VMware Horizon Community
Ray_handels
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Appvolumes 2.16 has been released

As it seems yestarday version 2.16 of Appvolumes has been released as version 7.8 from View (but hey who cares Smiley Happy).

I will be test driving it today because they are lots of new features to get exited about..... Smiley Happy Smiley Happy..

If anyone else is going to test 2.16 as has some input to deliver please feel free..

29 Replies
Ray_handels
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Please hold back with updating the manager.. There is an issue with the manager after you upgrade it. Appstacks do not show up anymore..

Anobix67
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Wow, how could something like that get released?

Here's hoping a reboot of the manager or something resolves that.

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Ray_handels
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Appstacks are not deleted but it seems like a database issue.

When looking at the snapvols table there's a new column called type. The value there is Appstack for aold appstacks. If you remove that value and set it to NULL the appstack is visible again. I would NOT recommend it for production though. No idea what happens with it afterwards.

Agent is good btw. We do see some performance improvement with applications being started.. So that's the good news..

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Anobix67
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

That's good to hear about the agent.

So I assume from a fresh start the issues wouldn't be noticeable, but doing an in-place upgrade of the manager loses contact with the previously created appstacks.

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Ray_handels
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

So I assume from a fresh start the issues wouldn't be noticeable, but doing an in-place upgrade of the manager loses contact with the previously created appstacks.

Yes. Has been confirmed on VExpert that when using a clean database it does work. You could create a new database and import all appstacks and writables. Not an option for us in production but if you have a smaller environment might be an option.

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Anobix67
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Has anyone heard anything from VMware support regarding a hotfix/.# patch or anything to fix the issue? Our environment is relatively small, but I really don't feel like restarting it or dealing with database edits.

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Ray_handels
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Unfortunately no I haven't. We do have a few agents on 2.16 just for testing purposes but I would really like to upgrade the manager as well..

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SchwarzC
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Any updates here? I would like to move to 2.16 and I am confused this error isn`t talked more.

BR

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Ray_handels
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Unfortunately no, there is not much more to say other than "they are fixing it". Officially they do not support Agent 2.16 wityh Manager 2.15 so kinda hard going that route.

That being said, it is just a cosmetic issue with appstacks, you cannot see them when going to Volumes --> Appstacks and only when the type of appstacks in the table Snapvols is AppPackage. You can do a check on your DB to see if you have those records inthere. It seems as if they are there from older versions of Appvolumes. You "could" change it to NULL (so no value, do not type in NULL Smiley Happy) but this is at your own risk!!!

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KjellO
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Perhaps it would be sufficient if you first upgrade to 2.15, update all AppStacks with 2.15 Agent and 2.15 Capture image then upgrade to 2.16?

/Kjell

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Ray_handels
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

It has nothing to do with the appstacks, you can safely use your old appstacks. It is a cosmetic issue within the database.

What you can do is check to see if you have the value AppPackage in the column type in the table snapvols. If not it seems to work okay after upgrade.

Do use this at your own risk. I'm not a VMware employee, if you do want support just raise a call with VMware/GSS.

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KjellO
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Oh, according to VMware-support, going from 2.15 -> 2.16 is safe, they have'nt yet anwser my question about what I wrote here. We got into trouble with AppStacks that was made prior to 2.13 after upgrading to 2.15, so we had to update all AppStacks after support with VMware, so it do have an impact on you're setup.

/Kjell

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VDINinja311
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

KjellO

This concerns me a lot. A lot of our appstacks were built on a mix of 2.11/2.12/2.14.2 versions. It takes a lot of man hours to rebuild them all on each version that we upgrade to, hence why we are behind on that. We currently cannot install the Cumulative updates on our Master Images because of the issue with the pre-2.16 AV Agent issue where no MSI's can run as the user see:Custom Appstack . So we want to get on the 2.16 AV Agent and to be supported that means using the 2.16 Managers as well.

But with these two issues (Appstacks possibly missing from Managers) and (Possibility of having to rebuild all of our Appstacks), we have been holding off.

What was the issue that you ran into that forced you to rebuild all the appstacks that were built pre- 2.13 template?

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KjellO
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi,

The main issue was our oldest AppStacks captured with 2.9 Agent, these would cause logon delays, timeouts with App volumes Managers and sluggish performance.

VMware informed that we should have atleast upgraded AppStacks to 2.13 Agent, so we upgraded all to 2.15 (around 80 AppStacks * 5 minutes per AppStack since you are just performing upgrade and not doing any changes).

BTW, Microsoft have fixed the MSI issues in March updates so no point in not updating Windows. Works as normal with 2.15 so I don’t see why it should not work with older versions.

  • Addresses an issue that may cause users to receive “Error 1309” while installing or uninstalling certain types of MSI and MSP files.

/Kjell

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bcross64
Contributor
Contributor

I was able to do some testing on this. The "type" column is there in my 2.15 environment, but it is null. This did not change when doing a fresh install of App Volumes Manager with no existing install of App Volumes Manager present on the server or when doing an upgrade. I never saw Appstack as a value in that column. My upgrade was a success.

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Anobix67
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Interesting bcross64, so your upgrade went just fine and you could still see the old appstacks in the list?

That's good to hear if so, maybe something else is causing the issue to happen for others that have tested it. Possibly the number of upgrades done in their environment versus starting from a newer version (our PoC setup started at 2.14, for example). I haven't done the upgrade yet for the fear of what others have said.

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bcross64
Contributor
Contributor

My environment started with 2.14 if I remember correctly. I installed 2.16 fresh on a new server first and then upgraded the existing installs. Maybe that helped. Uninstall and install would probably do the same thing.

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Ray_handels
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

The issue is not in the manager itself but in the database. As said, if you have the value AppPackage in the column type in the table snapvols and you upgrade to version 2.16 you wont be able to see these appstacks in the manager unless you change that value.

If the value in all of those rows is NULL you can safely upgrade (at least, it seems like that). Still, if you cannot see the appstacks, you can always downgrade to 2.15 manager just as long as you don't overwrite the database.

My guess is that it only happens when you have an older database (or database created/upgraded with an older version of Appvolumes manager). Still check this for yourself, before upgrading make sure to back-up the database (as always).

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