VMware Horizon – Powershell scripting (ViewAPI)

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• This is part of a series of posts about monitoring VMware Horizon with PRTG:
  1. VMware Horizon – Powershell scripting (ViewAPI)
  2. VMware Horizon – Powershell scripting (Connection servers)
  3. VMware Horizon – Powershell scripting (Problem VMs)
  4. VMware Horizon – Powershell scripting (Desktop Pools)

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I’ll be starting my new blog with a series of posts about using Powerschell to get information about a VMware Horizon infrastructure.

I’m using PRTG as my monitoring system because it has very flexible customized scripting capabilities. This way you can just monitor anything by writing your own scripts (if it’s not already builtin).

Requirements

First things first. We’ll need to make sure we have installed the VMware.VIMAutomation.Core & VMware.VIMAutomation.HorizonView powershell modules. With those modules we can manage our vSphere infrastructure and VMWare Horizon (In fact, the VMware.VIMAutomation.HorizonView module provides the cmdlets to connect to the View API Service of VMware Horizon).

Install the modules with the following powershell commands

Install-Module -Name VMware.VimAutomation.Core
Install-Module -Name VMware.VimAutomation.HorizonView

Before we can start using the new cmdlets we need to import the necessary modules. As we will connect to our VMware Horizon infrastructure, we’ll need both the Core module and the HorizonView module

Import-Module VMware.VimAutomation.Core
Import-Module VMware.VimAutomation.HorizonView

When you run the import-module command for the first time, you’ll get a warning about joining the VMware Customer Experience Improvement Program:

I don’t mind joining their program as long as I’m using my test setup, but for companies I still prefer to disable sending any information about your setup to VMware (or any other company). You can set your choice using:

Set-PowerCLIConfiguration -Scope Allusers -ParticipateInCEIP $false

Where: 

Scope can be User, AllUsers or Session.

ParticipateInCeip can be $true or $false.

To get the current confiration run:

Get-PowerCLIConfiguration | select Scope, ParticipateInCEIP

To get a list of all available commands in the module use:

Get-Command -Module VMware.VimAutomation.HorizonView

For the HorizonView module, the list is pretty small:

Now that we have all our requirements set, we’re ready to start!

Connecting… and disconnecting

First thing we need to do is connect to the Horizon Connection server. Therefore we use the cmdlet connect-HVServer.

Connect-HVServer -Server connectionserver.horizon.cloud

Where connectionserver.horizon.cloud is the fqdn of your Horizon connection server (not a security server of UAG).

When no other options are specified, credentials will be prompted. This is most likely the same user you use to access the Horizon Console or Horizon Administrator website. You can also specify a user and password by using the parameters -User and -Password or by specifying a PowerShell credential object with -Credential.

Current open connections to Horizon View servers can be viewed by checking the global PowerShell variable DefaultHVServers. This is also the object we will be using further on in our scripts to get all the information out of our Horizon Infrastructure.

$global:DefaultHVServers

After we have done all our work, we clean up everything nicely of couse by disconnecting the server. I specify the -Confirm:$false parameter here to prevent PowerShell from asking me confirmation if I really want to disconnect this Horizon View server.

Disconnect-HVServer -Server connectionserver.horizon.cloud -Confirm:$false

View API

As briefly mentioned before, to get information from the Horizon Connection server, the PowerShell module actually connects to the Horizon View API. I could of course just point you to https://code.vmware.com/apis/902/view and let you search out all the information you need yourself, but there’s no fun in that isn’t it?

Let’s start by saving our Horizon server connection into the variable $cs. That makes it easier to get the necessary information out of it.

$cs = Connect-HVServer -Server connectionserver.horizon.cloud

If we take a look at the possible properties of our $cs object, there’s not much to find here.

$cs | Get-Member

There’s only 1 property that we are interested in, namely ExtensionData. The ExtensionData property contains all the information we need. And if you take a quick look at that property, you’ll see that’s a lot of information!

$cs.ExtensionData

The screenshot above is not even showing all the properties. I won’t be covering all those properties on my blog, but I’ll show you some interesting ones to get usefull information about our Horizon infrastructure into our monitoring system.

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That concludes our short introduction to VMware Horizon PowerShell scripting. We have the necessary modules installed and we can connect to our Horizon Connection server. In the next parts I will show you how to get some relevant information from the Connection server so we can monitor our Horizon Infrastructure.

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• This is part of a series of posts about monitoring VMware Horizon with PRTG:
  1. VMware Horizon – Powershell scripting (ViewAPI)
  2. VMware Horizon – Powershell scripting (Connection servers)
  3. VMware Horizon – Powershell scripting (Problem VMs)
  4. VMware Horizon – Powershell scripting (Desktop Pools)

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