Introduction
This blog post addresses new features in VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon and Published Applications 6.4 dealing with memory usage, support, and some enhancements.
Previous posts in this series are
- VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon and Published Applications 6.4, Part 1: What’s New
- VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon and Published Applications 6.4, Part 2: New Support for Monitoring VMware App Volumes, View in VMware Horizon 7, and VMware Access Point
- VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon and Published Applications 6.4, Part 3: New Application-Crash Alerts for Desktop Applications and New Dashboard for Root-Cause Analysis
Application CPU and Memory Usage Reporting on VDI
You have had the ability to extract existing and custom reports. Now, with vRealize Operations for Horizon and Published Applications 6.4, you have access to new reports that capture native application use in the form of CPU and memory consumption. This is useful when you want to specifically monitor applications in a VDI environment that frequently crash; automated applications; or heavily used applications.
This level of reporting helps you
- Monitor the usage of specific applications, capturing the CPU and memory use on the virtual machine.
- Show concurrent usage of a specific application across multiple virtual machines.
- In a dashboard view, for a selected application, provide the user with the date and time stamp of an application launch and its usage.
- Report on VDI application usage:
- A dashboard with information on a per application view.
- A dashboard with information on a per user view.
You now have the ability to configure the vRealize Operations for Horizon environment to target and monitor specific applications in a VDI environment. Figure 1 shows a screenshot with vRealize Operations for Horizon being configured to monitor the Notepad and Calculator applications. You can view which users have currently opened application instances, and further investigate additional metrics that provide detailed properties, from the App Metric Picker or Instance Metric Picker. This results in additional information from the metrics chart such as CPU, process, and summary for more graphical representation of the state of the applications.
Historical data can also be collected for applications that are being monitored. An object relationship chart also exists that can provide you with a high-level view of the relationship of the application to the virtual machine and its environment.
Figure 1: Monitoring Specific Applications in a VDI Environment
From the same window, if you scroll down, you see the dashboard showing the usage of a monitored application in the Desktop Applications pane, and the usage of the application per user in the Desktop App Instance pane.
Figure 2: Horizon Desktop Applications Dashboard Showing Monitored Application Usage per User Session
From the Horizon User Session Details pane, you can select a user and, using a filter, display a graphical view of the number of times the user launched the applications being monitored.
Figure 3: Horizon User Session Details Pane
The dashboard views can also be exported with the new reports being added to both the vRealize Operations for Horizon and Published Applications reporting template environments, as shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4: Generating New or Custom Reports and Schedules from the Reporting Templates Environment
This level of application-per-user-session monitoring is not enabled by default. The following steps illustrate how to start monitoring specific applications in your VDI environment. This is a four-step process run on the vRealize Operations appliance.
- Connect over SSH using a tool like Putty into the vRealize Operations appliance.
- Log in using the root account.
- Navigate to the folder using the cd (change directory) command to the path:
/usr/lib/vmware-vcops/user/plugins/inbound/V4V_adapter3/Config
- Using the vi editor, modify the v4v-desktop-app-config.properties file, as shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5: Logging In to the vRealize Operations Appliance, and Updating the App Config Properties File
Following are examples of configurations to monitor Calculator on a specific server and Notepad on all pod servers:
- calculator,C:\Programdata\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Accessories\Calculator.lnk,Cluster=SERVER621
This shows the targeting of Calculator, restricting the monitoring to only SERVER621, as indicated with Cluster=SERVER621.
- notepad,C:\Windows\notepad.exe
This shows the targeting of Notepad for all pods.
- After the v4v-desktop-app-config.properties file is modified, as in Figure 5, use the vi editor to open and modify the properties file in a similar way.
Scroll down the file to find the property enableDesktopApplicationInstance and change the value from false to true. (By default it is set to false.)
- As in Figure 6, restart the services using the cmd:
service vmware-vcops ‐‐full-restart
Figure 6: Restarting the Services
Support for Horizon 7.x, XenDesktop, and XenApp 7.6 to 7.11
In this new release of vRealize Operations for Published Applications, we ensure that monitoring capabilities support the latest version of Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop environments. Common across both vRealize Operations for Published Applications and vRealize Operations for Horizon is the ability to capture application-crash alerts and view the root-cause analysis dashboard.
Enhancements in Environment Handling
The vRealize Operations for Horizon and Published Applications architecture has not changed in design. However, we made significant upgrades to the environment handling. By making improvements to the Remote Method Invocation (RMI) threads and connection management, we ensure a more robust environment between the solution adapters and the desktop agents (on the master images in the data center) and broker agents on the Horizon Connection servers and Citrix Desktop Delivery Controllers.
Figure 7 shows a typical View in Horizon 7 environment, and a XenApp or XenDesktop environment—vRealize for Operations for Horizon and Published Applications can fit either environment. The diagram also shows the addition of App Volumes to both environments, and the Access Point appliance (recently renamed VMware Unified Access Gateway) in the Horizon 7 environment, which can now be monitored by vRealize Operations for Horizon.
Figure 7: vRealize Operations for Horizon and Published Applications Deployment Architecture
Compatibility Matrix for vRealize Operations for Horizon and Published Applications 6.4
Figure 8 consists of two screen shots that show the supportability matrix that is compatible with this new release of vRealize Operations for Horizon and Published Applications 6.4. The chart shows the products and versions tested with this release.
Figure 8: Products and Versions Tested for Release 6.4
To get an accurate, up-to-date status about system requirements and compatibility of the listed product versions with this release, see the VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon 6.4 Release Notes and the VMware vRealize Operations for Published Applications 6.4 Release Notes.
Installing and Configuring Overview for vRealize Operations for Horizon and Published Applications
You might be deploying vRealize Operations for Horizon and Published Applications for the first time, or you might be upgrading from a prior release. Figure 9 provides a simple outline of the deployment of the components of vRealize Operations for Horizon and Published Applications in your environment.
Figure 9: Overview of the Deployment of the Environment Components
To carry out a fresh deployment of vRealize Operations or upgrade an existing environment, see vRealize Operations for Horizon Installation and vRealize Operations for Published Applications Installation and Administration.
You can also visit the previous posts in this series:
- VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon and Published Applications 6.4, Part 1: What’s New
- VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon and Published Applications 6.4, Part 2: New Support for Monitoring VMware App Volumes, View in VMware Horizon 7, and VMware Access Point
- VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon and Published Applications 6.4, Part 3: New Application-Crash Alerts for Desktop Applications and New Dashboard for Root-Cause Analysis
