VMware Horizon View 6 agent installation order

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This is something I preach about all the time but caught myself doing it when I wanted to “quickly” lab something up causing lots of head scratching for some time without realising what I had done.

So for VMware Horizon View to work there is a agent which is deployed to the master VM before converting to a template and provisioning out either as full or linked-clone desktops.

However it does matter in which order you install the ESXi toolset and the Horizon 6 agent into the master virtual machine.

1 Install the VMware tools first
2 Install the Horizon View agent next

Now this is straightforward enough but I needed to upgrade the VMware tools within my main image and while labbing it out I didn’t think much of it and went ahead (its only a lab what could possibly go wrong). However on provisioning I would get the dreaded black screen when initiating a connection. HTML5 and RDP would work without issue and I thought it must have been a firewall rule or similar but I’d made a simple error in my haste which caused the whole problem and subsequent blue air around me when I was trying to figure it out.

So here is the second point. if you have to upgrade the VMware tools within an image you should also reinstall the Horizon View agent afterwards as both are closely knitted into the virtual hardware and installing/upgrading the VMware tools on top of the Horizon View agent may as it did in my case cause issues with the display adapters.

 

 

 

Author: Dale Scriven

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