By Archit Lohokare, Product Marketing Manager, and David Wooten, Product Line Manager for vCenter Operations Manager for Horizon View, VMware
Background
Learning how customers use your products in their environments is always a plus. So it was great to hear how one VMware customer has leveraged VMware vCenter Operations Manager for Horizon View (vC Ops for View) across their virtual desktop deployment to help streamline desktop management and drive down costs.
For those of you who are new to vCenter Operations Manager for Horizon View, this product provides comprehensive visibility to monitor and optimize the health, performance, and efficiency of your Horizon View environment. Essentially, vC Ops for View provides a toolset for simplified health and performance management, analytics, rapid remediation of issues, and greater utilization of your existing virtual desktop infrastructure.
The Problem
The customer I met with had a large number of users calling in to their help desk on one particular day. The users complained that the Internet access inside their Horizon View desktops was “slow.” Prior to implementing vCenter Operations Manager for Horizon View, the help desk had minimal tools to investigate performance issues, and tended to pass on these problem tickets to the administrators or even development. However, with vC Ops for View deployed and running in their environment, the help desk was able to diagnose the complaint and trace the problem back to a few users streaming YouTube and Pandora on their Horizon View desktops and hogging all of the available bandwidth.
The Solution
So, how did the administrators enable the help desk folks to identify this problem? The IT administrators used the super metrics feature of vC Ops for View to collect aggregated performance data for their Horizon View desktops. In this case, the super metrics measured the bandwidth used by audio and video packets across all of the active sessions. The following steps illustrate how they set up the super metrics.
Figure 1: Active View Sessions
First, the administrators used the super metric editor to create two new “super” metric formulas: one to measure the aggregated Audio Receive Bandwidth and one to measure the aggregated Imaging Receive Bandwidth for all selected active Horizon View sessions.
Figure 2: Audio Receive Bandwidth (Kbps)
Next, the administrators created a super metric package based on the Audio Receive Bandwidth and the Imaging Receive Bandwidth.
Figure 3: Created Super Metric Package
Finally, they applied this package to the View Clients that they wanted to monitor.
Once the package was applied to the Horizon View Clients, as new data came in, vC Ops for View calculated the new, aggregated metrics and displayed the data on the administrator and help desk dashboards. Using the dashboard, the help desk specialists were able to see which Horizon View Clients were the source of performance issues across their Horizon View deployment.
Figure 4: Super Metrics Dashboard
The super metric feature in vCenter Operations Manager for Horizon View is very powerful, and it can be applied to Horizon View in many other interesting and sophisticated ways. For instance, if an administrator or help desk specialist is curious about how many Horizon View Clients have CPU usage between 70 and 80 percent, they could easily learn this using super metrics. For more information on how to configure and use super metrics in vC Ops for View, take a look at the VMware vCenter Operations Manager Administration Guide (Custom UI).
The Bottom Line
VMware vCenter Operations Manager for Horizon View can be used to extract some insightful and sophisticated analyses of the behavior of your Horizon View environment. This data can really help reduce the amount of time and effort you’ll need to troubleshoot and remediate any issues that arise. What’s even better is that VMware has now made this product available at no additional cost in the Horizon Suite. Be sure to check it out!
