I use VMware Horizon View as an outside-in approach to VDI. That being said, once I upgraded to vCenter 5.5, I broke my Horizon View integration. This showed up about a month after the upgrade as a failure to log in to a desktop. But before I could find a solution, I had to look at all the changes I made, because this error showed up only after I updated my VMware vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) to a 5.5 VDS.
Here is the order of the actions that led to the failure to log in to my VMware Horizon View 5.2 desktop:
- Upgraded to vCenter 5.5 (login still worked)
- Upgraded to vSphere 5.5 (login still worked)
- Waited about a month (login still worked)
- Upgraded my VDS to a 5.5 VDS (login failed)
Now, I began to wonder if the issue was upgrading my VDS to 5.5 from 5.1. But all other communication worked. That is when I checked out the Horizon View Administrator portal and noticed something odd: it stated that my datastores were low on space, which they were not. Further investigation revealed that my vCenter Server certificate was invalid. As such, the certificate was denied, which implied Horizon View could not speak to vCenter. The lightbulb glowed here: the certificate for the vCenter Server was changed during the upgrade to 5.5. Why it took an upgrade to VDS 5.5 to clear this from the Horizon View Connection Server is a mystery, but the solution was pretty straightforward:
- Go to the Horizon View Administrator dashboard
- Expand the vCenter Servers
- Select the URL to the server with a red box next to it (there is only one URL in my lab)
- In the resultant vCenter Server Details dialog, click on the Verify button
- Accept the certificate (be sure to verify it is correct)
- Close the vCenter Server Details dialog
- Refresh the screen.
Now, what was red with respect to vCenter disappears, and once more I see the available datastores, which are NOT out of space.
A test shows that View is now working as expected, and that, for me, is a good thing! The real mysteries are what information a VDS stores with respect to SSL and why it took an upgrade to clear it from the network before the Horizon View Connection Server had issues.
Edward L. Haletky, aka Texiwill, is an author, analyst, developer, technologist, and business owner. Edward owns AstroArch Consulting, Inc., providing virtualization, security, network consulting and development and TVP Strategy where he is also an Analyst. Edward is the Moderator and Host of the Virtualization Security Podcast as well as a guru and moderator for the VMware Communities Forums, providing answers to security and configuration questions. Edward is working on new books on Virtualization.