How to upgrade your Horizon Infrastructure (7.7 Edition)
Sometimes you have to bite the bullet and just upgrade everything! I recently went through the exercise of looking up all of the various solution components in the decoder ring matrixes to figure out what it would take to upgrade everything to VMware Horizon v7.7. This particular environment was also running Veeam for backups and Nutanix as the hardware platform.
Your particular order might vary, but this is the way I decided to upgrade the environment.
Upgrade Nutanix:
The Nutanix piece is comprised of two parts. The NOS and the Prism Central appliance. The current version we were on was 5.5.2 and we would need to upgrade to at least 5.9.2.3 for ESXI 6.7 U1 support. At the time of this writing, 5.9.2.3 is the latest 1-click upgrade enabled version. 5.9.2.3 is also part of the Short Term Support Release branch. By the time you read/need this, 5.10.1 should be available via 1-click and is part of the Long Term Support Release branch.
Be sure to upgrade Prism Central first before upgrading the NOS.
This upgrade can be done as a rolling upgrade without significant impact.
Upgrade Veeam:
Upgrade Veeam to at least 9.5. Update 3a to support backing up Virtual Machines from vCenter 6.7U1. No real gotchas for this upgrade. The in-place upgrade will handle both the Management, Server and remote proxy upgrades.
Upgrade vCenter:
If you are running 6.5, you can upgrade directly to 6.7U1. The appliance version is super easy to upgrade but does require a temporary IP address to preform the deploy and migrate. Be sure to validate any other external solutions that might need upgrading such as vRops or SRM. Be aware that as of vCenter 6.7, no more FAT Client at all. So it’s just HTML5 and Flex.
Upgrade ESXi Hosts:
Once vCenter is upgraded, you can proceed with all ESXi hosts under management. Assuming proper sizing and capacity of the cluster, a rolling upgrade can be preformed with minimal impact.
Upgrade Horizon View Connection Brokers:
Upgrading all brokers from 7.5.1 to 7.7.0. In this environment, Unified Access Gateways were in place so there was no need to worry about any paired security servers.
Depending on the load balancing situation, this upgrade might impact user connectivity.
Upgrade App Volumes:
This was a small point release upgrade from 2.14 to 2.15. The packaging machine, app stacks and also any images need upgrading to reflect the new 2.15 agent. The servers are backwards compatible though so agents can be upgraded as time permits.
Upgrade VMware User Environment Manager:
The UEM upgrade will consist of agents and the management console. We will upgrade from 9.5 to 9.6.
Upgrade Universal Access Gateways:
Upgrading the UAG appliance will also require a temporary IP address. This will be a simple deployment and migrate to upgrade from 3.3 to 3.4. External users would most likely be affected during this upgrade.
Upgrade remaining Agents, Tools and VM hardware:
Once the environment is fully upgraded, you will need to visit all VMs and upgrade the appropriate tools and agents and upgrade Virtual Hardware to version 14.
If you are using Insta-Clones, be sure to make sure your Horizon View agents are at least 7.5 and above.
There are lots of moving parts in this upgrade but with some planning and some patience, the entire upgrade process should go off without a hitch.
Happy Upgrading!
– Carlo