Upgrading my View desktop from Win7 to Win10

Hi all,

I was not sure how well this was going to go.  Seemed like no one else has upgraded their View desktop from Win7 to Win 10.  But I thought it was time for me to to it.  In the past, I did it like I had done at customers - a new pool, and everyone gets a new desktop.  Don’t lose settings or data of course but it gives a way back.  In this case I had a backup so I thought it wothwhile to try.  I did two things to increase my odds of success - I made sure my Win7 desktop was fully updated, and I made sure that View was fully updated - so 7.0.2.

And it worked, but it did take a while.  Here are some comments.

  • You need 10 GB free.  I had 6 but it was quick and easy to expand the disk in Settings, and extend the disk.
  • I was using Win7 Pro, and as I said I did all outstanding patches.
  • I had, from MSDN, Win 10 Enterprise.
  • I uploaded the ISO to my ISO datastore, and connected it to the VM.
  • Several hours were involved - although time on my side was maybe 20 minutes.
  • Multiple restarts
  • I used the VMRC
  • There was a lot of updates which also took time - included in the several hours above
  • Near the end there was a lot of questions - all of which seemed to be about sharing info with MS.  Said no to all except one about sharing usage with MS.  I left that one working as they can learn important stuff from phone home.
  • I also customized the desktop Apps for only Edge, and not Photos, Music, etc.
  • I had activation issues.  First it used existing PID and tried to talk to a local activation server.  I tried a new PID - again from MSDN - and it didn’t work - again due to looking for a local activation server.  I tried a different PID and now it used the Internet and activated fine.
  • I now had a working View desktop that mostly still looked like my old Win7 desktop.  I had to fix the desktop image so it was one color with my BGInfo info, remove the store icon in the task bar and I was almost ready to go.
  • I had to turn off a bunch of Cortana stuff in the Start menu, but once done things worked good.
  • I did a restart and waited to see if I could use my View client to connect to this desktop.
  • After I thought the restart was done I connected via my Mac View client and it worked fine.  The auto login took a few movements longer than normal - due I think to the logon screen graphics, but it worked fine.
  • I did not log out, but disconnected, and connected again, and it too worked fine.

So all good.

I should mention, I did have one issue during this process that I did not share.  It was very lab specific. When I connected to my ISO datastore, which is iSCSI hosted, it was blank.  I did the typical thing for this and did a Rescan Storage and nothing changed.  I accessed the management UI for my iSCSI storage, and an update was outstanding, so I did the update, and the included restart, and then did a Rescan Storage after that and now everything was seen. So I could in fact hook the Win10 ISO to the VM.

You should attempt to always have the most current View Client.  In particular, I upgrade that before I upgrade the View server, and in this case, with a very new OS I was going to be with, I again made sure to be using the latest View Client.

Any questions or comments, let me know,

Michael

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