I am planning an upgrade from View 5.1.3 to Horizon View 5.2 for two View installations on vSphere 5.1 (vCenter 5.1, ESXi 5.1).
Looking at the Horizon View 5.2 upgrade compatibility matrix (http://pubs.vmware.com/view-52/topic/com.vmware.view.upgrade.doc/GUID-E9BB81A4-1054-4BBB-A43B-CB60A6EF909E.html) and it says that View Composer 3.0 is not supported with Connection Server 5.2.
Also, on http://pubs.vmware.com/view-52/topic/com.vmware.view.upgrade.doc/GUID-504805D9-6645-438B-B3C5-F56EF6E38E77.html, it says " During an upgrade, Horizon View does not support View Composer provisioning and maintenance operations, local mode operations, or View Transfer Server publish operations. Operations such as provisioning and recomposing linked-clone desktops, checking out or checking in desktops, and publishing View Composer base images are not supported during the transitional period when any Horizon View servers are still running the earlier version. You can successfully perform these operations only when all instances of View Connection Server, View Composer, and View Transfer Server have been upgraded"
On http://pubs.vmware.com/view-52/topic/com.vmware.view.upgrade.doc/GUID-AF61903D-E162-4B30-8102-FEC4D14809C3.html , it says "During the first maintenance window, you will upgrade View Composer. Operations such as provisioning and recomposing linked-clone desktops and publishing View Composer base images are not supported until all Horizon View servers are upgraded" and then " At your next maintenance window, continue with the Horizon View upgrade"
I need to know exactly what it means about running Connection Server 5.2 with Composer 3.0 temporarily between maintenance windows. I understand it's not a "supported" combination, but will it still work?
Here is my issue - I have two separate View environments: Prod and DR. Entirely separate sets of connection, security servers, vCenter, and composer servers. However, they share the same Composer servers for each vCenter. One composer server for Prod vcenter, and another composer server for DR vcenter. The composer & vcenter servers are configured in both environments. This has been working fine, but can be confusing during upgrades.
My plan is to upgrade the DR View environment, which includes the DR composer server which works with the DR vcenter. However, the Prod environment will still be Connection server 5.1.3 and will need to use the newly-upgraded Composer 5.2 at DR because both View environments provision and maintain desktops in both environments.
The DR View upgrade will take place all at once, i.e., Composer, Connection Server, and Security Servers will be upgraded on the same day.
However, the Prod View upgrade will take place almost a week later. We will switch users from connecting to desktops managed by Prod to ones managed by DR about halfway through the week (load balancing via Microsoft NLB and switching incoming connections to use DR connection servers)
So what I need to know is: will Prod on 5.1.3 fail to do any composer operations in DR vcenter when DR Composer is 5.2?
Conversely, will DR 5.2 fail to do any composer operations in Prod vcenter when Prod Composer is 3.0 (not upgraded yet)?
If composer operations really will not happen at all (fail with errors in its log or something) then I need to spin up some more servers and install composer on them.