Upgrading to Horizon View 6 – Part 2 – View Composer

Let’s remember from Part one that we first need to do these steps.

Prepare for View Composer Upgrade (As in you’re about to perform the upgrade)

Verify physical requirements are met on the vCenter or standalone machine (Standalone, 2 vCPU 8GB RAM, 60GB Disk, usually recommended, 4 vCPU 16GB memory for vCenter co-located composer)
Disable provisioning on all the linked clone pools
If any pools are set to refresh on logoff, change them to Never.
Grab a copy of all the SSL certs ( at %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter)
Stop the View Composer service and backup the View Composer Database
Stop the vCenter service and backup the vCenter Databases
Snapshot the vCenter and/or standalone Composer VM(s)
Start the vCenter service
Start the View Composer service

Once we have a full backup plan, let’s upgrade View composer.

Remember to budget about 30 minutes of downtime and make sure that all your provisioning and automatic refresh actions are turned off.

I recommend the automatic upgrade of the View Composer database if possible. If you need to migrate View Composer to a different virtual, or change from a co-located Composer to a standalone, make sure to follow the upgrade guide to the letter. That’s outside the scope of this post, since I don’t have to do that in my lab.

Start the View Composer Upgrade by running the EXE we downloaded already (make sure to run as administrator if you have UAC on). And now, WIZARRRD PICTURES!

If you use integrated (AD) authentication instead of SQL auth, you will need to make sure you are logged in as the user who has access to the database.