Upgrade VCenter with VMware View

[robm82]

Hi all,

I recently upgraded VMware View from 5.3.2 to 5.3.4 which I upgraded out of hours the other day.  I would also like to upgrade the VCenter Server which is also the View Composer Server, and what I would like to know is if I upgrade the VCenter Server during the day will it affect users Desktops?  Will they continue to run as normal but will users be prevented from spawning new Desktops?

Any help or information is greatly appreciated.

[RyanH84]

Hi,

Upgrading vCenter during the day will cause an outage on centralized management services whilst it takes place. The connection/composer servers rely on vCenter to communicate with your VDI VM's so this would affect users ability to access them. In this particular case, I'm fairly confident that you would knock out the ability for people to connect to VM's and any provisioning activities that need to take place. However, users already connected should maintain their connection to the VDI desktop.

How do you deploy your VDI desktops: Full? Linked clones?

If this were me, I'd be planning on performing this upgrade out of hours.

[robm82]

Thanks for the information.  We deploy our desktops using linked clones.  I was thinking of performing the upgrades out of hours, but my problem is that I need to get the VCenter components upgraded ASAP due to a security audit that was carried out and I don't have much opportunity now to perform the upgrades out of hours.

As long as the users can maintain a connection to the VDI desktop, normally all users will have connected by a certain time so I am hoping that it shouldn't cause too much of an issue to do this within hours.

[RyanH84]

I'm confident that once the connection server has passed off the PCoIP connection to the VDI VM they will remain connected as long as the ESXi host is on that is running the VM.

Once vCenter goes down I'd keep a watchful eye on the Horzion View console. It will not have any visibility whilst vCenter is down. Once you have patched and got it back up, I'd login and check Horzion View. You might need to restart some services for it to reconnect, just make sure it is talking again.

Good luck!