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So you need a Help Desk tool for you VMware Horizon View Environment

Over the years of working with Horizon View the question I have been asked is how or what should our help desk staff do to support a Horizon View Environment. To answer this question a few things need to be answered.
  1. Will you give users access to View Administrator and if so what permissions?
  2. Will you give users access to vCenter and if so what permissions?
  3. Will you give users access to VMware VROPS or 3rd party monitoring tool (Liquidware Stratusphere)?
After you answer the above question you can then start to plan how you will integrate your current help desk staff to support a Horizon View Environment.

The good news is you might not need to do all this now as of yesterday on 6/20/17 VMware released VMware Horizon 7.2 code. In this release VMware has included an official help desk tool into the Horizon view product.  This new tool is a new simple interface that is great for help desk staff. It offers a great deal of features that your help desk staff will need to support a VMware View Environment.

Commands you can do:
  • Sending a message to the user
  • Launching Microsoft Remote Assistance to actively help the user in a session
  • Disconnecting, Logging off, and resetting the VM
Client and VDI info:
  • Client Side: Client Name, Client IP, Username, Protocol, and Bandwidth information
  • VDI Side: machine name, IP address, logon time, duration, session state, state duration, Horizon pod name, connection broker and vCenter name.
Other Metrics:
  • CPU Consumption
  • Memory Consumption
  • Session Latency
  • Logon Process Breakdown

As this does cover a great deal of information that help desk support teams need to have I do see it lacking in a few areas. It would be great to see the following metrics and information added to the product.
  • Session Packet Loss (Rx and Tx)
  • VDI up time (only valid for persistent VDI)
  • Disk space usage (%)
  • VMware Tools Status

For more information review the following information released by VMware:

VMware blog post on the release of horizon help desk tool 

Video Showing how the new tool works:
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