This five-day course builds your skills in resolving common issues that occur in a VMware Horizon® environment.

You engage in a series of lab exercises to bring existing environment issues to resolution. The exercises mirror real-world troubleshooting use cases. These exercises equip learners with the knowledge and practical skills to manage typical challenges faced by virtual desktop administrators and operators and provides you with the advanced knowledge, skills, and abilities to troubleshoot VMware Horizon® 8 infrastructure related issues.

This workshop teaches the required skill and competence for troubleshooting VMware Horizon® Connection Server™, VMware Unified Access Gateway™, protocols, connections, and certificates.

By the end of the course, you should be able to meet the following objectives:

• Implement a structured approach to troubleshooting
• Resolve common issues that occur in a VMware Horizon environment
• Troubleshoot issues with linked and instant clones
• Configure the Windows client
• Identify the correct log level for gathering logs
• Optimize protocols for best end-user experience
• Discuss Horizon Connection Server advanced configurations
• List troubleshooting techniques for Horizon Connection Server common issues
• Interpret Horizon 8 Connection Server logs
• Identify Unified Access Gateway configuration and certificate issues
• List troubleshooting steps for Unified Access Gateway common issues
• Describe BLAST configuration verification using logs and settings
• Describe BLAST optimization recommendations for different use cases
• Describe Horizon 8 Connections and how to troubleshoot related issues
• Describe Horizon 8 certificates
• List troubleshooting steps for common issues with Horizon 8 certificates
• Leverage Horizon infrastructure troubleshooting steps to resolve issues

• New or Junior Administrators and Operators;
• System Managers accountable for staffing and training Horizon operators and administrators.
• Experienced System Operators, Administrators & Integrators responsible for managing and maintaining VMware Horizon solutions

VMware Horizon 8: Deploy and Manage class

This course also requires knowledge of the following:

• Using VMware vSphere® Web Client to view the state of virtual machines, datastores, and networks
• Opening a virtual machine console on VMware vCenter Server® and accessing the guest operating system
• Configuring Active Directory services, including DNS, DHCP, and time synchronization
• Restricting user activities by implementing Group Policy objects
• Configuring Windows systems to enable Remote Desktop Connections
• Building an ODBC connection to an SQL Server database

1 Course Introduction
• Introductions and course logistics
• Course objectives

2 Overview of Virtual Desktop Troubleshooting
• Structured approach to troubleshooting configuration and operational problems
• Applying troubleshooting methods
• Documenting the steps to resolving the problem

3 Command-Line Tools and Backup Options
• Using command-line tools
• Backing-up and restoring VMware Horizon databases

4 Troubleshooting Horizon Linked Clone Desktops
• Only applicable for Horizon 7.x environments
• Describe the components that make up a VMware Horizon desktop
• Explain how the View Agent Direct-Connection plug-In is useful for diagnosing problems
• Highlight the best practice for optimizing a VMware Horizon desktop
• Troubleshoot common problems with VMware Horizon desktops

5 Troubleshooting Instant Clones
• Discuss how instant clones are created
• Discuss what gets logged when an instant clone is created
• Discuss the keywords to look for in the logs when troubleshooting instant clones
• Discuss how to troubleshoot problems with instant clones

6 Windows Client
• Correctly configure the Windows Client
• Identify the correct log level for gathering logs
• Enable the required SSL configuration level for the environment

7 Ports and Protocols
• Discuss the key ports on a Horizon Environment
• Discuss protocols used in the Horizon Environment
• Understand the benefit of optimizing Blast
• Become familiar with the optimization features for Blast
• Implement GPO changes for Blast
• Become familiar with the causes for Black Screens
• Discuss how to troubleshoot Black Screen problems
• Identify problems encountered when applying GPOs
• Discuss how to troubleshoot GPO-related problems

8 Horizon Connection Server Troubleshooting
• Discuss Horizon Connection Server general troubleshooting techniques
• Identity Horizon Connection Server common issues through logs
• Describe AD LDS replication
• Discuss Horizon Connection Server replication common issues
• Review and Interpret Horizon Connection Server logs
• Compare successful and unsuccessful logs from everyday infrastructure administration tasks

9 Unified Access Gateway Troubleshooting
• List and identify common Unified Access Gateway deployment issues
• Monitor the Unified Access Gateway deployment to identify health and issues
• Identify and troubleshoot Unified Access Gateway certificate issues
• Monitor, test, and troubleshoot network problems
• Discuss general Unified Access Gateway troubleshooting processes

10 BLAST Configuration Verification
• Discuss BLAST Codecs and Encoder Switch settings.
• Describe how to verify BLAST configuration using logs and settings

11 BLAST Optimization
• List general BLAST optimization recommendations
• Summarize BLAST tuning recommendations that apply to WAN connections
• Summarize BLAST tuning recommendations that apply to work-from-home and home-office-tocloud use cases
• Describe recommended tuning options to increase display protocol quality for all use cases and applications.

12 VMware Horizon Connections Troubleshooting
• Explain Horizon connections
• Describe the role of Primary and Secondary protocols in Horizon connections
• Describe HTML client access connections
• Describe Horizon connections load balancing
• Describe timeout settings, supported health monitoring string, and suitable load balancer persistence values
• Identify troubleshooting steps for failing Horizon load balancer connections
• List troubleshooting steps for Horizon connections

13 VMware Horizon Certificates Troubleshooting
• List Horizon certificate functions
• Describe Horizon certificates scenarios.
• Discuss potential challenges related to certificates in Horizon
• Describe the troubleshooting approach to Horizon certificate issues

14 VMware Horizon Challenge Lab
• Leverage Horizon infrastructure troubleshooting
steps to resolve issues