The Inside View of Desktops Layer

The Outside View of VMs layer provides an “external” view of the different VM guests - the metrics reported at this layer are based on what the VMware host is seeing about the performance of the individual guests. However, an external view of the VM guest operating system and its applications may not be sufficient. For instance, suppose one of the disk partitions of the guest operating system has reached capacity. This information cannot be gleaned from host operating system. Likewise, bottlenecks such as a longer process run queue or a higher disk queue length are more visible using an internal monitor. Internal monitoring (from within the guest operating system) also provides details about the resource utilization of different application(s) or processes.

The tests mapped to the Inside View of Desktops layer provide an “internal” view of the workings of each of the guests - these tests send probes into each of the guest operating systems to analyze how well each guest utilizes the resources that are allocated to it, and how well it handles user sessions, TCP traffic, and network loading.

By default however, clicking on the Inside View of Virtual Desktop layer, does not list the associated tests. Instead, Figure 1 appears, which displays the current state of all virtual desktops that have been configured on the monitored AHV server.

Figure 1 : The current state of the desktops configured on the Nutanix AHV server host that is monitored

To return to the layer model of the VMware VDI server and view the tests mapped to the Inside View of Desktops layer, click on the component layers link in Figure 1. The tests depicted byFigure 2 then appears.

Figure 2 : The tests associated with the Virtual Desktop layer of a VMware vSphere VDI

Almost all the tests depicted by Figure 2have already been dealt with in the Monitoring the Nutanix AHV server monitoring model. The two tests that are specific to the Nutanix AHV VDIr model are the following:

  • Browser Activity - OS Test

  • Virtual Desktop Sessions DetailsTest

  • Virtual Desktop Session Startup Details Test

  • User Profile Management - OS Test

  • Personal vDisk - OS Test

  • PCoIP Session - OS Test

  • Domain Time Sync - OS Test