VMware Horizon – Upgrade Horizon Agent to v. 2303

Release date: April 7th 2023

Welcome to my VMware Horizon series. In this session I will describe how I upgrade the VMware Horizon Agent in my template to v. 2303. The new version of the agent now have the support for Nvidia L40 and L4 GPU and other updates and changes as described in the Release Notes.

• Horizon Agent for Windows
  • This release adds support for the NVIDIA L40 and L4 GPU.
  • UNC Path Redirection has enhanced security.
  • The Screen Capture feature allows users to take screenshots of their Windows remote desktop.
  • Starting with this release, Horizon Agent for Windows supports the cursor warping detection feature. When this feature is activated by setting a registry key, the remote agent detects sudden mouse position changes initiated on the agent and reflects them to the client by moving the user’s local mouse cursor.
  • Media optimization for Microsoft Teams offers individual application sharing in VDI and RDSH desktop sessions for VMware Blast display protocol (Windows clients).
  • VMware Virtualization Pack for Skype for Business is no longer supported in this release. When using this release of Horizon Client with Horizon Agent 2212 or earlier, VMware Virtualization Pack for Skype for Business will continue to run in fallback mode.
  • You can redirect a Windows print server from the client side to the agent side by activating the group policy setting Enable server printer redirection.
  • You can enter a specific IP address or IP address range with Microsoft Edge Chromium and Google Chrome and IPv4.
  • This release supports AV1 encoding on desktops with Intel ATS-M GPUs for more efficient compression and high-quality video streaming.

According to VMware’s official documentation, this should be done as step 11 in the supported update sequence.

I start out by downloading the installation media from VMware Customer Connect

As I’ve gone over to using MDT to create Horizon templates, described here: Automating Template Creation & Maintenance, I will update the Horizon Agent in the Deployment Share, and run through the task sequence to create a new template. Before I begin, I open the task sequence and can see that it has found the 2212 Agent in the Deployment Share.

I close the Deployment Workbench MMC before I continue. To update the Horizon Agent in the Deployment Share I will first delete the existing agent and msi-folder from the Deployment Share

Next, I copy the new VMware Horizon Agent executable to the “HorizonAgent” folder in the Deployment Share. It is important to make sure that the executable isn’t blocked by Windows Security, therefore I right-click the exe-file, select Properties and tick the Unblock box, if it exists. This also applies to the other executable files under the “D:DeploymentShareVMware” folder.

When I now open the Deployment Workbench MMC, the new Horizon Agent will be identified and the msi-files will be automatically extracted.

As my task sequence is based on the osot.xml template, I will also have to edit this file

I locate the “Horizon Agent” step and adjust the name of the “ExeInstaller” to match the executable I copied in earlier

Once done, I open Deployment Workbench MMC and verify that the correct Horizon Agent is found, and update the deployment Share, before I run through the task sequence and push the new template to my desktop pool.

Having finished the Windows Agent upgrade, I can now proceed with upgrading the agent in my Linux template, covered here: VMware Horizon – Upgrade Horizon Linux Agent to v. 2303

VMware Horizon – Upgrades

VMware Horizon planning, deployment etc.

Official VMware Horizon 8 Documentation

Disclaimer: Every tips/tricks/posting I have published here, is tried and tested in different it-solutions. It is not guaranteed to work everywhere, but is meant as a tip for other users out there. Remember, Google is your friend and don’t be afraid to steal with pride! Feel free to comment below as needed.