VMware Horizon – Upgrade Horizon Linux Agent to v. 2203

Release date: June 29th 2022

Welcome to my VMware Horizon series. In this session I will describe how I upgraded the VMware Horizon Linux Agent in my template to v. 2203. I have previously shown how to upgrade the Linux Agent for VMware Horizon here: VMware Horizon – Upgrade Horizon Linux Agent to v. 2103. In this session I will describe the process for upgrading the VMware Horizon Agent for my Linux Multi-session Desktop Farm to v.2203. According to VMware’s official documentation, Update sequence for Horizon 7, Horizon 8, and compatible VMware products (78445), this should be done before upgrading the DEM Management Console, as shown below.

Before I start the actual Horizon Agent upgrade, I will download and install Ubuntu updates using the following commands:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo reboot
sudo apt autoremove
sudo apt autoclean

Next, once the VM is powered up, I open VMware Remote Console and log in. I start by downloading the installation media from VMware Customer Connect

Once downloaded, I unpack it in the Downloads folder

Next, I log out from the desktop and reboot to ensure the VMwareBlastServer process isn’t running

Before I can Putty into the desktop I need to know the IP address

I check the documentation to determine the correct command line options to use during upgrade here: Command-Line Options for Installing Horizon Agent for Linux

I connect using Putty and run the following command to upgrade:

sudo ./install_viewagent.sh -A yes -M yes --multiple-session -r yes

Once the installer is finished, it automatically reboots the VM.

Setting Options in Configuration Files on a Linux Desktop

I will be adjusting the following parameters in the “/etc/vmware/config” file

#Set clipboard redirection. Default is 2. 0 means disable; 1 means both directions; 2 means from client to agent only, 3 means from agent to client only.
Clipboard.Direction=1

#Set clipboard maximum size which should be specified in KBytes. Default is 1024 KBytes.
mksvchan.clipboardSize=1024

#Enable/Disable display scaling. This option only works if DPI sync feature is enabled.
Display scaling resizes the screen to auto fit the font size when the DPI is a mismatch between client and agent, the default value is FALSE.
rdeSvc.allowDisplayScaling=TRUE

I will be adjusting the following parameters in the “/etc/vmware/viewagent-custom.conf” file

#Enable/Disable CDR. Default is TRUE
CDREnable=FALSE

#Enable/Disable USB. Default is TRUE
USBEnable=FALSE

#Enable/Disable Help Desk Tool. Default is TRUE
HelpDeskEnable=FALSE

#Instant Clone offline domain join solution, default value is 'pbis'.
#Its value could be 'pbis', 'samba' or 'none', and 'none' means disable.
#OfflineJoinDomain=none
OfflineJoinDomain=pbis
#OfflineJoinDomain=samba

Before I push this new image to the Horizon Desktop Pool, I will fix an annoyance. Whenever I log into a Horizon Linux Desktop, I get the “Getting Started” Wizard.

This is of course because I’m using Instant Clones and therefore no roaming of my user’s Home folder. To work around this, I will be disabling the “Getting Started” wizard by uninstalling the gnome-initial-setup package by running the following command:

sudo apt purge gnome-initial-setup

Finally, I shut down the VM, take a Snapshot and deploy this to my desktop farm. Once the Push-operation is done, I can verify the agent version in my virtual desktops

This completes the Linux Horizon Agent upgrade.

Official VMware Documentation about this topic:

Upgrade Horizon Agent on a Linux Virtual Machine

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.