Horizon Toolbox

At the beginning of this month a new version of the fling Horizon Toolbox 2.0 was made available. I missed it then but still wanted to share it with you all. It has almost been a year ago since the last update which I wrote an article about.

New features in 2.0

  • Console Access
    • List all VMs for desktop pools, and you can filter VMs by VM name or DNS name.
    • Clicking the VM name, the vSphere console for that VM will pop out.
  • Power-on policy
    • Lists all desktop pools and their power policies.
    • Power Policy can power on all VMs in a desktop pool with some schedule, like 8:00 AM on all work days.
    • You can setup power policy for each desktop pool.
  • Client IP address auditing
  • List detailed information for all broker sessions, including user name, Client IP addresses, login time and log out time.
  • Installation file
    • GUI installation process

Enhancements

  • Auditing performance has been enhanced due to improved SQL query.
  • Remote assistance
    • Update the workflow so it’s more stable with Windows Remote Assistance.
    • Compatibility improvement for different Horizon View version
    • The end user side installer makes sure Windows Remote Assistance model is correctly configured.

Last year I thought that maybe some of the features from the Horizon Toolbox would be adopted by VMware in a future release of Horizon View. So far this has not happend yet, but I still think the toolbox is a good addition for an administrator, more so now with the new features and enhancements in this new version.

For more details and installation instructions head on over to the fling site here.