How to upgrade Horizon Workspace 1.0 to 1.5

Since a new version of Horizon Workspace came out I’ve been curious about differences and improvements, so i upgraded it to version 1.5.

I have to say that, besides some differences here and there in the look and feel and the new functionality to manage VMware Ready Android devices, I have already found a nice improvement in the way you mount the NFS store in the data-va because finally the procedure simply works and there’s no need of crazy workarounds. I also suspect that they improved a lot the way you change self-signed certificates compared to what it used to be; more on this when i will have tested it.

Note: You can only upgrade if you have completed the setup procedure and you have a fully functional environment.

All commands need to be run from the configurator-va, just as usual, so let’s SSH into it, then:

su -
/usr/local/horizon/lib/menu/updatemgr.hzn check

You should get this output:

As you can see it won’t recognize my vPostgres and this is normal. Since I’ve started this series of posts about Horizon Workspace installing the external database on vPostgres i also added the VM to the VApp to make sure it starts for first and stop for last. The first time i tried to upgrade i decided to ignore this error and went ahead with the upgrade which failed and left my Horizon Workspace installation in an unusable state so i reverted the snapshots, removed the vPostgres from the VApp and rerun the command and i could see no issue at that point.

Before going on and since it’s been so useful for me, i will show you how to snapshot all your VMs in the VApp at once so you can revert if you need. Since you might have more than just 5 VMs i like to use PowerCLI to take over this kind of task simply because it’s faster than working around the GUI:

Get-VApp Horizon-Workspace | Get-VM | New-Snapshot -Name "UpgradeHorizon" -Description "Horizon Workspace upgrade from version 1.0 to 1.5" -Memory -Quiesce -Confirm:$false -RunAsync

Given that you didn’t change the default name of the VApp (Horizon-Workspace) this will snapshot all the VMs included in it.

In the vSphere client you should see this:

Once they are all completed we can go back to the configurator-va and start the upgrade with peace of mind:

/usr/local/horizon/lib/menu/updatemgr.hzn update

Now you should see a whole lot of downloading and installing. In my lab it took about 40 minutes for the whole procedure.

When the upgrade is done you have to shutdown and restart the VApp; since i still have the PowerCLI open i used it:

Stop-VApp -VApp Horizon-Workspace -Confirm:$false
Start-VApp -VApp Horizon-Workspace -Confirm:$false

You shouldn’t start it again until it’s stopped, so in order to see the status of the command i’ve omitted “RunAsync”.

Now check that your Horizon Workspace environment still works then you can check again for updates to see the current status:

That looks al good, now you just have to remember to update your preview binaries in the data-va if you used the LibreOffice preview because there’s a new version, just do as usual.

If you’re happy with the result you can remove the snapshots we created earlier:

Get-VApp Horizon-Workspace | Get-VM | Get-SnapShot | Where { $_.Name.Contains("ToolsUpgrade") } | Remove-Snapshot -RemoveChildren -Confirm:$false -RunAsync

In my case i also had to put back the vPostgres VM in the VApp.

That’s pretty much it.

DISCLAIMER: PowerCLI is a powerful tool and should not be used to throw in some commands without understanding the effects. Before running PowerCLI commands in your production environment always test them and adjust them for your situation. I take no responsibility if you don’t test things out yourself first and your Horizon Workspace gets broken.

UPDATE: In the release notes it is clearly stated that in the documentation there are missing steps in case you have multiple service-va VMs. Please refer to the Horizon Workspace 1.5 release notes for the additional steps.