vCenter Operations for Horizon View

For most operations teams, one of the top goals is to ensure quality of service for infrastructure, applications, and desktops. When you look at the day in the life of the typical operations engineer, there are two tasks that ensure the business end users are happy, one is reactive problem solving and the other is proactive maintenance.

Reactive problem solving generally starts with an alert if you have a monitoring system in place or if you don't, likely from the user facing the performance problem. The job of the operations practitioner is to detect the problem (such as slow performance), isolate the issue, and then remediate the issue (like rolling back a patch).

The other solution is proactive maintenance to avoid the problems from happening. This task involves planning (such as looking at utilization), optimizing (reclaiming resources), and even automating the maintenance. In my previous role in IT leadership, we called this being a "Good Shepard".

That is where vCenter Operations for Horizon View comes into place, vC Ops for View monitors the entire infrastructure stack building correlations between observed performance metrics and the end user experience. All the data is organized, maintained and displayed by user. vC Ops for View, after the first two weeks, establishes dynamic thresholds for resource consumption by user.

Several dashboards that are specific for vCenter Operations Manager for Horizon View appear in the customer user interface when you install the Horizon View adapter. Administrators can change the default number of widgets and types of metrics that appear on each dashboard, and create their own custom dashboards.

The View Main dashboard shows the overall status of the Horizon View environment. It helps you to visualize the end-to-end Horizon View environment, its underlying environment, and alerts.

Version 1.5 focused on improved scale to support the current Horizon View 5.2/5.3 configuration complexity. It leverages the scalability gains made in vCenter Operations Manager 5.8. The new vC Ops for View can support up to 7500 concurrent sessions. 

Additionally, the new version provides the capability to support mutilple View PODs across one or more datacenters. That is pretty significant. As your environment grows, vC Ops for View is ready to scale to ensure that you can monitor the entire enterprise desktop environment.

Deploying vC Ops for View is pretty straight forward.

1. Deploy vC Ops 5.8
2. Connect it to vCenter
3. Add licenses to vCenter and assign vC Ops
4. Restart vC Ops from the admin console
5. Deploy the vC Ops for View adapter
6. Log into vC Ops and configure vC Ops for View
7. Install the broker agent on the View server

vCenter Operations Manager for Horizon View extends the functionality of vCenter Operations Manager 5.8 to monitor and manage Horizon View environments; and enables IT operations to provide proactive maintenance.

A tool like this can maintain the reliability and efficiency of your virtual desktop deployment as the scale increases and infrastructure gremlins that could impact user experience grows. Everyone knows gremlins look cute and fuzzy at first, but they quickly turn mean and green!