Horizon 7.2 Help desk Administration Portal
From the early days of Horizon, my clients have asked for a way to view and manage endpoints without needing access to the more robust administrative components of Horizon View. A simple portal to view all of the VDI sessions associated with the users in their organization. Something they can give to their first and second level support teams that provide basic, but frequent help desk support for their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and virtual application (published app).
In the View Admin console, you can add and remove users and permissions, create, update and delete Desktop Pools, Published applications, even Cloud Pod configurations. You might ask, why would I want my Help desk team to have access to such a wide array of tools?
Horizon 7.2 is proud to introduce a new Help Desk Tool, which provides IT admins with level one and two help desk functionality. Administrators can look up users and find their sessions; initiate Microsoft Remote Assistance; send user messages and, if needed, disconnect, log off and even reset desktops to quickly remediate and get the user up and running.
To access the new Horizon View 7.2 Help desk tool point your browser to the same URL as your Horizon View 7.2 HTML portal adding /helpdesk to the end (eg. https://view.vjoeg.com/helpdesk)
At the time of this blog post, you need to be a Horizon View Administrator to be able to login to the Help desk portal. Feedback from VMware is that a new Helpdesk-Administrator role is in the works for a future release of Horizon View, likely version 7.3.
Because of this several of my clients have decided to pause and not allow their Help desk teams access to the utility as this also allows them to access the Admin portal which has full control over the Horizon View 7.2 environment including Pools, Cloud Pod, permissions and more.
Once you are logged in you can use the search box to find the users that are configured in Horizon View.
Pick a username you go deeper into the sessions and entitlements for that user (Desktops and Applications) This screen also gives useful details like what protocol the session is using, the desktop or application type, when it was first connected, and how long the connection has been active.
Clicking on a computer name (eg win10-prod01.vjoeg.com) you are brought another level deeper into that session where the magic really happens.
Using the Horizon Help Desk Tool, help desk staff can take basic actions to help get the user up and running again, including:
- Sending a message to the user,
- Launching Microsoft Remote Assistance to actively help the user in session,
- Disconnecting and
- Resetting the VM.
Functional Note: Several customers have found an issue after upgrading to 7.2. And when they tried to log into the Help Desk Tool with their admin credential, the login screen just keeps spinning. This is documented in the known issue section of Release Note, and it’s due to username case-sensitive requirement. This will be fixed in the next update.
The Help Desk Tool is a feature of Horizon Enterprise Edition and Horizon Apps Advanced edition.
To experience the new Horizon Helpdesk Tool, download the evaluation copy of Horizon, or upgrade to Horizon 7.2.
