Now that the dust is starting to settle around the Broadcom and Omnissa divestiture, I’m fielding a lot of questions around what this means for the Management Pack for Horizon and Omnissa’s Horizon monitoring strategy moving forward. The questions are mostly focused on future development plans for the management pack, licensing implications for usage, support and compatibility, and the future for Horizon Monitoring with Omnissa, which I will tackle one by one.
Future Development for MP4H
While I can’t specifically speak to whether Broadcom will continue developing the Management Pack for Horizon, I can say that they have retained ownership of the MP and therefore control all future development and support.
It is also important to note that the current Management Pack for Horizon is still available for customers to use (link). Broadcom customers should reach out to their VMware Broadcom account and product teams to understand the current product roadmap and stress the importance of having a Horizon MP to successfully operate their VDI environment.
There are stipulations around licensing, support, and compatibility that need to be discussed. Which brings me to my next topic…
Licensing Implications for Usage
When this topic was first being discussed the licensing implications were not favorable to most customers, as they would be required to buy VCF/VVF for all their Horizon servers. However, as of August, 2024, the product terms of use for Aria has been updated to allow customers who have purchased VVF for VDI to use Aria and the Management Pack for Horizon “at no additional cost”. However, you must have at least some quantity of VCF or VVF in your environment to gain access and license the solution, but for the Horizon workload servers those are included at no additional cost.
The most recent document has slightly updated language to state that the total cores that can be monitored include your total VCF cores and the total VVF for VDI cores. Anything beyond that requires additional licensing.
Please refer to your Broadcom account and product teams for any further clarification, but as of 10.14.24 that is what the documentation states.
Support and Compatibility
Okay… now that we know we can at least use Aria and MP4H at “no additional cost”, other than what is required to license and gain access to the platform, what about support and compatibility?
Since Broadcom owns both Aria and the Management Pack or Horizon, support for both the base platform and the current Management Pack, with the specified versions of Horizon on the Interop Matrix, is still provided by them. If issues do arise, please follow your normal Broadcom support process to initiate a support request.
From the Omnissa side, the plan is to test and validate new versions of Horizon with the existing Management Pack for Horizon 2.7.0. Since the MP is essentially a query engine of the Horizon API’s, as long as the Horizon APIs maintain compatibility, the MP should continue to work as normal.
Into the Future with Omnissa
Looking forward with Omnissa, the primary monitoring options are Omnissa Intelligence for Horizon along with the Digital Employee Experience Management (DEX) Add-On for Horizon. For customers who require vSphere monitoring and/or cannot be cloud connected, Aria + MP4H is the primary solution of choice along with Intelligence to add additional capabilities such as AI/ML Insights and Root Cause Analysis, Application Performance, and last mile telemetry (Wifi, WAN, LAN performance).
Just like with Aria, Intelligence includes rich out-of-box dashboards and customers can create powerful custom dashboards using widgets to suit their needs. Below is an example of the latest Horizon Operations Overview Dashboard and its ability to simplify insights into how the Horizon Service is functioning.
Here is an example of using the custom dashboard capabilities of Intelligence to create an Application Performance and Utilization dashboard. From here we can see the overall Application Experience scoring, which apps are crashing the most, App utilization by resources and users, and which apps are consuming the most CPU and Memory.
Wrap Up
As you can see, the future is bright for Horizon monitoring and reporting with Omnissa Intelligence. With new platform capabilities that deliver next gen alerting with “Insights” and root cause analysis capabilities, which not only identify issues but also provides solutions to resolve them, Omnissa Intelligence can dramatically improve a Horizon administrators ability to improve overall user experience.
For customers who want to continue using Aria for vSphere and Horizon monitoring but want to take advantage of the new capabilities of the Omnissa Intelligence platform, both solutions are complimentary to one another and can work side-by-side with no interoperability issues.
Finally, for those customers who have cloud data restrictions and want to keep everything on-prem, you can continue to run Aria and the Management Pack for Horizon “at no additional cost” to your existing VCF/VVF entitlement.