Security server.

Upgrade the Horizon Agent.

Upgrade the Horizon Clients.

Upgrade the GPO’s to ADMX’s.

Note: during an upgrade it is allowed, or supported, that some older versions interact with the new versions. For example first upgrade the composer in a maintenance window and in the following the connections servers. Just don’t let that upgrade window take for ages.

Your environment probably will have some other upgrades like other Horizon suite components, vSphere, Tools, Windows versions and so on. Be sure to have the steps breakdown before doing any upgrades.

Check if the component versions can work together by checking the VMware Product Interoperability Matrices at http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/sim/interop_matrix.php#interop. Be sure to put in all the VMware solutions you are using. And check with vendors of components outside of the VMware scope. Don’t forget your Zero or Thin Client vendors!

Find a red in there, well stop right there before upgrading.

I have my testlab in the cloud. So for not breaking all the bits, I am cloning my lab in a new lab that I will use for the upgrade. Pretty nice functionality!

Announcement and location

While preparing for the upgrade bit to download we have some time to browse through the 7.1 announcements. Sure you have seen to VMware announcement or blog write ups where you can choose from. If not, ITQ Master of Drones and EUC Laurens has a post on the announcement bit that you can find over here: https://www.vdrone.nl/whats-new-vmware-horizon-7-1/.

Downloads, well easy pease they are in the usual my.vmware.com spot (linkie to the VMware spot: https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/info?slug=desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_horizon/7_1). Have an active SnS and your entitled to get the upgrade bits or else go for an evaluation.

And while your at it get the ADMX files for all of the Horizon GPO. Thumbs up, finally they are there VMware. Better late than never.

Upgrade Procedure

I have the following components in my vTestlab that need upgrading: Horizon Composer because of the current desktop pools, Horizon Connection Server and databases that are running because of these services. And Horizon Agent in the desktop pools.

For my testlab I used a saved blueprint of my VCAP-DTM lab and used that blueprint to publish a new testlab in Ravello.

After the upgrade I have to check the following components that interact with Horizon, vIDM and vROPS for Horizon. And client connections of course.

Composer

After disabling the provisioning of the desktop pools, log on to your composer server.

On the composer server start the installer. After the startup it detects that an upgrade should take place.

Click next, Accept the EULA, Check your destination folder, Check database settings and input password, Check port and certificate settings. Note: if you create a new SSL certificate you will have to retrust that one in Horizon. I am reusing the SSL certificate so I select the one installed, Check and push the install button, Grab a coffee and check status, Finish, Restart server, Rinse and repeat for other composers in your environment, If you are done with all components in your desktop block, don’t forget to enable provisioning of the desktop pool!

Connection Server

After disabling the connection server you are going to work on, log on to the connection server.

Select the connection server and click the disable button.

On the connection server start the installer. Like the composer upgrade, the installer will detect it is in an upgrade scenario.

Click next, Accept the EULA, Check and push the install button, Grab another coffee and check status, Finish and read the read me. Yes really, depending where your coming from there are some pointers in there to check or change to make your life simpler, Open a browser to your upgraded host and look at that spiffy portal, Open the admin console and check connection to other components, Enable your connection server, Rinse and repeat for others, (don’t forget your load balancers….)

Look at that pretty new portal

unfortunately the administration console GUI isn’t changed and flash (ahaaaa) is still around. Sad panda…..

Don’t forget to check if vIDM and vROPS for Horizon isn’t broken. I had to repair/restart the broker agent with vROPS. And have a little patience for the metrics to flow back in.

Agent

I have got an RDSH Hosted application farm server, I will be updating that agent. And some desktop pools, but the procedure is the same. First off, disabling access to the RDSH. Well that depends on the amount of servers you have in the farm and what your hosting from it. Disable hosted desktop pool for example. With my test lab its one server, so disabling the farm would be sufficient. Heck I am the only user so letting everything running would only bug my multiple personalities (who said that?!?).

With several servers you could maintenance one by removing it from the farm. Be sure to have your farm running with the same versions. Or have a cloned pool, just update the template.

On the RDSH host start the installer. Again the installer will notice it is an upgrade.

Click next, Accept the EULA, Check your IP version, Custom setup components, but we are not adding just upgrading click next, (manual only) Check registered settings RDSH with connection server, Next and Install, Finish and reboot, Enable hosts or pools when the farm is done.

What’s new in the admin?

Instance Clone pools have the option to select specific vLANs for that pool or use the VM network of the template snapshot.

In Global Settings – you have two new client settings:

hide server information in client interface. You will only see the lock if the certificate is trusted, but not https://connectiontoserver.fq.dn.

hide domain list in client interface. Only the username and password boxes are shown. The drop down with the domains are gone. Great for use cases where you want to hide the domain or there is a sh*t load of domains in there. Users have to remember there UPN.

With client user interface this is the Horizon Client and the HTML client (for the domain list the URL is still in your browser if you haven’t hidden that in another way).

Mind that this is currently not working if the Horizon client is pushed from AirWatch to iOS.

In global settings you can also add an automatic refresh of the admin interface (can’t remember if this was already in) or display some MOTD or legal pre-login to all your users. This must be accepted by all your users before able to logon.

What is missing from the admin?

As @jketels already mentioned on twitter:

Still no VLAN selection support for Dedicated and Floating pools. Only Instant-Clones have this new option available. #Horizon #View 7.1 pic.twitter.com/ehYCnZa4nB

— Joey Ketels (@jketels) March 17, 2017

The network selection you can only do from the GUI in instant clone desktop pools. The network selection (step 7 in vCenter settings) are not available in for example Linked clone pools. And like networks are not used in a CPA multiple POD deployment, or all other reasons that a lot of customers are using multi vLANs for the desktop pools. Again a missed opportunity. And no, linked clones are not yet depreciated or planned to be so support this from the GUI. Well if needed, with PowerShell you can still get this in for your linked clones.

That’s it

That it, core components are upgraded and running happily. I probably still have to find out a bit more about what has been changed within this release but for a start it looks pretty slick and without to much of a hassle.

– Happy getting your Horizon going the distance!

Sources: vmware.com, vdrone.nl