View 6.2.1. Upgrade, two caveats

Recently, I was performing an upgrade from View version 6.0.1 to 6.2.1. On other occasions upgrades from version 6.0.1 to 6.2.0 did not cause serious issues. View 6.2.1 is said to be a “maintenance” release, so I did not expect much problems.

The update of the standalone View Composer, the Connection Server and the Security Server went smoothly. After this stage it is a good practice to test the functionality of the View Composer and the Connection Server and Security Server. Setting up a connection from a Windows Horizon Client, went well, but after selecting a desktop pool, the following error was received “Unable to connect to desktop: There is no available gateway for the display protocol. Try again etc…”

Figure 1

The Connection Server log files showed the following error message: “ERROR (0894-1510) <ajp-nio-8009-exec-1> [DesktopsHandler] (SESSION:3580_***_7533) No co-management availability for protocol PCOIP””.

This blog post from Terence Luk put me on track; step one is upgrading the View Agent to version 6.2.1. Older versions will not work in View 6.2.1.

Upgrading the View Agent 6.0.1 also gave me some headaches. Upgrades failed and un-installing the current version did not succeed. There are VMware KB’s like this one and numerous blog post on this subject, what worked for me was;

Boot the parent VM in safe mode.
To un-install the View Agent, you need to enable the Windows installer. Read this post.
Un-install the old View Agent.
Reboot the parent VM and install View Agent 6.2.1.

After the installation of View Agent 6.2.1 and a recompose of a desktop pool, all desktops in the Inventory showed this error (No network communication between the View Agent and Connection Server. Please verify that the virtual desktop can ping the Connection Server via the FQDN. etc.) and were not available!

Figure 2

The resolution for this error needs some explanation: From the VMware Horizon 6 Readme document:

Items to watch out for when you install or upgrade to Horizon 6 version 6.2 from View 5.1 or later

Note: If you are upgrading from Horizon 6 version 6.1.x to Horizon 6 version 6.2, you already should have taken these configuration steps. Use these notes to review your setup.

1) You must open port 4002 in your back-end firewall to allow security servers to communicate with View Connection Server in the new enhanced message security mode.

If you perform a fresh installation of Horizon 6 version 6.1 or later, enhanced message security mode is enabled by default. If you upgrade to Horizon 6 version 6.1 or later, the pre-existing message security mode is retained. To enable the enhanced mode after an upgrade, you must change the Global Setting in View Administrator.

So while upgrading from View 6.0.1, the pre-existing message security mode should be retained!
At this point, it was decided to check the View related firewall rules. VMware KB VMware View ports and network connectivity requirements (1027217) is very useful performing this task.

To my big surprise, after adding a rule in the section “TCP Ports for View Agent”; Source = View Desktop, Destination = Connection Server, Port = 4002, Protocol = JMS, the error disappeared and connections to the Connection Server and the Security Server were successful.
Unfortunately, it is not clear why the message security mode had changed during the upgrade.

You can check the status of the message security mode in the View Administrator UI. Go to View Configuration -> Global Settings and verify the setting.

Figure 3 – View Admin 6.2.1. In View Admin 6.2.0 it looks a bit different…