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HainesFGL
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Move Horizon to new server farm?

We need to upgrade our Horizon servers to Server 2016.  Including Composer, 5 Connection servers and two Security Servers.  vCenter is vCSA and the Composer and Events DB are on SQL 2014.

Should be able to build composer and point it to the same DB as before once the

Here are the rough steps I'm thinking. 

Build new servers and add one of the new 2016 servers by installing Horizon 7.8 Connection server to the existing connection server group to allow it to download the ADAM DB.  Note existing Horizon environment is 7.5.  I'm planning to upgrade to 7.8 during this same operation.

Once complete shut down all servers one at a time starting with Composer.

Bring up NEW environment

1.  Bring up the new composer and install VMware Composer software (7.8) point it to the DB using DSN.

2.  Bring up new Connection server with the copy of the ADAM DB.  This server will already have Horizon 7.8 installed.

NOTE:  When the rest of the connection servers are first brought online I'll change the IP to match the original servers.

3.  Bring up remaining Connection servers and Security servers installing software one by one.

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vJoeG
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Good afternoon,

If you haven't already, take a look at this link to our Upgrade guides.

Horizon 7 Upgrade Overview

What you are thinking is definitely down the right track. There is a recommended order to doing the upgrades but since you're building new 2016 servers it will be a bit differe

------------------
Joe Graziano
Senior Solution Engineer - EUC Federal
VCP7-DTM, VCP6-DM, VCP6-DCV
vExpert, vExpertPro
jgraziano@vmware.com

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vJoeG
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Good afternoon,

If you haven't already, take a look at this link to our Upgrade guides.

Horizon 7 Upgrade Overview

What you are thinking is definitely down the right track. There is a recommended order to doing the upgrades but since you're building new 2016 servers it will be a bit differe

------------------
Joe Graziano
Senior Solution Engineer - EUC Federal
VCP7-DTM, VCP6-DM, VCP6-DCV
vExpert, vExpertPro
jgraziano@vmware.com
HainesFGL
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Thanks for the advice and link Joe.  Ideally I would love to do a fresh build of the whole environment.  The only thing stopping me that we use linked clones with persistent disk (persistent disk is where we store profiles, synced with ProfileUnity).  So in order to do that we would need to somehow bring back all the persistent disks.  Seems like that could get ugly.  Any idea if there's an easy way to do that?

Regards,

Roger

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vJoeG
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Yeah, that could get ugly if you have a lot of machines in those pool(s) with persistent disks.

You can one by one disconnect a persistent disk from it's VM and attach that to a new VM on the fresh environment but that would be a good deal of work.

If you're handy with PowerShell I would think you might be able to write a script to detach and name each disk so that you could then re-attach to the new VM's

I don't see another way to neatly do that tho. I think given the choice I would build the new Windows 2016 machines with the upgraded Composer and Connection server software and integrate them into the Farm and phase out the older servers.

Hope that helps.

------------------
Joe Graziano
Senior Solution Engineer - EUC Federal
VCP7-DTM, VCP6-DM, VCP6-DCV
vExpert, vExpertPro
jgraziano@vmware.com