Upgrading from 7.1 to 7.3.2. New to this... and tips or gottchas I should look out for?

[nary4484]

Looking to upgrade our Horizon environment from 7.1 to 7.3.2 this weekend.  This will be the first time I've attempted and sort of upgrade so wanting to make sure I cover all my bases.  So far it appears I need to update my snapshots, connection servers & composer server to the new version.  Seems simple enough but wanted to ask people here for any tips or guides to make this a hopefully smooth upgrade.

[BenFB · Accepted solution]

First off it's important to verify that all of your products are supported with each other. The below link compares lists the compatibility with Horizon 7.3.2/7.3.1 with vCenter, ESXi and VMware Tools.

VMware Product Interoperability Matrices

VMware publishes a update sequence for each vSphere version to ensure you upgrade in the correct order.

Update sequence for vSphere 6.5 and its compatible VMware products (2147289)

Update sequence for vSphere 6.0 and its compatible VMware products (2109760)

Update sequence for vSphere 5.5 and its compatible VMware products (2057795)

The vSphere 6.5 KB has a nice example for a Horizon View upgrade.

Once I know what all needs to be upgraded I'll read the release notes for each of those products looking for any gotchas or known issues that might impact us.

The Horizon Documentation has an upgrade section that should cover everything.

View Upgrades

Upgrades are a little more complicated with Cloud Pod but I'll assume you don't have that. Essentially you disable provisioning and take backups of everything (The Composer, Connection Server and SQL databases). Next upgrade composer and the connection servers. Once the last connection server is upgraded I'll enable provisioning and verify that composer is working. Finally upgrade VMware Tools and the Horizon Agent on all of your VMs.

[nary4484]

Great stuff.  I think this encompasses everything I need to know.  Thank you.

[samlouis55]

Hello. Could you please let us know how it goes? I have something planned as well but will need to upgrade my VSAN 6.2 to 6.6 prior to Horizon upgrade.

Regards.

[nary4484]

It was a very smooth upgrade.  Did not have any issues.  One neat thing I noticed was the even with all servers upgraded to v7.3.2 the VM's that were still on v7.1 were still able to connect.  I didn't think that was possible.  Made the transition even easier.

[BenFB]

It's advised to upgrade the Horizon Agent as soon as possible. However, it appears that the connection server is designed to be backwards compatible with older horizon agents for this exact reason. There are a few exceptions where cipher/protocol changes were made that were not backwards compatible but that's typically with major versions. I believe this note has been in every Horizon 7.x release

• If you use Horizon 7 servers with a version of View Agent older than 6.2, you will need to enable TLSv1.0 for PCoIP connections. View Agent versions that are older than 6.2 support the security protocol TLSv1.0 only for PCoIP. Horizon 7 servers, including connection servers and security servers, have TLSv1.0 disabled by default. You can enable TLSv1.0 for PCoIP connections on these servers by following the instructions in VMware Knowledge Base (KB) article 2130798, Configure security protocols for PCoIP for Horizon 6 version 6.2 and later, and Horizon Client 3.5 a....