In the last blog post we upgraded our Security Server which had a couple of issues which we resolved. We did experience some downtime for remote access, but this was to be expected. Upgrading the Horizon View Agent consists of two parts:
- View Agent
- View 5.3 Remote Experience Agent
Upgrade Process
It is assumed that you have access to your existing ‘golden template’ for your Horizon View Desktops and that the recompose operation will be undertaken out of hours.
View Agent
In my lab, I have two ‘golden template’ images for Horizon View desktops, one which is a Windows 7 32 Bit and the other which is Windows 8 64 Bit. For this upgrade, I’m going to concentrate on the Windows 7 32 Bit desktop. The first thing we are going to do is download the correct installation which is at the time of writing is VMware-viewagent-5.3.0-1427931 Launch the installer and hit ‘Next’
Accept the EULA and hit ‘Next’
Select the components you wish to install, I have ensured that Persona Management and vCenter Operations Manager are selected.
Click Install
After the install completes, you will need to reboot the ‘golden template’.
View 5.3 Remote Experience Agent
Next up is the View 5.3 Remote Experience Agent, with the latest version being VMware-Horizon-View-5.3-Remote-Experience-Agent-1.0-1404669 Launch the installer and accept the EULA
Select your installation options
Next hit Install
Now this is done, you will need to do the following:
- Ipconfig /release on the ‘golden image’ desktop
- Shutdown the ‘golden image’ desktop
- Create a new snapshot
- Perform a recompose of the desktop pool
- Upgrade your View Client to 5.3
I’m sure you can appreciate the above are out of scope for this post, however I did want to give you a high level overview.
Final Thoughts
The upgrade process has been fairly straight forward. VMware have made some drastic improvements to HTML access via Blast, it is now a usable method for accessing a desktop and makes using Horizon Workspace much more appealing.
I have yet to do more thorough testing, but so far so good.
VMFocus 
Hi Craig, I’ve followed your instructions and upgraded my Horizon View 5.2 to 5.3. I’m facing an issue, and unable to tackle it yet. I’ve been trying from 3 days. So when I recompose or deploy linked clone pool from Win7 Ultimate 64-bit updated to 5.3 agent and also updated Remote experience agent. I’m getting the following error:
View Composer Fault: Unexpected VC fault from View Composer (Unknown) – Unknown –
Could not open/create change tracking file
Can you please help. I’ve following VMware KB but nothing helped 😦
Regards
Hey Mobin, thanks for reading. This isn’t an error I have encountered before. I suggest that you contact VMware Support if you haven’t already.
Hi Craig,
This is a really good series on Horizon View – well done :-). I have one question however. I have perused many blogs, read books etc around View and Horizon, but none describe how one would say migrate from a legacy View 4.6 infrastructure to a new 5.3 infrastructure without doing in-place upgrades. Have you any tips on this and how one would run both in parallel and migrate the linked clones and golden images across to the new infrastructure?
I have this situation where the existing ESXi 4.1 and View 4.6 infrastructure is not suitable for other bad practice reasons (storage, hosts, compute etc) to do in-place upgrades. The endpoint Wyse devices P20 and P25’s seem eligible to support v5.3 🙂
Kind Regards
Rob
Hi Rob, I am a View System Admin in an Enterprise Medical environment. We have 2,000+ VMs and are in the middle of migrating from 4.6 to 5.2. I’ll tell you it can be a pain! We had to create a whole 5.2 Environment that co-exists with our old 4.6. If you would like some more insight, please contact me.
Hi Orlando,
That would be great if you had some summary bullet points on your approach and any gotchas you experienced on the way. We may jump straight to Horizon 6 as well soon after (after SP1).
Kind Regards
Rob
VCP 3,4,5 – England, UK.