Veeam 7 is just around the corner and as always the ‘green team’ is putting on a serious of webinars to educate us on the latest offerings.
Some pretty cool new features, but to be fair, I wouldn’t expect anything less:
To get registered click me
It’s time to update the VMFocus.com lab to vCenter 5.1 U1, before you do this, there are some known issues with Single Sign On and customers with multiple domain based identity sources and large number of groups who have access to vCenter. See VMware Alert Issue
The good news is my lab doesn’t have any of these issues, so we are good to go.
Before upgrading, I have ensured that I have followed KB 2037630 which gives you the supported upgrade sequence. I have already upgraded View Composer and View Connection Server, so that’s another tick in the box.
Next I have made sure that I have a good working backup (thank you Veeam) and I will be upgrading my Windows 2008 R2 vCenter Server named VMF-ADMIN01 in the following order:
TOP TIP: Make Sure You Have Your Single Sign-On Administrator Password
You can choose to update in a number of ways, if you have the vCenter Server Appliance, then it’s as easy as clicking update. You could choose to build a new vCenter Server and add your hosts to this. But you will then need to reconfigure all your settings and you will loose historical performance metrics.
Anyhow, we are going to upgrade directly on our vCenter Server VMF-ADMIN01 by running the installation media which at the time of writing this blog post is obtained from here for reference the build number is 5.1.0-1065152
vCenter Single Sign On
Launch your vCenter Server 5.1 U1 ISO and select vCenter Single Sign-On
Select Yes to the upgrade to ‘vCenter Single Sign-On’.
Click Next
Err, Click Next again
Accept the EULA and Click Next
Enter your Single Sign-On Password from your original vCenter 5.1 install
Fingers crossed you remembered it! Once ready Click Install
You will get a warning saying the system will need a reboot, Click OK
I’m a believer in drinking tea, now would be a good time to go grab a cup!
Awesome all done, Click Finish
Ah, forgot about the Reboot Click Yes
Inventory Service
Back to the installer, this time we are going to select Inventory Server and Install
Click Yes to perform the upgrade of the Inventory Service
Click Next
Hit Next again
Accept our friend the EULA
Click Install
Voila, click Finish
vCenter Server
You know the drill, Select vCenter Server and then Install
Select Yes to perform an upgrade of vCenter Server
Hit Next
Err, Next again
Accept the EULA
Click Next so that vCenter can authorize itself against your vCenter Database
Click Install
Cool, that took a bit of time, installing Orchestrator, but we are there now!
I recommend you login to vCenter to make sure everything is gravy, which I’m sure it will be.
Peripheral Application Installation
Now that the main parts of the vCenter Server 5.1 U1 are done, I’m going to upgrade the following applications:
Both of these have a simple Next, Next, Install, so it didn’t seem worthwhile adding screenshots for this.
The only thing to add, is that you will need to re Enable the vSphere Update Manager plug in vCenter again after it has been installed.
ESXi Hosts
To update my ESXi Hosts, I’m going to use the HP Custom Image for ESXi 5.1.0 U1 which can be found here
A bit like Blue Peter, here’s a blog post I created earlier called called ‘How To See Local RAID In ESXi 5.1‘ which shows you howto upgrade using a custom image.
I run into a number of minor issues when I was configuring Horizon View 5.2 HTML access, so thought it would be a good idea to get my frustrations, I mean fixes down in a blog post.
1. Connection Server
Check your Connection Server settings, as URL’s are reset after the upgrade. In specific make sure that
2. Security Server
Check your Connection Server settings, as URL’s are reset after the upgrade. In specific make sure that
3. View Desktop
When connecting to the View Desktop if you receive error message ‘the display protocol for this desktop is currently not available. Please contact your system administrator’.
Double check to make sure the VMware Blast service is running on your target View Desktop and that you can telnet to the View Desktop on port 22443 as this is the port that it listens for connections on.
If you close your Horizon View HTML5 session without logging out and then try to reconnect again you might see the error message ‘All available desktop sources for this desktop are currently busy. Please try connecting to this desktop again later, contact your system administrator.
To rectify this, log out and then log back in again.
4. Firewall
You can authenticate correctly to your View Connection/Security Server however when you go to launch your desktop, it sits on sending request and times out.
Check your NAT rules on your Firewall to make sure that Port 8443 is NAT’d to your Horizon View Security Server. To double check this telnet to your external IP address on Port 8443.
In the previous four posts we upgraded all the servers in our Horizon View environment.
Now it’s time to update our View Desktop sources with the Horizon View 5.2 Feature Pack. It’s fair to say that I’m a little excited by this as it means I can demo the Horizon View awesomeness over HTML5.
Horizon View Agent
Before we can install the Horizon View 5.2 Feature Pack, we need to upgrade the View Agent. The View Agent can be found here. At the time of this blog post, the most recent version is VMware-viewagent-x86_64-5.2.0-987719.exe
Launch the installer
Click Next
We have another EULA to Accept
The default settings normally suffice, the only thing you might want to change is if you are using SmartCard authentication. Hit Next
Ready to hit the Install button
This is going to take some time. Hooray it’s finished.
Time for a quick reboot before we move onto installing the Horizon View 5.2 Feature Pack
Horizon View Feature Pack
Now we have updated the Horizon View Agent, next on the agenda is downloading the Horizon View 5.2 Feature Pack which comes in two flavors a 64 Bit and 32Bit version, both of which can be found here.
At the time of writing this blog post, the most recent version is VMware-Horizon-View-5.2-Remote-Experience-Agent-x64-1.0-1046150
Launch the installer
Crikey, straight onto accepting the EULA
We are going to install both HTML Access and Unity Touch, so click on Install. Note that the Windows Firewall service must be running.
You don’t have to restart your View Desktop source, but I’m going to as I like to make sure everything is working.
The next step is to take a snapshot and then a recompose on our desktop pool to use this.
On your Desktop Pool, you need to enable HTML Access which is under Pool Settings
I would strongly recommend Disabling the Pool before you change the images.
Just so you know that I’m using the correct image, here is a screenshot of my vCenter Settings after the recompose.
This seems to be a good place to leave this blog post, I will do a separate post on a few things to check to make sure Horizon View 5.2 HTML Access works.
We are on a roll, this is the fourth post in the upgrading to Horizon View 5.2. To upgrade the Transfer Server we use the Connection Server installer from here and at the time of writing the latest release is VMware-viewconnectionserver-x86_64-5.2.0-987719.exe
Before we start the upgrade process, it’s a good idea to place the Transfer Server into Maintenance Mode, to do this, login to View Administrator and go to View Configuration > Servers > Transfer Servers > Enter Maintenance Mode
Now that’s done, lets crack on and launch the installer
Click Next
As always, accept the EULA
Double check your domain details, transfer server FQDN and your administrators email address and click Next
Select ‘Configure Windows Firewall automatically’ and hit Next
Then click Install
This is going to take a few minutes, so time for a quick brew.
Let’s double check Programs & Features to make sure we are on the correct Horizon View version.
At this point, I suggest you reboot your Transfer Server just to make sure everything is ‘tickety boo’.
Now it’s back online let’s go into View Administrator and go to View Configuration > Servers > Transfer Servers > Exit Maintenance Mode
VMFocus 