VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon 6.4

VMware Official Links for vRealize Operations for Horizon 6.4

What's New in This Release

vRealize Operations for Horizon 6.4 includes the following new features.

Access Point Monitoring - VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon now includes optional Access Point monitoring. With this feature, you can see the status of multiple Access Points, including blast and PCoIP session counts, usage percentage (i.e., the percentage of the maximum number of sessions actually used), IP addresses, and collection status. You can also use this feature to get details about the Access Point (e.g., health and active alerts). Additionally, you can also configure alert thresholds for session usage. Access Point releases 2.6, 2.7, and 2.7.2 are supported in this release.

Application Crash Alerts - vRealize Operations for Horizon now enables you to monitor events when an application launched inside a session crashes. The crash alert summary is shown on the alerts page. Click the link for the alert to see details of the crash, including cause and recommended action.

App Volumes Monitoring - VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon now includes optional App Volumes monitoring. With this feature, you can see which App Stacks are attached to sessions and users and view their attach times. Additionally, by viewing objects related to sessions and users, you can see associated stacks and discern, for example, which App Volumes Manager controls a stack, or which AD is associated with it.

Additionally, a new Horizon App Volumes Environment item on the Environment Overview lets you view summary information and metrics for App Volumes servers and App Stacks.

App Volumes releases 2.10 and 2.11 are supported in this release.

New Root Cause Dashboard - VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon now includes a Root Cause Analysis Dashboard. Reachable from the Horizon Help Desk and Horizon End User dashboards, it provides metrics for objects associated with sessions, and uses colors (green, yellow, and red) to indicate metrics that may require troubleshooting. Additionally, clicking on a metric displays it in a chart view that shows the given metric over time, enabling further analysis.

New Widgets - VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon includes the following new widgets:

Desktop Applications: Available on the Horizon VDI Pools Dashboard, this widget displays a list of all the configured applications hosted by a VDI desktop.
Desktop Application Users: Available on the Horizon VDI Pools Dashboard, this widget displays a history of user logon information for a selected application, indicating who uses the application, and when the application is used.
Desktop Applications Launched by User: Available on the Horizon User Session Details Dashboard, this widget displays when and which application hosted by a VDI desktop was launched by the selected user in a selected time period.
VM Host: Available on the Horizon Help Desk Dashboard, this widget displays the ESXi host of the related VM that is hosting a session.
Host Metrics: Available on the Horizon Help Desk Dashboard, this widget displays metrics of a selected host.
How to Use the Help Desk Dashboard and How to Use the Horizon End User Experience widgets.

New Reports - VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon includes the following new reports for 6.4:

Horizon Application Instance Usage Report: includes information about CPU and memory usage of an application instance.
Horizon Desktop Application Instance Usage Report: includes information about CPU and memory usage of a desktop application instance.
Horizon Desktop Application Usage Report: includes information about desktop application usage.

Cloud Pod Architecture Support - VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon 6.4 includes several changes related to Cloud Pod Architecture (CPA) support:

Two new monitoring objects, View Pod Federation and View Pod Health, have been added, enabling you to view pod federations in hierarchies and to see the health of pods.
A new column, "Pod Name," has been added to the Horizons Connected Sessions widget (visible in the Horizon Help Desk Dashboard).
A new, pod-related alert has been added. When any pod in a pod federation goes down, a “Failed to communicate with target pod” alert appears for other pods in the federation. Clicking on this alert (which can be found by searching for the alert from the Alerts tab) shows which connection to a target pod is affected. Note that when connectivity is reestablished, the alert status changes from Active to Inactive.

Support for Windows Server 2016 as an RDS host for Horizon 7.0.2 - Both Datacenter and Standard editions of Windows Server 2016 are supported.

Limitations

vRealize Operations for Horizon has the following limitations.

The RMI registry port 3091 is reused in vRealize Operations for Horizon 6.4 adapter.
The communications ports are 3099, 3100, and 3101 for the Horizon 6.4 message server. The message server objects for Horizon 6.x and 7.x are registered to this port.
Physical desktops in a pool are not monitored
Physical desktops included in a desktop pool are not monitored or shown in the user interface. However, physical RDS hosts are monitored and shown in the user interface.
High availability (HA) is not supported
vRealize Operations for Horizon 6.x does not support high availability (HA). If a View Adapter instance is moved to a different cluster node, the broker and desktop agents can no longer communicate with the View Adapter and the vRealize Operations for Horizon solution stops functioning. For solutions to this problem, see KB: 2092874: Best practices for configuring vRealize Operations for Horizon when HA is enabled.
You should wait sometime after the adapter service is restarted. Otherwise the adapter might not get started.
Make sure the vRealize Operations Manager does not have multiple network cards for multiple sub networks. It might make adapter instance bind to incorrect IP address.
The adapter configuration file /usr/lib/vmware-vcops/user/plugins/inbound/V4V_adapter3/conf/msgserver.properties and /usr/lib/vmware-vcops/user/plugins/inbound/V4V_adapter3/work/msgserver.propertiesshould be updated at the same time.
The Broker Agent 6.1 and Desktop Agent 6.1 cannot communicate with Adapter 6.4 even if pairing is successful because TLS 1.0 is disabled by default. A hand shake exception is thrown.
The configuration file of old adapter instance is not purged during upgrade. Therefore, if other SSL protocol/ciphers is configured on the adapter side, the broker and desktop agent might cause a hand shake failure. Configure some protocol and ciphers on adapter and agents.
The adapter can run on the collector node. It cannot run on the data node or the replica node.
When the primary controller (broker) fails, administrators must manually configure and enable the broker agent at the back-up controller (broker).

Licensing Notes

This section contains notes on the licensing of vRealize Operations for Horizon 6.4.

To run vRealize Operations for Horizon, customers need to enter two keys.
- A single vRealize Operations Manager license key.
- A 10-pack or 100-pack vRealize Operations Manager license key that monitors your desktop virtual machines.
- The VMs must be part of the appropriate licensing groups in order to ensure accurate licensing. For detailed licensing instructions, see Adding a vRealize Operations for Horizon License Key and Associate Horizon Objects with Your vRealize Operations for Horizon License Key in the vRealize Operations for Horizon Installation guide.
The vRealize Operations Manager component license that is included is for Horizon-supporting infrastructure monitoring. A separate vRealize Operations Manager license is required for non-Horizon infrastructure monitoring.

Installation Notes

This section contains notes on the installation process for each vRealize Operations for Horizon component. For complete installation instructions, see the vRealize Operations for Horizon Installation document.

vRealize Operations Manager for Horizon 6.4 is compatible with the following Horizon and vRealize Operations Manager versions:
- VMware Horizon 7 and 7.0.x
- VMware Horizon with View 6.2.x
- vRealize Operations Manager versions 6.0.2, 6.0.3, 6.1, 6.2, 6.2.1, 6.3, and 6.4.
For the most current information about supported versions, see the VMware Product Interoperability Matrixes.
You can download the vRealize Operations for Horizon installation files from the VMware download page.
You can download the preconfigured View dashboards file (Dashboards_V4VAdapter-6.4-xxx.zip) and report templates file (Reports_V4VAdapter-6.4-xxx.zip) from the VMware download page. View dashboards and reports are installed automatically when you install vRealize Operations for Horizon. These files are provided in case problems occur during or after installation and you need to restore the dashboards or reports to their original state. For information about importing dashboards and reports, see the vRealize Operations Manager documentation.
You install the View adapter on a vRealize Operations Manager cluster node or remote collector.
You install the vRealize Operations for Horizon broker agent on a View Connection Server host in your View environment.
Your View version determines how you install the desktop agent component of vRealize Operations for Horizon.

Horizon View Agent includes a version of vRealize desktop agent. Horizon 6.0.1 ships Desktop Agent 6.0, Horizon 6.1 and 6.2 ships Desktop Agent 6.1, and Horizon 6.2.x ships Desktop Agent 6.2.0. Horizon 7.0 ships desktop agent 6.2.1 and Horizon 7.0.x ships Desktop Agent 6.4. Check the VMware website for the latest available version.

For sizing and scaling guidelines, see KB 2098051: vRealize Operations for Horizon sizing guidelines.

Upgrade Notes

This section contains notes of the upgrade processes. For complete upgrade instructions, see the vRealize Operations for Horizon Installation document.

You can upgrade from vRealize Operations for Horizon 6.1, 6.2, 6.2.1, or 6.3 to vRealize Operations for Horizon 6.4. Customers with vRealize Operations for Horizon 6.0 must first upgrade to vRealize Operations for Horizon 6.1 before upgrading to vRealize Operations for Horizon 6.4.
During the upgrade process, the dashboards, views, and reports from the vRealize Operation for Horizon 6.1 are retained and new dashboards, views, and reports are added. Old dashboards, views and reports are identified by the View prefix, and the new dashboards, views and reports are prefixed with Horizon. You can remove old dashboards, views, and reports.
After the adapter upgrade, enable the port numbers 3099, 3100, and 3101 (if not already enabled). Edit the /opt/vmware/etc/vmware-vcops-firewall.conf file in the vRealize Operations Manager.

Add the command: TCPPORTS="$TCPPORTS 3099:3101" after TCPPORTS="$TCPPORTS 3091:3094" in /opt/vmware/etc/vmware-vcops-firewall.conf.
Restart the firewall: /etc/init.d/vmware-vcops-firewall restart.
Check the status of the firewall: /etc/init.d/vmware-vcops-firewall status.

Due to an existing limitation, vRealize Operations Manager cluster must be restarted after the upgrade for the process to complete. Or, restart the remote collector (Run service vmware-vcops --full-restart).
Sessions that were active during upgrade may not report data after the upgrade is complete. Restart the desktop agent for the active sessions that are not reporting.
During the Broker Agent upgrade process from 6.1, 6.2, or 6.2.1, or 6.3 to 6.4, vRealize Operations for Horizon broker agent service is stopped, configuration is preserved, Broker agent is uninstalled, and the new version of Broker Agent is installed. When the Broker Agent configuration utility launches, on the first screen of the wizard the vRealize Operations Manager IP address/FQDN IP and the pairing credentials have to be re-entered and paired. The subsequent screen will have the data populated from the preserved configuration file of the previous installation. This includes data such as Horizon Credentials and Events DB configurations. In case of upgrade, the Broker Agent service is not started automatically. On the Configure The Broker Agent Service screen of the Broker Agent Configuration Utility wizard, the broker agent service has to be started. Click Next and on the last page of the wizard, click Finish.
TLS 1.2 is enforced by default in vRealize Operations for Horizon Adapter 6.4. The Adapter cannot communicate with older desktop Agents running with TLS 1.0, such as vRealize Operations for Horizon Desktop Agent 6.0/6.1. VDI Pools, RDS Pools, or Apps running with older desktop Agents are monitored by default. To monitor pools running with older desktop Agents, administrators need to log on to vRealize Operations Manager collector node and add enforcesslprotocols = false to the /usr/lib/vmware-vcops/user/plugins/inbound/V4V_adapter3/work/msgserver.properties file. Horizon Adapter instance has to be restarted. Broker Agent and Horizon Adapter instance pairing might be required.

Internationalization (I18N) Support

The vRealize Operations for Horizon user interface and documentation are both available in English, Japanese, French, German, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Korean.

Prior Releases of vRealize Operations Manger for Horizon

Features that were introduced in prior releases of vRealize Operations Manager for Horizon are described in the release notes for each release, along with existing known issues

Resolved Issues

This section contains resolved issues for this release.

Functionality - No need to restart the Broker Agent after restarting a view server.
Interoperability - An issue with Blast Metrics having no data with View 7.0.3 has been resolved.
Performance - All string metrics have been changed to properties to avoid a thread block issue in the Analytic Module of vRealize Operations Manager.
Performance - Fixed an issue with high CPU usage with the Desktop Agent, which was caused by frequently invoking the WMI query API.
Performance - Fixed a Desktop Agent memory leak issue.
Performance - Fixed a broker agent long topology collection time issue, caused by too many entitlements in the Horizon Environment.
Performance - Redundant view API calls for entitlements have been reduced by half.
Scalability - A single vRealize Operations for Horizon 6.4 Broker Agent can now scale beyond 4K desktops when used in Horizon 6.2.1 or later environment on a single View POD.
Security - Dual sign is now used for all binary and installation packages.
Stability - Enhancements have been made to RMI connections.
Upgrade - You no longer need to update a vRealize Operations Manager firewall rule after upgrading vRealize Operation Manager to 6.4 or above.
Usability - The V4H config file has been migrated from older versions to 6.4.

Known Issues

This section contains known issues for this release.

Cannot navigate to the Horizon Root Cause Dashboard or other dashboards from End User Experience Dashboard heat maps if using vRealize Operations Manager 6.3.
Workaround: Use vRealize Operations Manager 6.2.4 (or 6.2.1).

Duplicate App Volumes Managers can be added with the Horizon Broker Agent Utility
The Horizon Broker Agent Utility allows you to add an App Volume Manager by FQDN and IP address. It is possible, but not desirable, to add the same App Volume Manager twice, once by FQDN and once by IP, creating duplicate objects.
Workaround: Delete one App Volume Manager manually via the Broker Agent Utility, and restart the broker agent service.

The sessions count may not be accurately reflected in the Access Point widget.
The total number of sessions shown in the Access Point widget may not include sessions launched in Access Point, as some Access Point-launched sessions may still be alive but not counted in the session total of the widget. (The total number of sessions will be appropriate in other places apart from the Access Point widget.) This only applies to sessions launched in Access Point.
Workaround: None for vRealize Operations for Horizon. (Try troubleshooting Access Point.)

Blast protocol metric is not available in the RDSH Pool dashboard.
Workaround: Create a supermetric to calculate Blast data with the Pool object.

The Desktop Agent may not run normally after you restart a VM or log in as another user.
This is caused by an installation mistake. It's not permitted to install the Desktop Agent on a desktop machine with an account that has an App Stack assignment in App Volumes. In such a case, the Desktop Agent might be installed successfully, but it would be installed on the mounted App Stack, not on the local storage, and the Desktop Agent will not run normally after you restart the VM or log in as another user.
Workaround: Install the Desktop Agent on an account that is not assigned an App Stack, or install the Desktop Agent on the base template of the desktop machine.

Too many application crash alerts may be displayed on the Alerts page.
When an application crash happens on the desktop, the Desktop Agent sends this information to the adapter; the adapter then throws a notification alert that is displayed on the Alerts page. Over time, unless old alert notifications are cleared, the Alerts page will be overpopulated with alerts.
Workaround: Use cleanallstopobjects.jar to remove unwanted alerts:

Usage: java -jar cleanallstopobjects.jar VROPS_IP Admin_User password record_per_page expire_day.
example: java -jar cleanallstopobjects.jar vrops.vmware.com admin password 100 7

("7" means all notifications that are created 7 days ago will be canceled when the program is running.)

Set a daily cron job to run cleanallstopobjects.jar.

The Access Point widget displays deleted Access Point objects.
If you remove an Access Point with the Horizon Broker Agent, the Access Point widget may still display the deleted Access Point object.
Workaround:

Stop the adapter instance.

Delete the unused Access Point object from the inventory tree.

Restart the adapter instance.

Pod names do not appear in the Connected Sessions widget within the expected time of 15 minutes.
Names of connecting pods may not appear in the Pod Name column of the Connected Sessions widget of the Horizon Help Desk Dashboard within the expected time of 15 minutes after session launch. Data appears within 15 minutes in all other columns related to the launched session in this widget.
Workaround: None. Pod names should appear within a maximum delay of 40-60 minutes after session launch.

In the Broker Agent Utility for Horizon, the test for Desktop Pool ID in the optional Specify Desktop Pools, fails if this ID is different from the Desktop Pool name.
Workaround: Enter the correct Desktop Pool ID, ignore the error message and click Next for the configuration.

When vRealize Operations for Horizon solution is upgraded to 6.1, duplicate session objects would appear
When vRealize Operations for Horizon solution is upgraded to 6.1, duplicate session objects would appear. Newer object will have a machine_id and the older object is without a machine_id. Only the session objects containing a machine_idwill fetch the metrics. Session Objects without machine_id are stale and will not fetch any metrics (because of vRealize Operations Manager limitation of not deleting stale objects immediately). This is applicable to VDI session objects only.

Horizon pods that are no longer being monitored still appear in the Horizon dashboards
If you stop monitoring a Horizon pod, the Horizon pod resource continues to appear in the Horizon dashboards.
Workaround: Manually delete the Horizon pod resource and all Horizon Connection Server, security server, and pool resources related to this Horizon pod from the vRealize Operations Manager user interface.

Existing linked-clone desktops must be recomposed
If you created desktop pool images that utilize linked clones prior to installing vRealize Operations for Horizon, you must to recompose the linked clones to include the vRealize Operations for Horizon desktop agent in the image.

User names that include multibyte characters might not appear correctly in the vRealize Operations Manager user interface

Network-related alerts are not generated for user sessions that were established before the View adapter was set up
The following alerts are not generated for user sessions that were initiated before the configuration of a View adapter instance: PCoIP|Round Trip Latency (ms) and PCoIP|Packet Loss Percent. See KB 1030695: PCoIP performance is slower than expected for troubleshooting high latency and packet loss issues.

Changing the adapter name causes the View Adapter Status dashboard to display incorrect data
If the name of the View adapter instance is changed, the health of the View Adapter in the Select View Adapter widget and the health of the objects in the View Adapter Status widget are unknown on the View Adapter Status dashboard. These problems occur because the View Adapter Collector resource does not automatically update to reflect the name change of the vCenter Operations for Horizon View adapter instance.
Workaround: Do not change the adapter name. If the adapter name has already been changed, update the adapter name in the vRealize Operations for Horizon user interface.

Certain View reports return inconsistent or incorrect results
The View Desktop Pool Usage and View Application Pool Usage reports return inconsistent or incorrect results in the Connected and Disconnected Desktop Sessions sections.
Workaround: None.

If a View adapter receives data from more than 1,000 desktop agents, the ARP cache on the vRealize Operations Manager collector node is not large enough to handle all of the necessary entries in the cache.
Workaround: For a solution to this problem, see KB 2096607: Adjusting the ARP cache on a vRealize Operations Manager remote collector node.

Scoreboard widgets on the View Overview, View Remote Session Details, View RDS & and View Adapter Self Health dashboards do not refresh
Most scoreboard widgets are configured to refresh every two minutes, but this problem prevents auto-refreshing. This problem is most apparent if the affected dashboards are always kept open.
Workaround: Click the Perform Multi-Select Interaction button on master widget's toolbar to reinitiate interactions and refresh the corresponding scoreboard widgets. For example, on the View Overview dashboard, click the Perform Multi-Select Interaction button on the View Pods widget toolbar to refresh the Pod Indicator Metrics scoreboard widget.

In Horizon Desktop Agent 6.1 or earlier versions, the Logon time, Logon duration, Session duration, Average Logon, Average Recollect, and Maximum Logon Time information cannot not be collected.
These metrics cannot be seen in the widgets such as Top RDS Desktop Session Logon Time in Horizon RDS Pools dashboard, Top Application Session Logon Time in RDS Pools dashboard, Top VDI Session Logon Time Horizon in VDI Pools dashboard, Horizon Remote Session in Horizon User Session Details dashboard, Pool Desktop Sessions in Horizon Desktop Usage dashboard, Top RDS Desktop Session Logon Time in Horizon user sessions dashboard, Top Application Session Logon Time in Horizon User Session dashboard, Top VDI Session Logon Time Horizon in Horizon User Session dashboard, All desktop Pools in Horizon Desktop Usage dashboard, Horizon pods in Horizon Overview dashboard.
Workaround: Upgrade the Desktop Agent version to 6.2 or later.

Tab traversal does not work in the correct order while configuring the Broker Agent utility.

The name of the virtual machine does not appear in the Applications Instances widget in the Horizon Application dashboard if you are using a Desktop Agent 6.1 or earlier versions.
Workaround: Upgrade the Desktop Agent version to 6.2 or later.

Applications launched by user widget in Horizon Remote Sessions Details dashboard does not populate any data if you have installed Desktop Agent 6.1 or earlier versions on RDS Server or VDI machine.
Workaround: Upgrade the Desktop Agent version to 6.2 or later.

If you restart a connection server machine, the Broker Agent cannot initialize the event db type. The following message appears:
WARNING: Exception creating connection for EventDBListener: Unsupported Event DB.
Workaround: Restart the Broker Agent service.

Blank view sessions are listed in the vRealize Operations Administrator UI after the Adapter receives the desktop Agent data.
Workaround: Perform the following steps:

Click the pencil icon on the top right corner of the widget.
In the pop-up window, go to Select which tags to filter, expand Collection States and ensure the Collecting option is selected.
Click Save.

When you upgrade vRealize Operations for Horizon adapter from 6.x to 6.4, the collection state of the adapter instance shows failed.
Workaround: Either restart the collector service ( Run service vmware-vcops --full-restart) or restart the vRealize Operations Manager appliance.

Log on time, average logon time, and maximum log on time values are not retained for the existing sessions after upgrading adapter from 6.x to 6.4.
Workaround: Log off and login again.

Even after the deletion of the View Pod environment, the stale entries are retained on the dashboards.
Workaround: Restart the service ( Run service vmware-vcops --full-restart). Login to vRealize Operations Manager, go to Administrator > Inventory Explorer, and select the objects and delete them manually.

For reconnected sessions, Horizon connected widget in help desk dashboard shows junk data.
Workaround: Edit the Horizon connected widget and select All Active Sessions and click Save.

If the View server is configured with IP, then the Broker Agent first tries to connect as a local host and displays a redundant error 'Could not connect to the connection server with the provided credentials.' in the utility. The second time it automatically connects to IP or host name. There is no impact on the functionality.
Workaround: None

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