Xtravirt — Horizon 7.2 Help Desk Tool

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Horizon 7.2 Help Desk Tool

by Curtis Brown

As those of you who have the joy of supporting end-users will know (and this old techie has worn that badge of honour!), any tool that can make getting to grips with an issue easier is always welcome, particularly if it means getting your hands on the user’s desktop to see the problem in action.

So it’s welcome news that the latest release of VMware Horizon® 7.2 brings into play a fully integrated helpdesk tool, specifically for supporting VMware Horizon desktop sessions. It provides session information, as well as several remote operational abilities such as resetting sessions, remote control, logging off users etc.

Setting up Helpdesk

You don’t need to do anything fancy to install it as it’s a part of the Connection Server installation, however there are several recommended additional steps to get best use from it.

You will need to configure the Events database – this provides session information to the HelpDesk console, so it’s pretty important. To track logon events properly, a further command should be run on each Connection Server:

vdmadmin -I -timingProfiler -enable

Oh, and ensure that the VMware Horizon Agent installed in the desktop templates is also a 7.2 release – otherwise you’ll miss desktop side session information.

Getting into the Help Desk Tool

There are two ways of accessing the Helpdesk tool.  In either case, a user will require Admin access to Horizon – Inventory Admins should be sufficient for most operations.

The first option is to log into the Admin console for horizon (HTTPS://(ConnectionServer URL)/admin). Once logged in, there is a new Help Desk button in the top bar of the console – click on this to access the helpdesk tool – the credentials pass through, all Single Sign-On style! image

Alternatively, you can access the console directly (via HTTPS://(ConnectionServer URL)/helpdesk) and then log on with the right credentials. image

Doing Help Desk stuff.

So, once you’re all set up and logged in, you can use the tool to do all sorts of heroic Help Desk stuff. The front page offers a search function. image

Punch in the name of the user, for example, “Curtis” and it’ll pull in the Active Directory credentials of the user – if the Active Directory E-mail and phone number fields are filled in, these are also displayed. image

If you click on the user, you’ll get a new page with a summary of running sessions and entitlements. image

Under ‘Sessions’, you’ll see the highlights of all running sessions - the green ones are connected sessions.  It’s even Cloud Pod aware – the L status refers to a session in the local Pod, and the G status refers to a session in the global Cloud Pod environment. If you then click on the Computer name, you can drill down further.

If the Agent is 7.2+, you get detailed session info, including CPU performance, memory usage and more.  Further, you can do some active tasks on the session.

You can send messages to the specific session or offer Remote Assistance.  The latter plugs into Microsoft’s Remote Assistance functionality, so this will need to be enabled and configured in the VM. image

On VDI sessions (not RDS Published Desktops or Application Sessions), you can issue a restart command to the desktop – this will reboot the VM.  You can also disconnect or log off users.  The Reset function differs from Restart in that the latter is a graceful shutdown and restart – Reset should only be used if the VM has hung.

Closing Thoughts….

So, a welcome set of useful capabilities has been added to this point release – and one that focusses on supportability rather than the usual performance or user-centric capabilities.

If you’re in need of assistance with a troublesome Horizon solution or perhaps want some support upgrading or implementing a new one, please contact Xtravirt, and we’d be happy to use our wealth of knowledge and experience to assist you.

About the Author

Curtis Brown joined the Xtravirt consulting team in October 2012. His specialist areas include End User Compute solutions and Virtual Infrastructure design and implementation with particular strength in VDI, storage integration, backup and Disaster Recovery design/implementation. He is a VMware vExpert 2017.

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