Monitoring VMware Horizon with vRealize Operations Manager Part 1

/ February 8, 2018/ vRealize

After deploying vRealize Operations Manager, this blog handles the installation and integration of VMware Horizon with vRealize Operations Manager version 6.6.

First of all, why do we need vRealize to monitoring the complete stack of Horizon Components in the network? vRealize operation manager gives it admins a single web interface with the health of the entire environment included the Horizon stack. vRealize collects a lot of information, for example:

latency;
bandwidth;
capacity;
Avg logon time;
pool consumption;
Avg PCoIP latency;
PCoIP Packet lost;
PCoIP bandwidth.

And many more……. Give it a try and convince yourself.

Before installing agents on the broker or desktop, you need to install a new solution in the vRealize administrator web interface. For installing the new solution, we need a .pak file, you can download this file on the VMware store.

For adding the solution, go to the Administration web interface “https://FQDN-or-IP/ui/ and select the tab “administration”.

Browse, select and upload the pak file. In my case this is a new installation so I don’t need to select one of the following options;

– Install the pak file even if it is already installed.
– Reset Default Content (all modifications to the default alerts will be overwritten).

After you have installed the solution, you must configure it before installing agents on devices and brokers. Select the solution (1) and click on edit (2).

While configuring the Horizon broker agent, at a certain point the installer will ask for a pairing password, with this step, you specify the pairing password at the server-side.

1. Select the adapter type “Horizon Adapter”.
2. Fill in the display name, additional some description and give the “Adapter ID” a name.
3 .Click on the second pointer (2) to create a password.

After you created a password, you can test the connection. Is the output of the test successful, then you can move on with installing the license and broker/desktop agent. Important note don’t forgot to save the setting.

Installing License

After installing the solution in the previous step, you must assign a valid Horizon license to the right component. Otherwise you will see an event with the following warning;

For assigning the license go to;

Administration;
Management —-> Licensing;
Add license ( 3 ).

Select in the drop-down list the solution “VMware Horizon”
Enter the License key and press “Validate”

Important, after adding the license you must stop and start the adapter

After installing and configuring the Horizon Adapter in vRealize, the next step is installing the Broker and desktop agent on the targets.

– Desktop Agent
This desktop agent must be run on each virtual desktop or RDS server. The agent collects metrics and performance data and send it to the Horizon adapter. The desktop agent is included with a few versions of the Horizon agent. ( Horizon 6.1/6.2/7.0.1/7.0.x and 7.x )

– Broker Agent
The broker agent collects Horizon Inventory information and send this to the Horizon adapter.

Installing the agent on the Horizon connection broker

For installing the agent on the connection broker, you use the installer with the name “VMware-v4vbrokeragent-x86_64-6.5.x”.

The installation is quite straight forward until the last window ( Next,next,etc. ) Before the installation begins, you can choose if you want to launch the configuration wizard after the installation is completed. The check box is enabled by default.

The configuration wizard contains several configuration steps:

Pair Adapter;
Connection server;
Event DB and Desktop pool;
App Volumes;
Unified Access Gateway;
Interval and Timeouts;
Logging;
Start/Stop broker agent service.

Pair Adapter

Pairing the broker adapter to the View adapter is a necessary authentication step that enables the communication between the View adapter, Broker agent and Desktop agent.

Adapter IP:
Set the ip address of the vRealize Operations Manager
Port:
Use per default port 3091
Pairing Key:
Set the Pairing Key, created while configuring the adapter credential

After configuring, press “Pair”

Type and validate the Username, Password, Domain and port

Set the Event Database username and password. You can use the account which is already configured in the Horizon View Administrator page.

Additional, you can enable App volumes Monitoring.

In my case, I don’t use a Unified Access Gateway, so I skipped this section.

In my case, I didn’t changed anything about logging level. By default Logging level “info” is selected.

The last step, before completing this configuration wizard. By default the Broker Service agent isn’t running. you must manual start this service.

After starting the broker agent service, you can check if the Horizon adapter is collecting data. You can do this in the Administration web interface of vRealize.