Horizon Cloud provides an environment in which you can have pods of varying types and deployed into various environments all connected to your single Horizon Cloud tenant environment. When the cloud-connected pods have onboarded to the cloud plane, they are listed on the administrative console's Capacity page. The Capacity page is your one-stop place from which you can oversee and manage your entire fleet of cloud-connected pods — add more pods to your tenant environment, edit characteristics of your pods, and remove pods. Besides using the Pods tab to operate on a pod as a whole entity, on the other Capacity page's tabs, you can configure sites (defined collections of cloud-connected pods) and configure settings for the pods' capacity-related resources such as stored credentials.
Introducing the Capacity Page
The Capacity page is available from the console's Settings icon. The Capacity page has multiple tabs. One way to think about how to use these tabs is that they provide access to the CRUD operations for the cloud-connected pods, the sites, and the capacity-related resources — the typical create, read, update, delete (CRUD) operations.
- Create operations
- The Pods tab provides a New action for beginning the workflow to add a new pod to your pod fleet. The Sites tab provides a New action for defining a new site. The Resources tab provides a Manage action that opens a new window. From that new window, you can add new Microsoft Azure subscription information to store in Horizon Cloud.
- Read operations
- The Pods tab serves as an access point to drill down and examine the details of a specific pod. You select the name of a listed pod to open a page that displays details about the pod. On the Resources tab, you select the name of a listed resource to open a page that displays details about that resource. On the Sites tab, the Edit button is used to view the details of a listed site.
- Update operations
- The Pods tab provides an Edit action for changing the pod's editable characteristics. The specific characteristics you can edit for a pod depend on the pod's type, the pod's existing characteristics, and what sorts of changes are supported for that pod type and characteristics. Similarly, the Sites tab provides an Edit action for changing a site's editable characteristics. The Resources tab's Manage action is the entry point for changing a resource's editable characteristics.
- Delete operations
- The Pods tab provides a Remove action for removing the pod from your Horizon Cloud tenant's fleet of cloud-connected pods. The Sites tab provides a Delete action for removing a site that is defined on that tab. The Resources tab's Manage action is the entry point for deleting the stored capacity-related resource, such as the stored credentials of a Microsoft Azure subscription.
Pods — Pod-Level Information
The Pods tab gives you an overview of your Horizon Cloud tenant environment's fleet of cloud-connected pods, their status, and how they are doing in terms of utilization of their resources. From here, you can also begin pod-level management workflows — such as starting a new pod deployment, editing characteristics of a pod, or removing a pod from your tenant environment. Each type of pod has its unique information provided on the Pods tab.
- A Horizon Cloud pod is built on pod-manager technology from VMware Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure.
- A Horizon pod is built on Connection Server technology from VMware Horizon.
| Column | Details |
|---|---|
| Status | Icon indicating the health status of the pod, such as online. For the meanings of the various statuses that might be displayed, see Pods — Displayed Health Statuses. |
| Name | Displays the current name of the pod. |
| Type | Displays the pod's type, according to whether the pod is one of the types supported to have in your pod fleet. Some examples of what the console displays in this column are On-Premises and VMware Cloud on AWS. |
| Version | For a Horizon Cloud pod, this column displays the software version from the underlying pod manager VMs' manifest information. This number reflects the version of software binaries at which the pod manager VMs are currently running. For a Horizon pod, this column displays the software version of the Horizon Cloud Connector that is connecting the pod to Horizon Cloud. |
| State | This column displays the current state of the pod deployment. The state's meaning depends on whether the deployment is built on pod-manager technology or Connection Server technology. For a brief description of the software technology difference between these pod types, see Introduction to the Service.
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| Location | Displays the geographic location that is currently associated with the pod. To change a pod's associated location, use the Capacity page's Edit action to associate the pod with a different location. See Edit Pod Characteristics. |
| Site | If you have configured Universal Broker, this column displays the name of the site that is currently associated with the pod. See Configuring Sites for Universal Broker. |
| Desktop & App Utilization | In your tenant environment, the desktop and application utilization percentage is a measure of end-user activity in terms of active in-use end-user sessions in use divided by the maximum number of potential sessions.
Note: In this release, the system reports desktop and application use only for your fleet's pod-manager-based Horizon pods on Microsoft Azure.
At the pod level, the Desktop & App Utilization column displays the percentage calculated according to the following:
As an example, imagine the pod has:
The percentage displayed for that pod in its Desktop & App Utilization column would be 2%, because there are 50 potential sessions (10 potential from the desktop farm and 40 potential from the applications farm), and 1 active session, so the calculation is 1 / 50 = 2%. |
| Capacity Used | In your tenant environment, capacity use is a measure of how much of the pod's virtual CPU resources (vCPUs) are in use out of the total capacity potentially available for that pod's use out of the underlying capacity infrastructure into which that pod is deployed.
Note: In this release, the system reports capacity use only for your fleet's pod-manager-based pods. The capacity utilization for such a pod is based on the Total Regional vCPUs quota of the subscription as a whole. All pods in the same subscription report the same capacity utilization.
As an example, for such pods, their vCPU capacity usage comes from your Microsoft Azure subscription's Microsoft.Compute Total Regional vCPUs quota. In addition to the vCPUs used for imported VMs, sealed images, farm RDSH instances, and VDI desktop instances, each such pod uses 4 vCPUs for its manager VM and 4 vCPUs for each of its Unified Access Gateway VMs out of your subscription's total regional vCPUs quota. |
| Agent Version | Starting with the v2204 release and that release's Horizon Cloud pod manifest, this column displays the version of the agent that matches the pod's manifest. For earlier manifests, this column might be empty until the pod is updated to the v2204 release's manifest or later. When one or more pods are running different versions of the agent than the base version distributed with the current pod manifest, a blue dot appears to the right of the version number. Click the dot to view the details. In addition, a notification is generated when an agent update is released. |
Pods — Available Pod-Level Actions
The specifics of the pod-level management actions you can perform from the Capacity page depend on the pod's type for the pod involved in the action — a Horizon Cloud pod or Horizon pod. You can initiate pod deployments for those pod types that have automated deployment wizards available in your environment.
| Action | Description |
|---|---|
| Begin the workflow to add a new cloud-connected pod to your pod fleet. Use this action to add a pod to your fleet after you have added your very first pod. The method for adding a pod depends on the type of pod you want and what is supported for your use in the current control plane service level. The following topics link to the detailed steps based on the type of pod.
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| Edit | Select a pod and click Edit to change the pod's editable characteristics |
| Remove | Select a pod and click Remove to remove the pod from your tenant.
Tip: The outcome of the remove workflow varies with the pod type.
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| If a pod is in monitored state and meets certain requirements, you can change it to managed state for use with Universal Broker and multi-cloud assignments.
Note: The console displays this action only for
Connection Server deployment types. As explained above, pod-manager-based pods are always in managed state. As a result, you cannot change the state of such pods.
Use this workflow by selecting a pod that is in monitored state and then selecting . See Use the Horizon Universal Console to Change a Cloud-Connected Horizon Pod to Managed State |
Pods — Details Pages
When you click a pod's name on the Capacity page, the pod's details page is displayed. The pod's details page provides information and actions you can perform on that pod. The types of detailed characteristics you can see for a pod depend on the pod's type. The types of actions you can perform on the pod depend on the pod's type and the current state of the pod. Some of the actions duplicate the workflows you can perform on the pod from the Capacity page itself, such as editing the pod and removing the pod from your tenant environment.
| Type | Details |
|---|---|
| Horizon pod deployments (pods deployed with Connection Server technology) | The page has the following tabs: Summary and Audit Logs. For information about the Audit Logs tab, see Working with Audit Logs. You use the action buttons on the pod's Summary tab to perform those actions that the service currently supports for use on these pods.
The number displayed in the Version No field reflects the version and build number of Horizon Cloud Connector that is currently running on the pod. |
| Horizon Cloud pod (pods deployed with pod-manager technology) | The page has the following tabs: Summary, System Activity, User Activity, and Audit Logs. For information about the Audit Logs tab, see Working with Audit Logs. You can use the action buttons on the pod's Summary tab to perform those actions that the service currently supports for use with this type of pod.
The number displayed in the Version No field reflects the version of software binaries at which the pod is currently running. This version is sometimes called the pod's manifest number or the pod's build number. When an updated version of the pod software is available for your pod, the screen displays a message which contains the manifest number that is available to apply to your pod. You can also edit the pod's subscription information from the pod's details page. See Change, Modify, and Update the Subscription Information Associated with Deployed Horizon Cloud Pods. From the pod detail's page, you can also examine the level to which such pods are using your Microsoft Azure subscription limits. See Examine a Subscription's Current Usage of Your Microsoft Azure Limits Using the Horizon Universal Console. |
Pods — Displayed Health Statuses
The cloud monitoring service (CMS) retrieves information from each of your pods and uses that information to indicate pod health on the Capacity page and in the Dashboard page. The meanings of the health statuses that are displayed in the Capacity page's Status column are listed in the following sections. On the Capacity page, you can hover your cursor over the status icon to view underlying details for the reported status.
- Online
- The pod has no health issues. The pod's connector service has Online status and all the pod's services are operational.
- Ready
- The pod has no health issues. You might see the Ready status briefly on the Capacity page when a pod is in transition to Online, such as when a pod deployment or update process is finishing.
- Error
- The pod has some critical health issues that you should address. Critical issues will affect the pod operating properly.
- Warn
- The CMS has retrieved the health status from the pod and some issues exist. The pod can operate normally because these issues are not critical to pod operations.
- Offline
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The CMS detects the pod has no connection service running.
- For a pod-manager-based pod, this status typically means that the pod manager VM is not running. This situation is rare, and usually happens when you manually shut down the pod manager using the Microsoft Azure portal or the Microsoft Azure cloud is having an outage.
- For cloud-connected Horizon Connection Server deployments , this status implies that there is no connectivity between the Horizon Cloud Connector and the control plane. Check if the Horizon Cloud Connector is operational and running.
- Unknown
- The CMS cannot retrieve the health status from the pod. For a Horizon pod, this status typically means the API call to that Horizon pod cannot retrieve information, such as when the Horizon Cloud Connector instance or the Connection Server instances are having issues and cannot provide the needed data.
Sites
The Sites tab is displayed when your environment is configured to use the Universal Broker. See Working with Sites in a Universal Broker Environment and its subtopics for detailed information about sites in a Horizon Cloud environment.
Resources
The control plane needs specific types of information to work with the pods that live in each type of resource capacity. This information is stored in configuration sets in the control plane when you associate the resource capacity with your Horizon Cloud environment. The Resources tab provides:
- An overview of those stored configuration settings.
- A Manage action to manage those settings. As of today, this tab provides the ability to manage the stored Microsoft Azure subscription information that the control plane uses to run and manage the pod-manager-based deployments for Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure. See Editing, Deleting, and Adding Microsoft Azure Subscription Information.
