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P U B L I S H I N G
Andrew Alloway
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Andrew Alloway
P U B L I S H I N G
While working at Nuna Logistics Limited, he supported northern mining sites for
their unique and challenging IT environment. In 2012, some of his projects and work
were featured in the Winter 2012 edition of Aptitude Magazine in an article entitled
"Building the road to streamlined license agreements".
He is a supporter of open source technology and products such as Ubuntu, ICTFax,
Apache, Drupal, and Piler, among other projects.
He has designed and implemented projects, which include Exchange migrations, Lync
deployments, System Center Configuration Manager, and various VMware products.
In 2013, he received the VMware Certified Professional 5 Data Center
Virtualization certification.
He has previously worked with Packt Publishing on VMware Horizon Workspace
Essentials and VMware Horizon View High Availability.
Preface
The increasing movement towards virtualized workloads and workstations has put
VMware Horizon View into a central, mission-critical role in many environments.
Administrators may be overwhelmed with planning for outages and dealing with
failure-related scenarios. It's easy to miss small details that may result in outages
down the road. Following VMware Horizon View best practices and planning
ahead with network infrastructure will allow you to avoid these common pitfalls.
This book will walk you through the setup and configuration of View in a highly
available configuration. It will provide you with the skills needed to analyze and
deploy configurations that can stand up to rigorous failure standards.
Preface
Chapter 6, Hardware Redundancy Planning for Fibre Channel Storage, covers the various
topics related to Fibre Channel High Availability and the hardware requirements
for deployments.
Chapter 7, NFS, iSCSI, and Network Planning, covers network-related High Availability
concerns, which include DNS, Active Directory, DHCP, NFS, and iSCSI. Redundant
switch configurations are covered along with VMkernel configuration concerns.
Chapter 8, Monitoring VMware Horizon View, covers the health monitoring of the View
connection servers, vSphere hosts, and vCenter host. This chapter covers the usage of
vRealize for Horizon View to perform an in-depth monitoring.
Chapter 9, Upgrade and Downtime Planning, covers a basic overview of upgrade
planning and its common pitfalls. This chapter will help you minimize your
downtime during maintenance windows.
Chapter 8
Monitoring VMware
Horizon View
VMware Horizon View deployments are dependent on adequate monitoring
and performance checking. In this chapter we will explore the various methods
of gathering information from VMware View and how to use that information to
improve the availability of the environment and performance.
In this chapter we will cover:
Monitoring checklist
vCenter offline
Datastores offline
In addition to System Health, there is the mini dashboard, which is available in all
views in the top-left corner of the screen:
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Chapter 8
The number of errors and warning events that have happened in the
last two days
The event database will contain details about user logins, warnings about virtual
desktop failures, and notifications about resource outages. Error messages will be
generated for View composer failures, including recompose events and refresh
events. This is the first line of information gathering when troubleshooting issues
with VMware Horizon View.
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There is a list of alarm definitions that can be altered, enabled, or disabled to suit the
environment. The Alarm Definitions tab can be accessed via the Manage Tab in the
vSphere Web Client.
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Chapter 8
Using the alarm definitions, you can define actions that occur when each alarm is
triggered. Common actions include rebooting a troublesome server/application that
has a memory leak if the RAM usage gets above a certain amount, sending an email
or SNMP trap if the alarm is triggered, and running scripts against the host or VM
when an event is triggered.
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Chapter 8
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RVTools
RVTools is a freeware tool made by Rob de Veij. It will log into the vSphere host
or vCenter host and will provide a neatly formatted table of nearly every aspect of
the virtual environment. In particular, it is very good at discovering unnecessary
snapshots, unnecessary CDs attached to VMs, low disk space, outdated tools, and
unused VMDK files on the datastore. RVTools provides a rapid health check feature
that will discover configuration problems and issues to be addressed.
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Chapter 8
RAM usage
Login times
Outages
Disk performance
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Disk latency
Disk usage
CPU times
Capacity planning
VMware vRealize also has the capability of performing a rapid root cause analysis
and troubleshooting from one dashboard. The vRealize dashboard is designed to
provide a quick look at the health of the environment, providing an easy-to-read
Green-Yellow-Red color scheme for the conditions of the various VMware assets.
vRealize comes complete with auto-correlation logic that will intelligently alert
administrators to changes in the environment and weed out non-relevant alerts.
vRealize can also monitor trends in the environment's growth and usage. In addition
to growth monitoring, it can monitor VMs for wasted resources and make VM
hardware recommendations. This will allow you to get the best performance out of
the existing resources.
vRealize Operations for Horizon is an add-on to the standard vRealize Operations
Manager Suite, and as such, is dependent on having an operational and licensed
vRealize Operations Manager VM up and running. vRealize Operations Manager is
available in three varieties: Windows, Linux, and Virtual Appliance. For the sake of
simplicity, in this book, we will assume you are using Virtual Appliance.
For more information on vRealize Operations Manager for Horizon
View, visit:
https://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vcops-viewpubs.html
For more information on vRealize Operations Manager visit:
https://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vrealizeoperations-manager-pubs.html
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Chapter 8
First we must install the vRealize Operations Manager and configure it.
1. Log into http://my.vmware.com and download all the items from the
vRealize Operations Manager for Horizon View section. In particular,
you will need:
vRealize-Operations-Manager-Appliance.ova
for vRealize)
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Chapter 8
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20. Enter the Display name, Description, vCenter Server FQDN, and enter
administrator credentials for the vCenter Server.
21. Test the connection and accept the certificate.
22. Save the settings.
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Chapter 8
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10. Enter the username, password and domain for a user account with View
Connection Server administrator privileges, and select Validate to validate
the credentials. Then select Next.
11. Enter the username and password for the Event database, you may need to
consult with your DBA for the details. The account requires read access to all
the View Event database tables. Select Validate, then Next.
12. Enter the View Pool Filter. By default, all the pools are monitored, but that
can be filtered down. Select Validate if you opted not to monitor some of
the pools. Select Next.
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Chapter 8
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View Overview: This dashboard displays the most critical details about your
View environment.
Top View Alerts: Here the most critical issues with your Horizon
View infrastructure and Virtual Desktops are displayed. This widget
allows you to rapidly evaluate the health of the View environment.
Pod Indicator Metrics: This widget displays the Pod health, Pod
workload number of connected and disconnected sessions, and
various bandwidth and latency details.
Pod Session Metrics: Details the sessions with the View connection
server and how many of each type of session is active.
Pod Capacity Metrics: Details the capacity used and available to the
View environment.
View Infrastructure: Details the status of the ESXi hosts and any underlying
hardware for the VMware Horizon View environment.
View VDI Desktop VMs: Shows the status of the desktops in View.
View RDS Hosts (View 6.0): Shows the status of the RDS hosts
attached to the View 6.0 or higher environment.
View Users: Details the users and sessions that are ongoing in the
View environment.
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Chapter 8
Object Metrics: Lists the metrics available to the object in a tree view.
Expand the individual nodes to view individual metrics. Selected
metrics are graphed on the Object Metric Charts.
Object Metric Charts: Lists the health of the object selected and lists
the metrics selected from Object Metrics.
View Remote Sessions: Details the current sessions of VDI desktop sessions,
RDS desktop sessions, and application sessions. It breaks down the sessions
by PCoIP latency, TX bandwidth, and TX packet loss.
Top * Session PCoIP Latency (ms): Lists the latency of each session.
Top * TX Packet Loss (%): We can use this to identify weak links
in our network infrastructure by analyzing sessions that are
experiencing packet loss.
View VDI Pools: Details the resources of each pool and object broken down
by View pool.
VDI Desktop Pools: Selects a pool from this widget to populate the
other widgets with stats.
Various Top * Details: Several widgets that present the top usage
and latency graphs of the various VMs.
View RDS Pool: Similar to the VDI pools view, this view lists all the details
about the RDS pool sessions and applications available.
Farms: Lists the RDS farms configured on the View connection server.
RDS Desktop Pools: Lists the RDS pools configured on the View
connection server.
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Various Drill Down Views: You can see various statistics and
performance details about all the farms, RDS pools and application
pools available in the View environment.
View Desktop Usage: Lists the number of sessions and events with a
timeline graph of when each event and session happened.
View Remote Sessions: This dashboard breaks down the statistics for the
remote sessions:
Session Logon Breakdown: Lists the logon time for the session.
Session Health & Events: Lists the events that have occurred in
the session.
View RDS and TS Host Details: Lists the various statistics for RDS and
TS hosts.
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Chapter 8
Monitoring checklist
Depending on the way you choose to monitor VMware Horizon View, you may
respond to outages in different ways. Please make sure to document how you
monitor each event, and ensure you receive a timely notice to respond to the issue.
After each step, ensure that a notice was received and that you can respond to each
issue quickly.
Induce a low disk space situation on a datastore being used by the Horizon
View environment
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Summary
In this chapter, we learned about the various monitoring options for VMware
Horizon View. We went through the basic ways to gain insight into VMware
Horizon View and the various monitoring solutions available for Horizon View.
We learned how to install vRealize Operations Manager for Horizon View, and we
learned about the various resources we can use to log and monitor the performance
of the VMs and hosts.
In the next chapter, we will go over upgrade and downtime planning for VMware
Horizon View, and cover the best practices for minimizing outages.
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www.PacktPub.com
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