vCenter Operations for View 1.5 – Part 3: Conclusion: Why should a customer use vCenter Operations for View

After Part 1 and Part 2 of this series we come to the conclusion and the question how customers can benefit from vCenter Operations for View.
Let’s start with the traditional approach when troubleshooting View environments. One of the parts in a View deployment a customer will troubleshoot, is the User experience and consequential the PCoIP protocol.
All performance data of the PCoIP protocol can be found in these files on each VMware View Virtual Desktop:

C:\ProgramData\VMware\VDM\logs\pcoip_server_DATE_######.txt

For readability and troubleshooting purpose the log file is not really suitable, so Chuck Hirstius wrote a little program called PCoIP Log Viewer, which shows all values in informative graphs.

It’s a great tool but in my opinion it’s not suitable for bigger View environments or to get information for the complete View POD, because you get only information of single desktops and not the whole infrastructure. Think about a View environment of 100+ desktops.
With vCenter Operations for View a customer gets the following benefits:

• Holistic visibility into the performance and health of the VMware View infrastructure from the VMware View
  Servers up until each and every Virtual Desktop.

• Automated root-cause analysis – what is the most possible value/fault for the problem
• Self-learning analytics
• Dynamic thresholds and “smart alerts” that notifies early in the process before a performance issue happens
• Lower operating costs, because an administrator will get all the important data faster within a single pane of glass
• Better and consistent End-User experience

The only drawback of vCenter Operations for View is the price. It is a separate license which is not included in Horizon View or Horizon Suite. It is licensed by concurrent user with a list price of 100$. You can purchase it as 10 or 100 concurrent user pack.
Success Story
I deployed vC Ops for View at a customer site because the customer had problems with desktop performance and logon times. After same days (need’s some time for vC Ops to collect enough performance data) we found out that the Pod Avg. Session Logon Time was about 120 seconds which was really high, but not every desktop encountered this problem. So we checked to group policies and there we found the problem. After reconfigure the GPO the Pod Avg. Session Logon Time went down to approx. 7-10 seconds.