With the release of vSphere 6 last week, I decided it was time to update some of the infrastructure in the home lab over the weekend. I got an early start Friday as I had my three remaining wisdom teeth pulled in the AM and took the rest of the day off work.  Now I’m not talking about jumping straight to vSphere 6, not just yet.  I’ve got some constraints that prevent me from going to vSphere 6 at the current time but I expect I’ll be ready within a month or two.  For the time being, the agenda involved migrating some guest operating systems from Windows Server 2008 R2 to Windows Server 2012 R2, migrating MS SQL Server 2008 R2 to MS SQL Server 2012, and updating templates with current VMware Tools, and tackling VMware Horizon View getting Composer and the Connection Server migrated from version 5.3 to 6.1.0 including the pool guests and related tools and agents.

I won’t bore anyone with the details on the OS and SQL migrations, that all went as planned. Rather, this writing focuses on an issue I encountered while upgrading VMware Horizon View Agents in Windows 7 guest virtual machines. For the most part, the upgrades went fine as they always have in the past. However I did run into one annoying Windows 7 guest VM which I could not upgrade from View agent 5.1 to View agent 6.1.0. About two thirds of the way through the 6.1.0 agent upgrade/installation when the installation wizard is installing services, a ‘Rolling back action‘ process would occur and the upgrade/installation failed.

The View agent installation generates two fairly large log files located in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Temp\.  I narrowed down the point in time the problem was occurring in the smaller of the two log files.

svm: 03/16/15 10:54:52 — CA exec: VMEditServiceDependencies
svm: 03/16/15 10:54:52 Getting Property CustomActionData = +;vmware-viewcomposer-ga;BFE;Tcpip;Netlogon
svm: 03/16/15 10:54:52 INFO: about to copy final string
svm: 03/16/15 10:54:52 INFO: *copyIter = RpcSs
svm: 03/16/15 10:54:52 INFO: newDependencyString = RpcSs
svm: 03/16/15 10:54:52 INFO: *copyIter = vmware-viewcomposer-ga
svm: 03/16/15 10:54:52 INFO: newDependencyString = RpcSs vmware-viewcomposer-ga
svm: 03/16/15 10:54:52 ERROR: ChangeServiceConfig failed with error: 5
svm: 03/16/15 10:54:52 End Logging
svm: 03/16/15 10:54:53 Begin Logging
svm: 03/16/15 10:54:53 — CA exec: VMEditServiceDependencies
svm: 03/16/15 10:54:53 Getting Property CustomActionData = -;vmware-viewcomposer-ga;BFE;Tcpip;Netlogon
svm: 03/16/15 10:54:53 Cannot query key value HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\DependOnService for size: 2
svm: 03/16/15 10:54:53 Cannot query key value HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Netlogon\DependOnService for size: 2
svm: 03/16/15 10:54:53 End Logging

In addition, the Windows event log reflected Event ID: 7006 “The ScRegSetValueExW call failed for DependOnService with the following error: Access is denied.

I had made a few different attempts to install the 6.1.0 agent, each time trying a different approach. Checked registry permissions and dependencies, relaxed registry permissions, enabled auditing, temporarily disabled Avast Antivirus, etc.  The VMware Horizon View Agent installs a handful of components. Although I didn’t know yet what the issue was on the OS, I had the problem narrowed down to the VMware Horizon View Composer Agent portion of the installation which installs VMware Horizon View Composer Guest Agent Server service (vmware-viewcomposer-ga is the name of the service if you’re looking in the registry).

After doing some more digging, I found out that some antivirus applications like Panda have a a self-preservation mechanism built in which can cause unexpected application problems. Avast has one as well and it’s called the avast! self-defense module. This defense mechanism works independently of normal real time antivirus scans which I had disabled previously.  I had never run into a problem with Avast in the past but in this particular instance, Avast was blocking the modification of Windows services and dependencies. The easy solution, and I wish I had known this from the start but I don’t invest much time in antivirus or malware unless I absolutely have to, was to disable the avast! self-defense module which can be found in the Troubleshooting area of the Avast settings.

Once the avast! self-defense module was disabled, the installation of the VMware Horizon View Agent 6.1.0 agent, including the VMware Horizon View Composer Agent portion, completed successfully. After the agent installation completed, a reboot was performed and I re-enabled the avast! self-defense module.

Thus far I’m impressed with VMware Horizon 6.1. Not much has changed from UI/management perspective but stability and cleanup within Composer operations has improved. I built up and tore down a 28 Windows 7 guest VDI pool and whereas this has lead to precarious pool states and manual cleanup steps in the past, it has worked flawlessly so far.  I’m definitely looking forward to the jump to vSphere 6 infrastructure in the coming weeks. All but one of the other lab infrastructure components have been upgraded and are ready at this point so it shouldn’t be much longer until I have vSphere 5.x in my rear view mirror.

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