Horizon View Desktop Pool does not provision VMs

Today i encountered a problem with Horizon View version 6.0.1 that did not provision virtual machines (VMs) even thought the Desktop Pool configuration said it should. Before i continue i admit that the Horizon View version is kind of old but it’s for a good reason so let’s not discuss that.

The Desktop Pool settings included:

• Min number of machine:10
• Max number of machines:300
• Number of spare (powered on) machines:5

There were 213 VMs deployed but only 2 spare VMs when the customer contacted me. Customer setup includes:

• 2 x Horizon View Connection Servers
  • The problem Horizon View Desktop Pool used Full Clones and dedicated assignments.
• 1 x Horizon View Composer Server
• F5 Load Balancer
• 1 x Nutanix based vSphere Cluster version 5.5 U3

My investigation included the following:

• Check the Horizon View Admin interface for:
  • Desktop Pool error(s)/failure(s)
  • System Health errors(s)
  • Events section error(s)
• Check Horizon View Connection Servers for:
  • Windows Event Viewer error(s)/warning(s)
  • Errors and/or failures associated with the corresponding Horizon View Desktop Pool in the log files found in directory c:\ProgramData\VMware\VDM\logs
  • ADAM Database, via ADSE Edit, errors. Actually verified that the ADAM database Desktop Pool information was the same as specified via the Horizon View admin interface.
    • Connect to the ADAM database via ADSI Edit with the following information:
      • Computer localhost:389
      • Connection Point DC=vdi,dc=vmware,dc=int
• Verified that number of VMs in the Desktop pool were the same as actual VMs in vCenter Server.
• Verified that there were no errors in vCenter Server
• Verified that vNetwork Distributed (VDS) switch ports were available.

Nothing of the above solved my problem so next step was to try some configuration changes and the first one was the Desktop Pool Provisioning Timing setting. I changed the value from “Provision machines on demand” to “Provision all machines up-front”.

I also changed the Max number of machines to 216 instead of 300. This actually worked and another 3 VMs were created. This proves that the Horizon View VM provisioning works, the problem is that the provisioning workflow is never called. After this test i changed the configuration back to original configuration and deleted the newly provisioned VMs so we only had 2 spare VMs in the Desktop pool.

Next thing i checked the VM status in Horizon View and i found 3 VMs had status “Agent Unreachable” and when i reset these VMs and they came back with Status Available the provisioning started.

Case solved by resetting VMs with Status “Agent Unreachable”…. This is something a resolution i have never seen before.

Thanks to viewgeek for troubleshooting input.