Upgrade VMware Horizon 7.x Connection Servers to Horizon 8 2111

hello everyone brandon lee with virtualization how to coming to you guys with a video walkthrough of how to upgrade from vmware horizon 7 to the newly released vmware horizon 8 21 11. 21.11 has some really fantastic new features uh to mention i just spun up a blog post as of yesterday covering the new features of 211 but just a quick walkthrough of those features horizon 2111 includes a extended service branch support so 36 months of support with horizon 2111 contains new rest apis rename of desktop recording to horizon recording also with this release the vmware os optimization tool that we've all used and love for the past few years fact the number one fling on the vmware flink site is now a production supported tool so fantastic news there there are various improvements with instant clones uh with the horizon console the various horizon clients have fantastic new features so i'm going to post the blog post in the description for this video on those new features so what i have in the lab environment that i want to show you guys is a couple of vmware horizon 7 connection servers that i have spun up and what i've done is i've spun up the first connection server as a connection server the second server is spun up as a replica connection server but essentially as you guys know those two are one and the same so they have ldp replication between the two boxes and that's how the configuration the database everything is replicated uh between the two connection servers so things to be aware of uh you want to pay attention to uh all aspects really of your horizon upgrade but the first thing i wanted to mention is you need to do this in a specific order and there's a really fantastic kb from vmware showing exactly the order of operations that you want to follow upgrading your vmware horizon environment so i have a very simple environment in the lab i've got two connection servers now if you most likely in a production environment you're going to have uag boxes you're going to have external connecting clients that you need to be aware of so there are definitely things you want to do in a certain order number one listed is make sure your clients are at the latest and greatest horizon client version to make sure you don't have issues there now i am all the way on step seven with connection servers so obviously i don't have all of these technologies in between and pre post uh the connection server so i'm just worrying about the connection server for this video but just be aware of that i'm going to post this link as well also there is a product interoperability matrix vmware maintains a really nice interoperability and one of those is the upgrade path so be aware that depending on which version of vmware horizon that you are starting with there are supported upgrade paths and there are those that are unsupported so you want to make sure that you are hopping between the green check boxes on your upgrade path hitting those check boxes to arrive at 211 if that's what you so desire to upgrade to the latest and greatest so what i have done is i have upgraded actually one other thing that i want to show you guys is that you want to make sure that replication between your connection servers is healthy so there's a command for that and it's the rep admin command so i'm going to run this on both connection servers and let's see what output we get so run the command and here we see we have no errors they would be listed at the bottom or in among the return so as we see we properly have replication with the secondary connection server which is the replica server in in my uh environment so i'm going to flip over to connection server 2 and we are going to paste and run the same command and we should see the reverse uh everything being fine with replication to the 01 server which we see we don't see any errors we see the neighbors correctly reported everything shows to be successful in this case so that's something you want to do before you start upgrading your horizon connection servers you can do this in tandem vmware has a kb article talking about upgrading your connection servers in parallel so that is something you definitely can do so if you don't want to take the down time to upgrade one server then flip everything over and make sure the other server gets upgraded you can just create a maintenance window upgrade both in tandem but this is a command that you want to run initially to make sure that you have replication between both it's healthy you don't see any errors because if you do you need to address that first so i'm going to flip back over to o1 i'm going to kick off the 2111 upgrade to horizon 8 and we're going to see how this looks with the upgrade process so take just a second for things to to get started a really nice thing about the horizon 8 upgrade in place upgrade is that it's simple you know it just takes a few minutes copy over the upgrade file or it's actually just the same file if you're going to upgrade or perform a new install so you just run this it's going to recognize you have an existing installation and it's going to carry over that config so pretty common stuff here uh next next to finish process if i could describe it that way so we're just accepting the eula we're going to say no to join the ceip program hit next it basically just giving you some informational data describing the process privacy statements those types of things so now we're going to install and we're going to let this run so it will do the normal install installer processes checking the installer validating install it's going to upgrade the components to essentially delete uh vmware horizon 7 and pull over that configuration from the database now there are database changes with horizon 8 and i had specifically spoken with vmware about this you most likely as a best practice you don't want to just simply bring in a uh horizon 8 server to your environment so if you have a horizon 7 server you don't want to just automatically stick a horizon 8 server in as a replica partner you want to do those in-place upgrades because there are some database changes that are made to that ldp database the atom database as you perform this upgrade process so this allows that process to run successfully and to do things that it needs to do now once again i'm gonna go over and pull this upgrade file from my 01 server i'm going to pull it from the downloads directory and set copy and we are going to stick that in the uh get to the right directory stick this in the downloads folder let that copy over and we're going to kick the same process off on the o2 server so again you can do this in tandem as long as you have everything as healthy between the two so it looks like it's upgrading the schema of the database as we speak from the o1 server installation and the o2 server as getting started so we're going to let this get rolling we're going to do the same process on the o2 box and next through those screens there say next accept the eula so again this box is configured as a horizon replica but again not really any difference between the standard connection server and replica so i'm going to say install flip back over to the number one server and this will be the longest step that you will see in the process the waiting for web apps to start and that's when the everything has been installed it's just simply waiting for services to start everything to come up healthy before it can deem it as a successful installation so what i'm going to do this normally takes just two three minutes i'm going to pause the video we'll come back after the web apps have started successfully and as we can see o2 is rolling along deleting the horizon 7 installation and it will replace those with the new 2111 components and essentially look and go through the same process as our o1 server so be back in just a minute okay so we have a installer completed uh successful message uh basically on the one server we went through the upgrade process using the uh file downloaded for horizon eight twenty 8 211 so now we see that web apps have started staller completed i'm going to click finish i'm going to flip back over to o2 and same story there we have a installer completed i'm going to click finish and of course it's opening up uh release notes so i'm going to minimize that and i want to show you guys an error that i saw not really an error but just unexpected results here after the upgrade that i went through yesterday when you double click or or i found this when i double clicked on the uh shortcut for the horizon administrator console what i noticed was a blank page or not really blank but a background without the login uh so i sat and waited for just a moment thinking well web apps may not have started correctly one thing i i did notice when i i brought up the browser tools was i had an error 404 on some web resources that no doubt are behind the fact that that is not displaying the login fills so played around with this just a little bit reinstall did some kind of normal troubleshooting that you would expect however same result so what i did just playing around was instead of localhost i noticed that with localhost i was receiving that error so one thing i wanted to try was the fqdn for the horizon connection server so i did that received the ssl warning click advanced proceed and walleye the login box appears correctly so if you do receive that error message if it is pointed to localhost try your fqdn for your connection server and if anything else you can just simply update your shortcut for your administrator console i'm not sure if this has been reported as a bug or if there's something else going on specific to my environment but i wanted you guys to see this in my lab environment in case you see that in a production upgrade save you a vmware support ticket well i'm brandon lee this is virtualization how-to and hopefully you've enjoyed this just quick walkthrough of how to upgrade your horizon 7 environment 2 horizon 8 21 11. hit like on the video subscribe to the channel and i will see you guys soon

Channel: VirtualizationHowto

Views: 118

Keywords: connection server, horizon 8 2111, how to, process, update, upgrade, vmware horizon 7, vmware horizon 8, walkthrough

Id: Ocv9OQHLojA

Length: 14min 4sec (844 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 02 2021