childebrandt42

For those of you still yet to take the plunge from 6.5 to 6.7 there is one huge got you with it. It appears a bunch of people miss a single step. So here is my warning.

If you are using VMware Horizon and using Instant Clones you need to plan your migration accordingly.

1. Take a snapshot of the parent VM on which you upgrade Horizon Agent to Horizon 7 version 7.5 or later. This snapshot is the master image for instant clones.
2. Set the Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) migration threshold to 3 in the cluster.
3. Disable the instant-clone desktop pools.
4. Upgrade vCenter Server to vSphere 6.7.
5. To put the hosts that you plan to upgrade into maintenance mode, choose one of the following options.

   • Put the host directly into maintenance mode from vSphere Web Client then upgrade the host to vSphere 6.7. After the upgrade completes, use vSphere Web Client to exit maintenance mode.

   • Use the icmaint.cmd utility to mark a host for maintenance with the ON option. Marking a host for maintenance, deletes the master images, which are the parent VMs in vCenter Server from the ESXi host. Put the host into maintenance mode and upgrade to vSphere 6.7 ESXi. After the upgrade completes, exit the host from maintenance mode. Then, use the icmaint.cmd to unmark the host for maintenance with the OFF option.

6. Enable the instant-clone desktop pools.
7. Perform a push-image operation for each instant-clone desktop pool that uses the new snapshot.

   Only the hosts that are upgraded to vSphere 6.7 ESXi are used for provisioning. The instant clones created during the push-image operation might be migrated to other hosts that are not yet on vSphere 6.7.

8. Verify that all hosts in the cluster are upgraded to vSphere 6.7.
9. If you upgrade the parent VM from a previous version to be compatible with ESXi 6.7 and later (VM version 14), then upgrade VMware Tools on the parent VM. You must take a new snapshot of the parent VM, which is the master image for instant clones and perform a push-image operation on all the instant-clone desktop pools that used the previous version of this master image.
10. If the Virtual Distributed Switch (vDS) is upgraded, power on the parent VM on to verify that there are no network issues. Following a vDS upgrade, you must take a new snapshot of the parent VM and perform a push-image operation on all the instant-clone desktop pools.

Pulled from the VMware Doc

If you decide not to do this you will get something like this……

WARN  (1008-1878) <CacheRefreshThread-https://vcenter:443/sdk> [ObjectStore] Host: HostName not available for provisioning. ConnectionState=connected, PowerState=poweredOn, MaintenanceMode=false, AdminRequestedMaintenance=0, MarkedAsFailed=false, Host Version: 6.5.0, Host API Version: 6.5

Just a the little got ya’s………