I just wanted to take a minute to briefly share some feedback. I like the product and I think it is a good fit for some monitoring environments. However, i don't think mine is one of them. We are deploying a VDI environment based on VMware View, and expect to scale up to 5000-6000 virtual desktops within a couple years. The desktop nature of these VMs takes away some of the monitoring requirements. Specifically, we're using so-called non-persistent pools, which uses a desktop for a single session, then tears it down and builds a replacement one. Step one in the troubleshooting guide is to get a new session, which means new OS, new application, new everything. In the off chance that something doesn't work, View should destroy the VM for us, and that's the end of the story. If we weren't using the non-persistent pools, it might make more sense, but not for our highly transient environment.
That said, I think that this may have a future in our server virtualization side of things and I'll re-visit this in the future, but I personally don't see this as a fit for the way we're doing desktop virtualization. Overall, I give it 4/5 stars
One more quick note...
One feature that may make this more useful in a VDI environment would be a search view by user. That is, what user is logged into the virtual XP desktop. That's one item that we're struggling with - our current "solution" is to have the user run a "support script" icon on their desktop, that reports username, XP hostname, ESX host, IP, etc... If all that could be integrated into a hyper9 view, that would be interesting...
I have to add - after reviewing the local monitoring agent - yes, that stuff would be excellent. there is a lot of room for implementation on View, in fact i've been writing my own MS powershell for that crap.
Anyhow, the monitoring agent is prety good. it's the first agent i've found (outside vcenter itself) that can catch a vm reboot on a 4gb disk backplane, so i have great reports on that aspect. (even 1 minute, it detected a reboot - outside of monitoring via SNMP i've not yet been able to catch that.
good stuff. too bad this recession is killing my business sector in general this year, so i'm looking at next year for anything like this, budget-wise.
thanks,
Jamie
Thanks for both of your feedback. We are most focused on the virtual server side right now - but virtual desktop looks interesting. Based on your experiences with VDI, what do you think some of the biggest management challenges are there? Sounds like somewhat of a paradigm shift....
I think one of the more difficult management is the difference in help desk roles. Typically, help desk handles desktop issues, and hands off server issues. Since these are desktops, running on server hardware, there's some confusion. With virtual center, we can of course grant permissions to do just what we want the help desk to be able to do, but like I mentioned there is no easy identification of what user is on what machine in a dynamic environment. The View Connection Server's admin interface is all or nothing, and that's the only place that the user - desktop relationship is currently displayed. Since we don't want the help desk to have admin access to the entire 6000-desktop environment at the same time, they don't get that access. I see this being potentially helpful as a help desk extension. We can give the help desk the VI client with appropriate permissions, and if they could search by logged on user, and then have reboot / remote control capability. However - that's tricky. VDI works with a RDP sesion to the XP desktop, which isn't the same as the actual console, so you can't directly access the console through the VIC. Right now, we're using a VNC kind of thing to get the help desk to the desktop, and the users have to tell the help desk what their machine name / IP is.
Regardless, I am a consultant, and once this engagement is over, I may get a server virtualization project next. I'll keep this in mind for future use.