Vmware control up это
In a previous blog, I took a look at ControlUp and the ways VMware customers can purchase ControlUp licenses—to monitor Horizon environments—as add-ons to their Horizon licenses, directly from VMware.
With ControlUp, Horizon customers can monitor their EUC environments in real time and proactively track the experiences of their end users. ControlUp’s guided troubleshooting and built-in actions can quickly remediate problems within their environment. A great start.
But I wanted to dig a little deeper.
Yes, ControlUp has a comprehensive dashboard for real-time monitoring, but it also provides a powerful framework that can be used not just to gather information, but to proactively avoid or reactively remediate issues not only with the desktops, but also with other technologies, such as App Volumes, UAG, Blast, and thin clients. Much of ControlUp’s extensibility is made possible through script actions that can be downloaded from their script repository or—because ControlUp has such a strong focus on its user community—created and uploaded to the script library by its users.
I wanted to check out the variety of Horizon-related scripts that were available, so I brought up my ControlUp console and entered Horizon in the search box; I found at least two dozen of them. The scripts’ functions ranged from performing fairly mundane tasks, such as logging off a Horizon user to more involved analyses, like examining the logon duration for any given user.
With the vast percentage of the global workforce working remotely, keeping your EUC environment healthy is imperative to ensure business continuity and deliver a great user experience.
Over the last couple of months, we’ve seen a huge influx of new virtual desktop users, following a global move to remote work during the Coronavirus crisis. While some system admins have increased the number of users in their existing virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI), others have scrambled to set up new VDI environments.
Whether your company has been using VDI for years or you are just getting started with it, you need to use your IT resources (e.g., compute, storage, and network) as judiciously as possible. When multiplied over hundreds (or even thousands) of devices, a slight performance gain on each desktop can lead to huge overall savings in IT resources.
A few years ago, VMware saw that modern desktop OSes were designed for standalone physical systems where IT resources utilization wasn’t an issue; but, in a VDI environment where IT resources are oversubscribed, there are tweaks and optimizations that can be applied to a desktop to make it more performant and less resource-intensive.
In the early days, VMware system engineers (SEs) had a manual checklist for optimizing their virtual desktops, though VMware eventually created a script to automatically apply these best practices. This gave rise to the venerated VMware OS Optimization Tool (OSOT), which took off like wildfire and is now VMware’s most downloaded Fling.
In the early days, SEs were seeing decreases of up to 30% in desktop IT resource usage after applying the tool. Lately, I haven’t seen gains that are that dramatic, but I have heard from other users that they can see a huge difference between a desktop that has had this tool applied and one that hasn’t.
The tool can be downloaded for free from VMware’s Fling site.
To run the tool, click Analyze, examine the changes that it will make, and then click Optimize.
To get an idea of how effective the OSOT is, I ran some baselines on both a fresh-from-the-box Windows 10 desktop, and another desktop that had already been optimized.
NOTE: This was more of an ad hoc test rather than a benchmarking exercise, but it did mimic results I’ve seen in the past when comparing non-optimized and optimized desktops.
Logging in to the optimized desktop as a new user took just eight seconds, while the non-optimized desktop took twenty seconds—more than double the time. Also, IT resource usage was considerably less when logging in to the optimized desktop. Using ControlUp, it was easy to compare the two desktops and get quantifiable data.
After letting the sessions sit idle for ten minutes, I looked at the desktops again and saw that the optimized desktop had 40 fewer processes running on it and was consuming fewer resources.
I then logged off the machines, waited ten more minutes, then logged back in as the same user. It took four seconds to log in to an optimized desktop, and eight to log in to the optimized desktop. Again, I saw less resource usage on the optimized desktop during the login process.
By using the VMware OSOT, you can deliver a better user experience by decreasing end-user login time, while also decreasing the amount of IT resources that are being consumed. As an added bonus, running desktops that have been optimized will lessen the impact of large numbers of users logging in to their desktops simultaneously; this means that you can run more desktops per host, which equates to a greater VM density and a lower cost per desktop.
Ensuring a problem-free user experience is arguably the most important part of delivering a successful virtual desktop service. It is also quite often the most time-consuming, costly and difficult part of the administrator’s job, given the complexities involved in most virtual desktop and application deployments.
At any moment in time, a user may experience a number of issues related to connectivity, poorly performing applications, slow logon or session latency, all of which negatively impact their overall experience. It is a multi-layered problem, that may result from a combination of insufficient or underperforming resources, poor connectivity, inadequately optimized images or incorrectly configured protocols, among others, which makes it difficult to diagnose these problems in an efficient and timely manner. To further exacerbate the issue, greater adoption of hybrid and multi-cloud environments have created more complex, geographically dispersed deployments that require a more unified monitoring approach than ever before.
When you talk to Horizon administrators about these challenges, you invariably hear them describing their pain in the following ways:
1. I need end-to-end visibility into all my deployments within in a single pane of glass, in real-time.
2. I am responding to service tickets rather than preventing them. I need a more proactive approach to resolving issues and reducing the number of tickets.
3. Problem identification is only half the battle. The more difficult part is knowing where to start when troubleshooting. I need a solution that not only identifies the issue, but also helps to sift through metrics and synthesize data to zero in on the root cause.
4. I need a solution that scales as my environment grows, reduces MTTR and helps meet key SLAs.
In short, organizations struggle to implement a monitoring and troubleshooting strategy that is scalable and dynamic, and that enables them to proactively isolate and prevent problems, instead of reacting to them.
With the launch of the Horizon Cloud Service, VMware introduced the Cloud Monitoring Service (CMS) – a built-in solution containing a rich set of monitoring, reporting and helpdesk features that enable customers to monitor all their deployments from a single console.
Today, we are adding to that portfolio by announcing a new partnership with our existing TAP partner, ControlUp – an advanced monitoring and troubleshooting tool for virtual environments. With this new partnership, customers will be able to purchase Advanced Monitoring for Horizon Universal License powered by ControlUp as an add-on to their VMware Horizon universal licenses, directly from VMware, with the benefit of VMware support and services backing their deployment.
Advanced Monitoring offers a single unified console with which to monitor desktops, applications and the Horizon infrastructure across on-premise and cloud deployed pods, with out-of-the-box automation and remediation workflows that reduce the time and effort involved in identifying, troubleshooting and remediating a problem. Customers can consume it as a cloud service or deploy it on-premises for cases where data must remain within their environment.
With Advanced Monitoring, customers are able to monitor in real-time, proactively track user experience issues and take advantage of guided troubleshooting and built-in actions for speedy resolution of problems within their environment.
Real-Time Monitoring – Customers can see a wide array of metrics from across their Horizon deployment covering user sessions, VMs, hosts, clusters and datastores, delivered at 3 to 30 second interval. The console is simple and easy to follow with color coded baselines that help to reduce noise and help focus on the issue.
User Experience Scoring & Stress Levels – Advanced Monitoring tracks a rich set of metrics during logon and throughout the user session, including logon duration, application load times, user input delay, latency, resource contention and others, to assign a unique User Experience Score for each user within the environment. Stress levels are also assigned to resource groups, VMs, hosts and clusters to help identify outliers and take timely corrective action.
Built-in Actions and Guided Troubleshooting – A set of built-in actions can be performed at the host, session, VM and process level to help troubleshoot and eliminate issues with a single click. A recommendation engine is able to analyze the problems and provide a series of steps designed to guide admins through the troubleshooting process and identify the root cause.
Automation & Script Actions – With Incident Triggers and Script Actions, admins can set up KPI based triggers that invoke a series of actions from notifications to script-based automations, that help develop an automated framework with which to prevent and remediate issues. Admins can also benefit from a list of pre-built powerShell scripts curated from a community of the ControlUp users that provide an easy way of setting up automated remediation actions for a wide variety of commonly occurring problems.
Organizations realize that delivering a powerful and seamless experience for their remote workers is essential in building out a truly productive, distributed, digital workforce. Implementing a monitoring framework that helps proactively manage and optimize user experience is critical to achieving this goal.
Ali Sardar
Ali is a Sr. Product Manager within VMware’s End-User Computing Division. He leads the development of monitoring and intelligence platforms for Horizon, in particular, the Cloud Monitoring Service for the…
Manage strategically and stop day-to-day firefighting.
ControlUp’s native integration with VMware Horizon gives Horizon administrators full-stack visibility—from the processes on a virtual desktop to the processes on a VDI client and everything in between—to their Horizon environment. This visibility ranges. Having unmatched insights into your environment from a simple, elegant console allows Horizon administrators to detect, troubleshoot, and remediate the root cause of issues in their environment, regardless of the source!
Employee experience is paramount to the acceptance of VDI; anything that detracts from it will frustrate your users and lead to lost productivity. A poor user experience can be caused by many factors, including excessive logon or application launch times, high protocol latency, or restricted bandwidth. ControlUp provides early detection of issues that impact user experience, and allows administrators to quickly find the root cause of issues and fix them or, with the use of ControlUps self-healing functionality, solve issues without an administrator's intervention.
ControlUp offers a wide variety of powerful multi-target management actions and a Script Actions platform that allows self-healing and automated remediation of issues. ControlUp’s dashboard gives Horizon administrators unparalleled control of their environment through the use of built-in, script, and automated actions.
ControlUp makes it possible to identify and correct issues that may cause problems for your users. This includes finding Horizon machines booting from the wrong snapshot, analyzing logon duration, analyzing Blast and PCoIP sessions, freeing up resources from idle desktops, and automatically giving critical processes a higher CPU priority.
In today's modern workspace, desktops can be deployed from a number of different sources. ControlUp supports Horizon 7 and 8, Horizon RDSH, Horizon Cloud, Horizon VMC Cloud on AWS, Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure, Horizon Cloud on IBM Cloud and other desktop and application sources. ControlUp’s all-inclusive dashboard provides a unified view of every virtual machine and user session in your environment and allows you to take action from the same console, uniting all your deployments in a single view.
The unexpected change to global remote work has stressed VDI resources beyond their intended capabilities. Being able to see, in real time, the condition of your infrastructure is and, more importantly, how it impacts user experience has never been more important. ControlUp Insights aggregates data over the course of a year, to give you in-depth visibility into experience trends, so you can proactively plan how to deal with issues before they affect your uses. ControlUp Insights offers a wide array of reports, including user activity, user experience, application activity, resource consumption—including hosts, servers, and even processes data—and system health.
Learn!
The world of work has pivoted from its small number of physical offices to countless numbers of remote workspaces. Gartner says 71% of employees do not believe HR understands what they want and need. It’s now up to IT to foster a digital culture by focusing on the digital employee experience.
Learn how VMware Horizon and ControlUp create a high-performing digital experience for both employees and IT.
In our first session, you will learn how VMware Horizon can:
- Modernize operations
- Enable remote work
- Manage workloads across the Hybrid Cloud
- Secure data and achieve compliance
- Build resiliency
And, you will learn how ControlUp complements Horizon to:
- Capture problems, end-to-end, in real time
- Remediate end-user issues in just minutes
- Optimize the user experience to maximize productivity and performance
- Proactively notify IT about issues with published applications or resources
- Automatically fix people’s recurring problems
After we learn how ControlUp and Horizon play together (we don’t run with scissors here), we will spend the evening playing at Topgolf Dallas, having fun, food, and drinks hosted by ControlUp.
TopGolf Dallas offers climate-controlled hitting bays, Angry Birds game, Toptracer shot tracer, a full-service restaurant and bar, and an outdoor patio with fire pits (and that sounds like a pretty great experience to us).
Space is limited. Once your registration is approved, you will receive a confirmation email.
Horizon + ControlUp: It’s a Blast
Next, I wanted to see how ControlUp worked with VMware Blast Extreme. Blast is VMware’s remote display protocol of choice and can have a profound effect on the overall experience that an end user has with their virtual desktop. I found a couple scripts that looked interesting: Analyze VMware Blast Session, which provides the statistics for a Blast session, and the Reduce Session Bandwidth Consumption script, which reduces the maximum frames-per-second (FPS) sent. Limiting how often a screen is refreshed can save bandwidth, but it can also cause unacceptable video jitter and lag in applications.
To test these two scripts, I connected to a local Horizon desktop. I ran a 1720 x 720 video on it to generate a load on Blast, then ran the Analyze VMware Blast Session script. It reported, among other things, that my RTT was 1ms and that it was refreshing at 22 frames per second; the ControlUp Dashboard showed that it was consuming ~6 Mbps. The video on the desktop played smoothly and the applications were responsive.
Once I had a baseline of the FPS and the feeling for the responsiveness of the desktop, I used the Reduce Session Bandwidth Consumption script to set the FPS to 5. By doing this, it reduced my bandwidth usage in half (~2 Mbps). The video was extremely jittery and there was a slight lag when working with documents, but in certain cases it is desirable to sacrifice smoothness to conserve bandwidth. Horizon does have a group policy object (GPO) that allows you to change Blast parameters permanently, but for one-off testing and emergency situations, Reduce Session Bandwidth Consumption definitely comes in handy.
You can find a demo walk-through of this ControlUp capability on VMware TestDrive.
Bridging the gap with ControlUp
Ready to get started? Pick a time that works for you, and our sales engineers will walk you through a live product demo.
VMware + ControlUp: A Script for Success
VMware Horizon has proven to be extremely reliable and performant over the past decade, but when issues do come up with it, with one of its features, or with the devices users are using to connect to it, they must be resolved quickly. With ControlUp, you can monitor your entire VDI environment from a single dashboard and when problems arise, you can investigate and solve them from that same dashboard. When script actions are used in conjunction with ControlUp’s triggers, you can start on your journey to having a self-healing environment.
You can take a look at the full range of ControlUp script actions in their Script Library. If you’d like to learn about creating your own scripts, they have a thorough blog post that walks you through everything involved you need to get started.
Ali Sardar
Ali is a Sr. Product Manager within VMware’s End-User Computing Division. He leads the development of monitoring and intelligence platforms for Horizon, in particular, the Cloud Monitoring Service for the…
Gain insight into your VDI and DaaS environment
Optimize your approach to physical endpoint management
Proactively identify outages and prevent productivity losses
Monitoring Horizon Sessions, End-to-End
ControlUp can monitor a Horizon session from end-to-end—literally from a thin client to the processes running in a virtual desktop. The platform’s dashboard can monitor Windows 10 IoT thin clients, as well as those from another of VMware partners, IGEL.
By right-clicking on an IGEL thin client in the ControlUp console, you can see script actions that are relevant to that device. These allow you to quickly pinpoint and isolate issues that your users may be having with IGEL thin clients or to see if other issues in your environment are impacting the thin clients. For example, if a user is having an issue, you can use the Shadow terminal script to take a look at what they are seeing on the IGEL device. There are scripts to wake it up, see the machine details, update its configuration, and even perform a graceful reboot of an IGEL device directly from the ControlUp Console.
To get a better feel for the extensibility of ControlUp, I decided to dive deeper into a few of these scripts.
Consider VMware Unified Access Gateway (UAG). UAG is used with VMware Horizon, Workspace ONE Access, and Workspace ONE UEM to provide secure external access to an organization’s applications, so it’s critical that the UAG(s) are operational and running without any issues. ControlUp’s Get Horizon UAG Health script pulls all health information for the UAGs connected to the pods in a Cloud Pod Architecture (CPA) or the local ones if CPA hasn’t been initialized.
You can find a demo walk through of this ControlUp capability on VMware TestDrive. Here’s a short demo video that shows how it works:
(click above to watch the video)
Now that we know that UAG is healthy, let’s take a look at App Volumes, one of the major components of the VMware Just in Time (JIT) composable desktop strategy. If App Volumes has an issue, it must be detected and remediated quickly. ControlUp’s Health Check App Volumes End-Point script action takes care of that in just a couple of clicks. This script reports issues that are impacting users, as well as showing disk mounts and durations for App Volumes mounted in user sessions.
App Volumes does a great job of writing issues to event logs, but combing through these logs manually is, at best, time-consuming and the possibility of missing an important issue is high. ControlUp automates this process and produces and displays a report of user logon stages and the durations of those phases.
There is a caveat, however. When running this script, it’s important to know that some of the data written to the logs is written asynchronously and might not appear for several minutes after a user’s logon has completed.
There are any number of issues that can affect the health of AppVolumes; ControlUp’s Health Check App Volumes Endpoint checks more than a dozen of these. The output provides vast amounts of information, including which version of App Volumes was running, the App Volumes server, the number of App Volumes sessions, and that a test connection to the App Volumes server was successful. It also features a warning that restart recovery for App Volumes was not set.
You can find a demo walk through of this ControlUp capability on VMware TestDrive. Here’s a short demo video that shows how it works:
(click above to watch the video)
Once I confirmed that my App Volumes installation was healthy, I wanted to go deeper and make sure that App Volumes was performing well with my user’s desktops.
Logon duration is among the things that cause IT admins to lose sleep. So, it’s not insignificant that one of ControlUp’s most popular scripts is Analyze Logon Duration, which has recently been updated to include App Volumes information and now shows how long App Volumes take to instantiate in your environment. This information allows you to detect and investigate whether any of your App Volumes are having issues and causing slow login times for users. It can also eliminate App Volumes as a cause when investigating slow login times, so you can concentrate on finding the root cause.
To see the Analyze Logon Duration script in action, I used VMware’s TestDrive. TestDrive is a sandbox environment setup by VMware where our partners and customers can work with and take products out for a spin. You can talk to your VMware or VMware partner account executive or system engineer to get access to it.
Following the instructions in the ControlUp Advanced Monitoring for Horizon—App Volumes Health Check for End Points TestDrive walkthrough, I logged into TestDrive, logged on to a Horizon client, then launched the ControlUp Console.
I ran the script against my desktop; it showed how long each one of the App Volumes took to start. From the output, I could see that Epic 2014 (a popular healthcare application), WinDg (a Windows debugger), and Fiddler (a web debugger) were being mounted as App Volumes. For each of these applications, I could see the pre-start, logon, postsvc, and shell start time for them.
You can find a demo walk through of this ControlUp capability on VMware TestDrive. Here’s a short demo video that shows how it works:
(click above to watch the video)
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