This dashboard gives an overall performance of the network portion of the Desktop as a Service. Together with the Horizon Datacenter Performance dashboard, it provides the complete Horizon overall performance visibility.

Just like the Datacenter portion has Consumer Layer (VM) and Provider Layer (ESXi), the Network portion has Consumer (Protocol) and Provider (network infrastructure). The two layers have different metrics and it is important to understand when they correlate and when they do not. For example, Packet Loss metric at the consumer layer does not always mean that there is packet loss at the provider layer. Protocol packet loss is measured by the desktop agent. Horizon agent can drop packets simply because the packets are stale or out-of-order. Sometimes, there are packet drops occurring by the physical or virtual switches, which impact the consumer layer. This occurs with non-optimal network routing, protocol hair pinning, firewall mis-configurations, Network QoS settings, and so on.

Design Consideration

The dashboard works as the entry point of monitoring. It can drill down into the RDS Farms dashboard and VDI Pools dashboards, providing users the ability to branch out as they drill down.

How to Use the Dashboard

Review the headline scoreboard spanning the top of the dashboard.

  • They are color coded. Click to edit the widget and familiarize with the threshold.

Review the table Pods and World

  • It lists all the Horizon Pods. If you want to see the overall number, the object Horizon World encompasses all pods.

Select one of the entries in the table.

  • The performance of the selected entry is shown in the health chart.

  • The RDS Farms, VDI Pools, and vSphere Distributed Switch in the selected pod is listed in the tables underneath.

Review the tables RDS Farms if you are using RDS.

  • Pay attention to the hosts that are not performing.

  • If the current number of sessions is 0, then there are no recently active sessions, but there were sessions in the last seven days.

Review the tables VDI Pools if you are using VDI.

  • Pay attention to the VDI Pools that are not performing.

  • If the current number of sessions is 0, there are no recently active sessions, but there were sessions in the last seven days.

Review the tables Distributed Switch if you are using VDI.

  • Distributed Switch is part of vSphere Datacenter, while RDS Farm and VDI Pool are part of the Horizon Pod. There is no direct mapping between them. Automated RDS Farm and Automated VDI Pool do not span multiple Distributed Switch as they live within a vSphere Cluster.

Select one of the entries in the table.

  • Its KPI is shown in the scoreboard. The KPI of selected object scoreboard is a shared widget, driven by all three tables. This is why the KPI varies depend on the type of object selected.

  • The relationship to other objects is shown in the relationship widget.

Points to Note

  • vSphere network is by nature distributed. Each ESXi contributes to the physical NIC. This represents the physical capacity. Distributed switch and its port groups span across these independent network cards. This makes it harder to define and measure its performance. Unbalance can happen in ESXi or physical NIC. In a sense, it is like distributed storage (for example, vSAN). Capacity management does not apply to a port group, since its upper limit (also known as the physical capacity) can vary even by a minute.

  • Latency within a datacenter should be below 1 millisecond. Use vRealize Network Insight to study the latency or the retransmitting problems caused by moving into the lateral traffic.

  • Add a physical network using the appropriate management pack, such as True Visibility Suite.

  • Most packets are unicast, between a pair of sender and receiver. If your environment has many VMs sending broadcast packets to everyone and multicast packets to many targets, add a Top-N widget to find out which VMs are sending these packets.