We had a very long ongoing issue wherein we couldn’t uninstall or upgrade the VMware Horizon Client within the AppStack. We had successfully installed the Horizon Client within the AppStack. However, when it was time to perform an upgrade or uninstall to the latest version, it would fail during a reboot with the following error.
We initially saw the issue on App Volumes 2.14. While we were troubleshooting for an extended period, we upgrade to App Volumes 2.18.1, and both the versions exhibited the same failure during uninstall or upgrade.
Process to reproduce the error
- Upgrade horizon client –> reboot –> hard error
- Uninstall horizon client –> reboot –>hard error
- Uninstall horizon client –> install horizon client –> reboot –> hard error
- Upgrade horizon client –> complete provisioning without reboot –> completes successful –> during next update of AppStack it crashes with Hard error
- Uninstall horizon client –> complete provisioning without reboot –> completes successful –> during next update of AppStack it crashes with Hard error
Environment Details
VMware Horizon 7.11
VMware App Volumes 2.18.1
VMware Dynamic Environment Manager 9.10
VMware Horizon Client 5.x
Process of elimination
- Upgrade the Horizon Client to the various 5.x version to remove any version specific Client related issues
- We didn’t have Antivirus running on the AppStack capturing template
- We could build the AppStack from scratch with the newer version of Horizon Client but only upgrade/uninstall would fail
- We were honestly running out of troubleshooting ideas
Resolution
After trying out all the usual steps and avoid re-creating AppStack every single time during life cycle management, we managed to open a VMware GSS case handled by Karan Ahuja(Very helpful support engineer), which ended been worked by the engineering team(Art Rothstein – Champ in AV Eng Team). Note quite alot of logs and Procmon were exchanged from the problematic application capturing VM template. Finally, the fix was determined as a AppStack snapvol.cfg exclusion. After putting this exclusion into the AppStack – App capturing VM during provisioning we could upgrade or uninstall Horizon Client.
| exclude_registry=\REGISTRY\MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileService |
Disclaimer – Due to the nature of the issue and time taken to resolve it we decided to move the Horizon Client from AppStack into the base image. However, the fix is validated, and 100% working post the exclusion.
I hope you will find this information useful if you encounter the issue. A big thanks to Manivannan Arul my teammate for his continuous effort while troubleshooting with GSS over a period of 4+ months.
Thanks,
Aresh Sarkari