Recently, VMware updated the Horizon Toolbox, a fling for Horizon. The Horizon Toolbox was formally known as the “View auditing portal” and acts as an extension to the Horizon View Administrator (Horizon 6.0 or above is required). This new web portal offers several functions that you, like me, might have missed in the View Administrator.

Auditing

Some extra Auditing functions are added that should give you extra insight into your Horizon View infrastructure.

  • Sessions:  Shows historical concurrent session trend for last 2 days, last week and last month. Shows current virtual desktop connections by desktop pools, and shows virtual application connections by RDS (Remote Desktop Service) Farms.
  • Usage:  Shows accumulated use time of users for last 2 days, last week and last month.  Shows all connections (user name, pool/farm name, machine name, connection time, disconnection time) for the past 2 days, last week, and last month.
  • Snapshots:   Shows parent virtual machines of linked clone desktop pools and descendant snapshots in a tree view. The snapshots not in use by linked clone pools are marked in grey, so that the View administrator can remove the snapshots not in use.
  • Clients:  Shows statistics for operation systems and versions of View clients in different types of view styles.

To be able to use the “Sessions” and “Usage” functions you will need to configure an event database from View Administrator.

Remote Assistance

The ability to remotely assist or control an users desktop is one of the most basic tools that IT administrators us in their work. Up until now you would have to use a 3th party tool to remotely control a View desktop.

With Horizon Toolbox you are able to provide remote assistance capabilities for the administrator or IT helpdesk to remotely view and/or control an end-user’s desktop in the Horizon View environment.

Device Access Policy

Device Access Policy provides a whitelist to control devices that can access Horizon View.

To make use of “remote assistance” and “device access policy” the guest OS needs to have Microsoft .NET framework 2.0 or higher running. Windows 7 and 8 have the necessary .NET framework components installed by default.

I think this is a great Fling and it would not surprise me if VMware will add some of the features into a future release of Horizon View. If you want to have a look at the Fling yourself you can head over to this site.