This housing association, with a history of community support dating back to the early 1900s, takes pride in maintaining its extensive portfolio of over 20,000 housing units, modernizing more than a thousand units annually. The need to upgrade their IT infrastructure became apparent, especially since over 200 employees depended on accessing their virtual desktops through zero clients.
The association was using an outdated version of Horizon View, which required an update to support Windows 10. The Chief Technology Officer (CTO) stated, “With all these modernization projects underway, we can't afford any downtime for our employees. That’s why we decided to seek external expertise to guide us through the upgrade process.”
Reinhard Partmann, the project lead from comdivision, noted the significant challenge of adapting the firewall configuration to the new Unified Access Gateways (UAG) due to the substantial version jump and limited firmware availability for the zero clients.
Partmann proposed setting up a small proof of concept (PoC) environment with one Connection Server and one UAG to facilitate the update. “We initially updated two zero clients and created a new test pool with the appropriate Horizon agents in the PoC environment,” Partmann explained. Following successful internal and external access tests, a comprehensive migration plan was developed.
Firstly, all 250 zero clients were updated to the latest firmware. Redundant connection servers were then removed from the configuration before updating the primary connection server. “After cleaning the old version of any issues, we began upgrading the entire Horizon environment,” Partmann continued.
Since linked clones were predominantly used, the Composer component also required updating. New Horizon Connection servers were installed on an updated operating system and integrated into the environment. The old servers running on Windows 2008 R2 were methodically phased out.
“Thus, we were well-prepared for the end of support for Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2,” Partmann added.Next, the security servers in the DMZ were replaced by UAGs, transferring the firewall configuration from the PoC. The master images in existing pools were updated with the new agent, and the pools were recomposed, followed by another series of access tests.
Partmann proposed setting up a small proof of concept (PoC) environment with one Connection Server and one UAG to facilitate the update. “We initially updated two zero clients and created a new test pool with the appropriate Horizon agents in the PoC environment,” Partmann explained. Following successful internal and external access tests, a comprehensive migration plan was developed.
“These tests were also successful,” Partmann noted, and the CTO added, “Our users didn’t even notice the upgrade! Our administrators are thrilled with the swift implementation and now have a test environment which was the PoC environment for future upgrades.”
The upgrade also enhanced system security, as the UAG platform is now used for external access, and the Horizon services operate on current operating system platforms.
Partmann concluded, “An often-repeated phrase in the IT department was ‘if everything goes well’... But if you're well-prepared, thoroughly test, and understand the customer's environment, success is certain.” And the CTO of the client added, "Our upgrade was so seamless that it was virtually invisible. The daily operations continued without a hitch, a clear sign of our project's success. This smooth transition exemplifies the meticulous planning and execution by comdivision!"
