Upgrade to the Latest Version of Omnissa Horizon Connection Server on a Different Machine

As part of your upgrade, you can migrate Horizon Connection Server to a new machine.

Prerequisites

• Upgrade at least one existing Horizon Connection Server instance to the latest version. See Upgrade Horizon Connection Servers in a Replicated Group. During this upgrade, your existing Horizon LDAP will be upgraded.

• Verify that the new physical or virtual machine meets the system requirements for installing Connection Server. See Supported Operating Systems for Horizon Connection Server and Hardware Requirements for Horizon Connection Server.

  Note: For Horizon 8 version 2503: Using Microsoft Windows Server 2025 to upgrade to the latest version of Horizon Connection Server on a different machine is unsupported.

• Familiarize yourself with the security-related requirements of Omnissa Horizon 8, and verify that these requirements are met. See Upgrade Requirements for Horizon Connection Server.

• Determine when to perform this procedure. Choose an available desktop maintenance window. Budget 15 minutes to half an hour for each instance.

• Verify that you have a domain user account with administrative privileges on the host you will use to run the installer.

• Familiarize yourself with the procedure for installing a replicated instance. See the Horizon 8 Installation and Upgrade document. You install a replicated instance as part of this procedure.

You do not need to make any changes to the configuration of existing load balancers.

Procedure

1. Verify that an upgraded instance of Horizon Connection Server is running and is accessible to the new machine where you plan to install Horizon Connection Server.

   When you install Horizon Connection Server on the new host, you will point to this existing instance.

2. On the new machine, install a replicated instance of Horizon Connection Server.

   The Horizon LDAP on the new instance will replicate that of the upgraded source instance.

3. If applicable, uninstall Horizon Connection Server from the old host by using the Windows Add/Remove Programs utility.

4. In Omnissa Horizon Console, go to Settings > Servers > Horizon Connection Servers tab and determine whether the Horizon Connection Server instance that was uninstalled still appears in the list.

5. If the uninstalled Horizon Connection Server instance still appears in the list, use a vdmadmin command to remove it.

   vdmadmin.exe -S -s server_name -r

   In this example, server_name is the host name or IP address of the Horizon Connection Server host. For more information about the vdmadmin command-line tool, see the Horizon 8 Administration document.

Results

A new instance of Horizon Connection Server is added to a group and an old instance is removed.

What to do next

Upgrade the other Horizon 8 server components.

If you ever reinstall Horizon Connection Server on a server that has a data collector set configured to monitor performance data, stop the data collector set and start it again.

If you are using load balancers to manage access to Horizon Connection Servers, update the load balancer configuration to add the newly installed Horizon Connection Servers, and remove the decommissioned Horizon Connection Servers (if applicable).

If you upgraded to Horizon version 2503 from a previous version, we recommend that you plan and perform updating the partition names to the new ones. For details, refer to KB article 6000797.