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.
Figure 1: Console Access Tab
Click the VM name in the Console Access tab, and the vSphere console for that VM appears.
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.
Figure 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.
Figure 4: PowerOn Policies Setup Popup
Installation File
We now provide an easier interface for installing Horizon Toolbox.
Figure 5: Select Installation Folder Installation Window
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].
