vSphere 6.7 has a new API for instant clones. Therefore, if you are using instant clones, and are upgrading from a vSphere version earlier than 6.7 to vSphere 6.7 or later, you must complete the steps in this upgrade process. For example, if you are upgrading from vSphere 6.0 to vSphere 6.7, from vSphere 6.5 to vSphere 6.7, or from vSphere 6.5 to vSphere 7.0, this process applies. This process does not apply if you are upgrading from vSphere 6.7 to vSphere 7.0/8.0.
Prerequisites
- Complete the system requirements for VMware Horizon 8 upgrade.
- Complete procedures described in Upgrading Horizon Connection Server.
- Complete the procedure described in Upgrade Horizon Agent for upgrading the agent in the golden image.
- Complete the prerequisites listed in the VMware vSphere Upgrade Guide, using the version of the guide that corresponds to the version of vSphere that you plan to upgrade to.
Note: If you upgrade vCenter Server to vSphere 6.7 or later, then all or some of the ESXi hosts in the cluster must be upgraded to the newer version. Else, the instant-clone desktop pools will not be provisioned properly.
- Identify the ESXi hosts that you plan to upgrade and verify that you leave enough hosts online for existing desktop pools.
Procedure
- Take a snapshot of the golden image on which you upgrade Horizon Agent.
- Set the Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) migration threshold to 3 in the cluster.
- Disable the instant-clone desktop pools.
- Upgrade vCenter Server to vSphere 6.7 or later.
- To put the hosts that you plan to upgrade into maintenance mode, choose one of the following options.
- Put the host directly into maintenance mode from vSphere Client then upgrade the host to vSphere 6.7 or later. After the upgrade completes, use vSphere Client to exit maintenance mode.
- Use the icmaint.cmd utility to mark a host for maintenance with the ON option. Marking a host for maintenance deletes the golden images, which are the parent VMs in vCenter Server from the ESXi host. Put the host into maintenance mode and upgrade to the new ESXi version. After the upgrade completes, exit the host from maintenance mode. Then, use the icmaint.cmd to unmark the host for maintenance with the OFF option.
Note: You must upgrade at least one host so that you can resume the provisioning of desktop pools. Then you must upgrade all the other hosts.
- Enable the instant-clone desktop pools.
- Perform a push-image operation for each instant-clone desktop pool that uses the new snapshot.
Only the hosts that are upgraded to the newer ESXi version are used for provisioning. The instant clones created during the push-image operation might be migrated to other hosts that are not yet on the new vSphere version.
- Verify that all hosts in the cluster are upgraded to the new vSphere version.
- If you upgrade the golden image from a previous version to be compatible with ESXi 6.7 and later (VM version 14), then upgrade VMware Tools on the golden image. You must take a new snapshot of the golden image that VMware Horizon 8 uses to perform a push-image operation on all the instant-clone desktop pools that used the previous version of this golden image.
- If the Virtual Distributed Switch (vDS) is upgraded, power on the golden image on to verify that there are no network issues. Following a vDS upgrade, you must take a new snapshot of the golden image and perform a push-image operation on all the instant-clone desktop pools.
