By Dale Carter, Senior Solutions Architect, End-User Computing
Over the last few years working with VMware Horizon View and doing many upgrades, two of the biggest issues I would hear from customers when planning for an upgrade was: “Why do we have to have so much downtime, and with seven connection brokers, why do we have to take them all down at once?”
These questions and issues came up when I was speaking to Engineering about the upgrade process and making it smoother for the customer.
I was told that, in fact, this was not the case, and you did not have to take all connection brokers down during the upgrade process; you can upgrade one connection broker at a time while the other servers are happily running.
This has been changed in View 6, and the upgrade documentation now reflects it. You can find the document here.
In this blog I will show you how to upgrade a cluster of connection servers with zero downtime. For this post I will be upgrading my View 5.3 servers to View 6.0.1
Here are the steps needed to upgrade a View pod with zero downtime:
- Follow all prerequisites in the upgrade document referenced above, including completing all backups and snapshots.
- In the load balancer managing the View servers, disable the server that is going to be upgraded from the load balanced pool.
- Log in to the admin console.
- Disable the connection server you are going to upgrade. From the View Configuration menu select Server, then select Connection Servers and highlight the correct server. Finally, click Disable.
- Click OK. The view server will now be disabled.
- Log in to the View connection server and launch the executable. For this example I will launch VMware-viewconnectionserver-x86_64-6.0.1-2088845.exe. NOTE: We did not disable any services at this point.
- Click Next.
- Accept the license agreement, and click Next.
- Click Install.
- Once the process is done click Finish.
- Now back in the Admin Console enable the connection server by clicking Enable. Also notice the new version has been installed.
- In the load balancer managing the View servers, enable the server that has been upgraded in the load balanced pool.
- Follow step 2 – 12 to upgrade all of your View servers.
Security Servers
If one of the connection servers is paired with a security server then there are a couple of additional steps to cover.
The following steps will need to be done to upgrade a connection server that is paired with a security server.
- In the load balancer managing the View Security servers, disable the server that is going to be upgraded from the load balanced pool.
- Follow all pre-requisites in the upgrade document referenced above, including disabling IPsec rules for the security server and take snapshots.
- Prepare the security server to be upgraded. From the View Configuration menu select Server, then select Security Servers. Highlight the correct server, click More Commands, and then click Prepare for Upgrade or Reinstall.
- Click OK.
- Upgrade the paired Connection server outlined in steps 2 – 12.
- Log in to the View Security server and launch the executable. For this example I will launch VMware-viewconnectionserver-x86_64-6.0.1-2088845.exe.
- Click Next.
- Accept the License agreement and click Next.
- Confirm the paired Connection server and click Next.
- Enter the pairing password and click Next.
- Confirm the configuration and click Next.
- Click Install.
- In the load balancer managing the View Security servers, enable the server that has been upgraded in the load balanced pool.
Dale is a Senior Solutions Architect and member of the CTO Ambassadors. Dale focuses in the End User Compute space, where Dale has become a subject matter expert in a number of the VMware products. Dale has more than 20 years experience working in IT having started his career in Northern England before moving the Spain and finally the USA. Dale currently hold a number of certifications including VCP-DV, VCP-DT, VCAP-DTD and VCAP-DTA.
For updates you can follow Dale on twitter @vDelboy
