VMware Horizon By Product Technical Guides

Discover What’s New with VMware Horizon 6 Toolbox 2.0

By Shengbo Teng, Senior Member of the Technical Staff, VMware

With contributions from

  • Nan Wang, Staff Engineer, Technical Marketing and Enablement, VMware
  • Sam Zhao, Technical Marketing and Enablement Manager, VMware
  • Peter Zhang, Solution Engineer, Technical Marketing and Enablement, VMware

In an earlier white paper (Explore the VMware Horizon 6 Toolbox Auditing and Remote Assistance Capabilities), we introduced you to VMware Horizon 6 Toolbox—a web portal that acts as an extension to View Administrator in View virtual desktops in Horizon 6. Now we are pleased to announce version 2.0 of the Horizon 6 Toolbox!

We made improvements to the following features in Horizon Toolbox 2.0:

  • Auditing performance
  • Client IP address auditing
  • Remote assistance
  • Console access
  • PowerOn policies
  • Installation file

Auditing Performance

Compared to Horizon Toolbox 1.5, the auditing performance has been enhanced with improved SQL queries. Instead of a left outer join for two tables in the Events database, we now use two separate select queries, which is much faster.

Client IP Address Auditing

Horizon Toolbox now provides a list of detailed information for all broker sessions, including user name, Client IP address, and log in and log out times, enabling strict IT auditing of all IP addresses for client devices.

Remote Assistance

An updated workflow makes Horizon Toolbox more stable with Windows Remote Assistance. You no longer need to install help desk, compatibility has been improved for different View versions, and the end-user installer ensures that the Windows Remote Assistance Module is correctly configured.

Console Access

Horizon Toolbox also provides a list of all VMs for desktop pools, and filters VMs by VM name or DNS name.

Console_Access_TabFigure 1: Console Access Tab

Click the VM name in the Console Access tab, and the vSphere console for that VM appears.

vSphere_Console

Figure 2: vSphere Console

PowerOn Policies

Under the new Power Policies tab, you will find a list of all desktop pools and their power policies.

Power_Policies_TopPower_Policies_TabFigure 3: Power Policies Tab

This policy can “power on” all VMs in a desktop pool with some amount of scheduling, such as “8:00 a.m. on all workdays.” See Figure 4 for an example of setting up the PowerOn Policy for each desktop pool.

PowerOn_Policies_Setup_Popup

Figure 4: PowerOn Policies Setup Popup

Installation File

We now provide an easier interface for installing Horizon Toolbox.

Select_Installation_Folder_Window

Figure 5: Select Installation Folder Installation Window

Monitoring_Installation

Figure 6: Monitoring the Installation Process Window

Downloading Horizon Toolbox 2.0

You can download the latest version of VMware Horizon Toolbox.

Additional Resources

To learn more about the Horizon Toolbox, visit our official Horizon Toolbox Web site.

For more installation information, see the Horizon Toolbox 2 section of the VMware Horizon 6 Connection Server blog post by Carl Stalhood.

To comment on this paper, contact the VMware End-User-Computing Technical Marketing and Enablement team at [email protected].