Upgrading VMware Mirage to 4.3

I’ve been waiting for a while for version 4.3 to come out for some interesting features some of my customers would be able to leverage, but I never thought I would be so surprised once I got to understand how to do it.

Essentially, there is no upgrade procedure, you just uninstall and reinstall the components just as they were before by using installer files from the 4.3 version.

Yes, I know, I thought the same but I can say that in the end it just seems to work. Even if there is no orchestration of a version upgrade that checks things around before proceeding I have to admit that the ease of operations is pretty nice.

Preparations steps are simple, just make sure you have the following written down:

• Database server name
• Credentials for the database server
• Horizon Mirage server cache directory location
• Cache size

Then just stop all Mirage services, snapshot all volumes, backup your DB and you’re done. A more detailed procedure can be found here but there is really not much more than that.

Now to the upgrade (or should I say reinstall?), the only thing to remember is that the order of operations must be respected:

1. Select Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs to uninstall the system components.
2. Uninstall all Horizon Mirage servers.
3. Uninstall the Horizon Mirage Management console.
4. Uninstall the Horizon Mirage Management server.
5. Uninstall Horizon Mirage WebAccess.
6. Use the new mis files to install the latest version of Horizon Mirage.
7. Install the Horizon Mirage Management server.
8. Install the Horizon Mirage Management console.
9. Install the Horizon Mirage servers.
10. Install Horizon Mirage WebAccess.

You will need to reboot the server after step 9.

A neat thing is that you won’t need to do anything to update your Mirage clients because once they contact the server they will self-upgrade with no downtime for the user. I just wish it would be possible to suppress the balloon notification that informs users about the upgrade or the possibility to decide when user clients will be upgraded.

I used this procedures twice on simple single server implementations and I had no issues.

Even if I would prefer a real upgrade procedure, in the end of the day i just want upgrades to work and this seems to be the case with Horizon Mirage, so no complains.