By Sachin Sharma, Product Marketing Manager, End-User Computing, VMware
It has been a few months since we released Horizon 6, yet it feels like it was just yesterday! With all the activities since the release (webinars, workshops, road shows, and so on), I have had little time to blog about one of my favorite aspects of the Horizon 6 release—Mirage 5.0. Mirage 5.0 introduced several new features, including Windows 8.1 support and enhancements to the Mirage Gateway. I would like to tell you about one of the cool new features that might have gone unnoticed, but which can help desktop administrators in a big way—alarms.
Having a systems management background, I get excited when I hear about dashboards and alarms as they relate to desktop, server, network, and database management and monitoring. In this first phase of the new CVD alarms feature (CVDs are backups), we have introduced a handful of useful alarms that will help IT understand issues in their Mirage-managed desktop environment. IT gets a better view of their environment through centrally monitoring and troubleshooting CVDs with these alarms. Alarms show up on both the CVD Inventory view of the Mirage Web Manager and the Inventory view of the Mirage Console. These new alarms are as follows:
- VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Service)
- Download failure
- Upload failure
- Not enough volume disk space (the Mirage server)
- Not enough disk space (the Mirage client)
Let us take a brief look at each of these alarms, along with a more detailed look at one in particular.
- VSS – If the endpoint you are managing experiences VSS snapshot failures, an alarm opens. If there are no successful transactions, such as an upload or download on the endpoint that occurred after the last seen VSS failure event, an alarm is opened. Once a successful upload or download occurs, the alarm closes.
- Download failure – If a download transaction to an endpoint results in a failure, such as an internal error, signature mismatch, or incorrect manifest data, an alarm opens. Once a successful download transaction occurs after the last failed transaction, the alarm closes.
- Upload failure – If an upload transaction from an endpoint results in a failure, such as an internal error, signature mismatch, or incorrect manifest data, an alarm opens. Once a successful upload transaction occurs after the last failed transaction, the alarm closes.
- Not enough volume disk space (the Mirage server) – I hope this one is self-explanatory. If you are running out of space on the volume your Mirage server is attached to, and you try to upload an endpoint to that volume, you see an alarm. Add more space to the volume or remove CVDs, and the alarm closes.
- Not enough disk space (the Mirage client) – This one should be self-explanatory, too; however, let us dig a little deeper. If you perform a download transaction on an endpoint, such as assigning a base layer, you must have sufficient disk space on the endpoint to store the base layer and endpoint differences. If you do not have enough space, you receive an alarm. The alarm closes after an adequate amount of space is freed up on the endpoint.
Any open alarm shows up in the Mirage Console under a new alarm column. Here, you can see a red alarm icon next to the E14-WB1E32-0 CVD:
You can also click the Problematic CVDs node in the left pane to see all open alarms. In this example, the Wotan CVD has an open alarm. If you right-click the Wotan CVD and select Show Alarms, you see the following description of the alarm:
Wotan does not have enough disk space to perform the base layer download. Alternatively, you can also view this alarm in the Mirage Web Manager:
After you free up space on the Wotan PC associated with this CVD, the alarm closes, as indicated by no alarm icon in the alarm column:
This is the first phase of implementing CVD alarms in Mirage. I encourage you to provide feedback to us by commenting on this blog post. Let us know if these alarms are helpful and, if they are, what other types of alarms you would like to see in the future. And, as always, for more information, visit us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or discuss in our Communities.
