Upgrade Horizon vCenter and Hosts with no downtime

[nettech1]

Our current (7.3) Horizon VDI environment is running on 3 ESXi 6.0 servers with vCenter appliance 6.0 and external PSC. Our tech support and customer service departments are 24x7 so we don’t really have any maintenance windows and both departments are on the vdi platform. We are looking to replace  or upgrade our vcenter & hosts to 6.5 and ensure we don’t cause any downtime during the upgrade. Since we have a spare server that has enough resources to run vms for users during our slow time of the day, we are looking to take the following approach and would like to get a confirmation if our upgrade plan is a good solution.

• - New vcenter 6.5 appliance with embedded PSC is deployed.
• - Spare server gets esxi 6.5 installed and added to the new vcenter
• - New vcenter is added to the existing view admin as a second vcenter
• - New vcomposer is installed and linked with a new vcenter
• - Parent vms are cloned to the new vcenter (linked clones)
• - Exiting horizon pools are configured for use with the new vcenter and a new esxi host.
• - Old ESXi servers removed from the old vcenter
• - Vcenter 6.0 and composer are removed from horizon admin config
• - Vcenter 6.0 and PSC VMs are deleted
• - Esxi 6.5 is reinstalled on the old servers and all servers get added to the new 6.5 vcenter

Thanks

[BenFB · Accepted solution]

If you truly need 100% availability then Cloud Pod Architecture (CPA) would be the way to do this. However, that would require building out additional connection servers which may not be ideal for your short term use case. If ongoing you need to provide 100% availability then you should look at using CPA but it will require double the amount of hosts.

For your use case what you have laid out should work with one exception. You can not reconfigure the pools from the 6.0 to 6.5 vCenter (There is also no way to migrate a linked clone from one vCenter to another). You would need to build new parallel pools on 6.5, add the existing entitlements to the new pool and then remove the entitlement from the old pool. The users would then get new desktops on their next login. Once all users have been migrated you can delete the old pools, unregister the 6.0 vCenter and rebuild the 6.0 hosts with 6.5.

Any reason you are looking at 6.5 instead of 6.7 U1? 6.7 U1 has a number of new features focused on VDI (vMotion for NVIDIA vGPU, Virtual TPM, Microsoft Virtualization Based Security).

[nettech1]

Would love to move to 6.7U1, but it's not supported by Veeam yet. That's the only reason we are looking at 6.5U1. Maybe we should wait for Veeam to release 6.7 supported version as we would be able to migrate from vcenter 6.0 with external PSC to 6.7 and embedded PSC

Moving the parent VM would not be a problem, with have an NFS data store that can be presented to both vcenters. Clone or storage vmotion the parent to NFS and add it do inventory in the new vcenter.

Thanks for pointing out the pool migration issue, we didn't take it in to consideration. Also, will take a look at CPA, but don't think we want to invest time and resources for this this migration

Thanks for your help