With the earlier posts in the Cloud Connector Know-How series, we learned the importance of the Horizon Cloud Connector for hybrid-cloud Horizon deployments, and how it is deployed, onboarded and upgraded.
Today, we want to tell you a little more about monitoring the status of Horizon universal license across all your Horizon Pods, and walk you through the troubleshooting of any errors during the sync of the Horizon universal license.
What are Horizon universal licenses?
A VMware Horizon universal license is a single subscription license that entitles customers to all deployment types including Horizon on-premises, Horizon on VMC on AWS, Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure, etc. This means that a Horizon Cloud customer is now entitled to Horizon, and a Horizon customer is now entitled to Horizon Cloud. So, with the Universal license, customers need only one license to flexibly deploy desktops and apps across on-premises data center and public clouds.
The universal license comes in versions with different feature sets that are tailored to customers’ various needs. You can find more details in this subscription feature comparison chart.
Pushing the Horizon universal license to Horizon Pods
Once the Horizon universal license is purchased, you should be able to push the universal license to all your Horizon Pods so they can be connected to the Horizon Control Plane to unlock all cloud service benefits. The Horizon universal licenses rely on an operational communication chain between the Horizon Pods, the Horizon Cloud Connector, and the Horizon Control Plane services; the Horizon Control Plane service syncs license to the Horizon Pod every 24 hours.
You can use the Horizon Cloud administration console to monitor the status of your licenses and troubleshoot any sync problems that might arise.
If one of the links in the license communication chain becomes non-operational, the license sync fails and the Horizon Pod enters a sync grace period of 25 days. During this period, the subscription license remains valid and the Pod stays operational to allow time for you to investigate and remediate the cause of the sync failure. If the failure persists until the end of the sync grace period, services to the pod are disrupted and the pod becomes non-operational. This means end users will not be able to connect to remote desktops and applications on the Pod when the sync grace period expires.
To notify you in the event of a sync failure, alert messages appear in several different areas of the Horizon Administrator Console, including the following locations:
• Dashboard Page
• Capacity Page
• Color coded License Alert Banner
• Log report section on Capacity page shows more details about the cause of failure
Figure 1: Dashboard Page showing License Sync alert
Figure 2: Capacity Page showing License Sync alert
Figure 3: Color coded License alert banner
Figure 4: Capacity page: Logs report
License Sync Error Remediation
Now, let’s see how to remediate these errors based on the cause listed in the log report section.
• POD_IN_PERPETUAL_MODE: Indicates that at Horizon Enterprise the license mode is toggle to perpetual license
○ Enable subscription license mode on Horizon Enterprise
• POD_OFFLINE: Horizon Cloud Connector is not connected
○ Verify Cloud Connector is connected. Check the health status for services at CC.
• POD_AUTHENTICATION_ERROR: Cannot connect to Horizon Enterprise due to invalid credentials
○ Verify that credentials are valid, not expired or changed. Perform reconfigure action in Horizon Cloud Connector Configuration Portal
• POD_USER_INSUFFICIENT_PERMISSION: Cannot connect to Horizon Enterprise due to insufficient permissions for user account
○ Verify and fix the user account permissions to make sure account has Admin permissions.
• POD_CONNECT_ERROR: Error connecting to Horizon enterprise connection servers due to any reasons like credentials, certificates or timeout error
○ Verify the credential, connectivity and certificates and perform reconfigure action on Horizon Cloud Connector Configuration Portal
• POD_CERTIFICATE_ERROR: Timeout while connecting to Horizon Enterprise
○ Verify that certificates are valid and perform reconfigure action on Horizon Cloud Connector Configuration Portal
• POD_SOCKET_TIMEOUT_ERROR: Horizon Cloud Connector can’t reach to Horizon Enterprise.
○ Check for DNS, Proxy and Firewall details to check if connectivity is blocked.
• UNKNOWN_ERROR: In case of this error, please contact VMware Support
Again, we encourage you to fix any license sync errors at earliest and avoid any services disruption due to the missed 25 days window.
We will see you again with another topic about Horizon Cloud Connector soon!
Read Further:
• Horizon Cloud Connector Know-How Series Intro – What is Cloud Connector
• Horizon Cloud Connector Know-How Series – Onboarding Horizon Cloud Connector
• Horizon Cloud Connector Know-How Series – Auto-Upgrade
• What’s New in Horizon Cloud Connector 1.8 Release
• Monitoring the Horizon Subscription License – VMware Docs
• Subscription license sync health issues and remediation for Horizon
