By Tina de Benedictis, Senior Technical Marketing Manager, End-User Computing, VMware
A primary new feature offered in Horizon Mirage 4.2 is a Help Desk web console. This web console enables Help Desk personnel to easily fulfill common user requests, such as desktop recovery and incremental backups, always with the zero-touch style of Horizon Mirage. The Horizon Mirage Web Manager transforms Help Desk personnel into magicians!
The new web console allows Horizon Mirage Help Desk personnel to perform the following actions on selected devices:
- Enforce Layers
- Set Drivers (device drivers)
- Reboot
- Suspend
- Synchronize (synchronize the current endpoint with the backup image)
- Collect Logs
- Restore (restore desktop from a backup image)
- Revert to Snapshot (restore to a particular snapshot of the desktop)
- Note (enter notes about a device)
Figure 1: Possible Actions on an End-User Device from the Horizon Mirage Web Manager
This first version of the Horizon Mirage Web Manager contains the console for Help Desk personnel. More consoles for other roles will follow later, and eventually the Web Manager will replace the Mirage Management Console (MMC). You can still use the MMC now, but current functions have been redesigned for the Web Manager, and new functionality has been added.
What are the advantages of the new Horizon Mirage Web Manager?
- Quick search – You can quickly perform searches for specific devices. You can filter the search results to find the exact set of devices you want to examine or act upon. You can even find devices that are disconnected from the network.
Figure 2: Search Results Listing All Mirage-Enabled Devices
Figure 3: Filtered Search Results, Including Devices Disconnected from the Network
- Device history – You can examine the history for each Mirage-managed device in the environment. You can view device history through either a Grid or Timeline View
Figure 4: Grid View of Device History in the Horizon Mirage Web Manager
The Grid View displays in a chronological list the history of device events and statuses.
Figure 5: Timeline View of Device History in the Horizon Mirage Web Manager
The Timeline View displays the history of device events on a timeline, which allows you to select a time period and to drill down on specific events.
- Pending actions on multiple devices – You can start and pause actions on different devices or on the same device simultaneously, without submitting these actions for completion. While these pending actions on various devices await completion, you can submit another action for completion. You cannot pause wizard actions in the Mirage Management Console.
- Overview of issues – You can examine problems with backups in the whole environment of devices. You can see graphs displaying the number of devices with initial backup problems and devices with incremental backup problems.
Figure 6: Horizon Mirage Web Manager Dashboard Showing Status of Initial Backups for All Devices in a Mirage Environment
In Horizon Mirage, the initial backup is called centralization. In Figure 6, the graph shows that in the last six months, 395 desktops have been centralized.
Figure 7: Horizon Web Manager Dashboard Showing Reasons for Incremental Backup Failures
The graph in Figure 7 shows the reasons that devices failed to make incremental backups to the datacenter.
- Report on network disruptions – You can see a report on disruptions to the network between the Horizon Mirage servers and Mirage-managed endpoints during a specified time period.
Abracadabra! Become a magician with the new Horizon Mirage web console for Help Desk personnel.
For more information about the new web console in Horizon Mirage 4.2, see the VMware Horizon Mirage Web Manager Guide. Also see the Horizon Mirage 4.0 Reviewer’s Guide for a product introduction and hands-on exercises for Horizon Mirage 4.0.
