Unable to create Template or Replica on New Host

[Super6VCA]

We had to rotate the old Hosts our of our environment and our VDI cluster usually gets the hand-me-downs.  We have done this every year for at least the past 9 years and this one fell short of successful.  After adding it to the cluster and getting everything setup i am unable to compose any desktops in any pool that has a desktop managed on that host.  There are NO replicas or templates being created.  All the connectivity seems fine.  I ran through a few troubleshooting steps and all the host can be seen by Horizon.  I am a bit puzzled at this and since i have been starring at it for the past day i thought I would seek another set of eyes.  Anyone have any ideas.  Any assistance is appreciated.  Thanks

[MP-CAE]

@Super6VCA Are there any errors or screen shots to support the issues that you're having currently?

Can you you create, / power on anything manually?  In other words, are the issues only with Horizon or also outside of it in vCenter directly?

[Super6VCA]

Message I get in the Admin Console says "Customization Operation Timed Out.  and some say Agent unreachable.  Like I mentioned, that host is the only one that has NO Repilcas or Templates for any Pools.  If i move teh desktop form the new host to one of the others those machines are fine.  The templates and replicas in the screenshot are not on this Host. 

 

[MP-CAE]

At this point the customization seems to be timing out - this may be a cause or a symptom so I'd tackle it first to see what is the culprit so far.

From experience, I've had strange issues in the past at a certain point where Win 10 (did not affect Win 7 at that time oddly) VMs being created with Horizon would not get their network (available and ready to use) right away and could take several seconds which ate up time that was allocated for the customization.  It additionally caused GPOs not to take effect properly since the network was not present right when it was needed.

In my case I had to get crafty and both extend the customization timeout (I suggest you do this at least for testing) and also created a script that runs when a VM is created which waits for network presence and only then will if force a fresh gpupdate /force.  I also included logging in the script to help see what steps take longer and what would fail.  While it is not fancy and may not have fixed the unicorn root cause it did the trick flawlessly in my case of getting my Horizon pools to work.

So again, I'd say start with trying to extend the customization timeout (https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Horizon/2203/virtual-desktops/GUID-5EBD194C-EDC5-47F7-AD3C-D8A9559...) and then also hop onto the VM that is failing to see if you can see what errors or issues inside of it may be going on.

Good luck - issues like this are always fun since there are so many moving/automated parts. 😉

[Super6VCA · Accepted solution]

Come to find out that the host was not put into Instant clone maintenance mode prior to shutting down. So I needed to shutdown the host again, this time putting it in IC maint mode.  Once restarted it appeared to be fine.  I guess this is a lesson to do things yourself.  Thanks for all the help.  Really appreciate it.