AskAresh

Horizon Reach is a potent tool, and Andrew Morgan has put in a lot of blood, sweat and tears to develope it. What suprises me is why isnt this fling included into the Horizon product? We haven’t gathered here to talk about the product management and roadmap aspects 😉

Horizon Reach fling aggregates all the various Horizon POD information into its database. Typically, running Horizon API calls or Horizon Powershell modules might have to run them against individual pods to fetch information about that POD. The beauty with Horizon Reach is it aggregates all the information, we can write scripts/API calls to request information from there instead of writing Horizon POD specific scripts.

Let’s take a look at the following information from the Horizon Reach fling:

• What API’s are available with Horizon Reach?
• What all options are available to interact with Horizon Reach API?
• Script – Get a consolidated list of Horizon Farm details (Display the Name, Base Image details, Snapshot Version, Health and If provisioning is enabled)
  • Note the above can also be fetched using the old Horizon Powershell modules but trust me it’s pretty tricky to run a foreach loop for every object on the SOAP method.
• Script – Get a consolidated list of Horizon Desktop Pools details (Display the Name, Base Image details, Snapshot Version, Health and If provisioning is enabled)

What API’s are avilable with Horizon Reach?

After you have installed the Horizon Reach fling, go to the following URL to check out all the avilable API’s. Its the UI Swagger interface to simplify and understand each calls.

URL – https://horzonreach.domain:9443/swagger/index.html

What all options are avilable to interact with Horizon Reach API?

You can interact with the API with your preffered method such as Powershell or Postman or something else.

Postman – https://horzonreach.domain:9443/swagger/v1/swagger.json (You will be able to import all the Horizon Reach API as a collection within Postman)

Powershell – You can use the built-in modules of Invoke-RestMethod or Invoke-WebRequest method to interact with Horizon Reach API.

Scripts to get consolidated Horizon Farms/Desktops information

Pre-requsites:

• You need the Horizon Reach Server URL
• You need the password of the Horizon Reach Server
• The script provides you with the details of all Horizon PODs in your setup.
• The script was tested on PowerShell V5.x

#Horizon Reach Server Name or IP Address
$HZReachServer = "https://horizonreach.domain:9443"

#Ignore the self signed cert errors
add-type @"
    using System.Net;
    using System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates;
    public class TrustAllCertsPolicy : ICertificatePolicy {
        public bool CheckValidationResult(
            ServicePoint srvPoint, X509Certificate certificate,
            WebRequest request, int certificateProblem) {
            return true;
        }
    }
"@
[System.Net.ServicePointManager]::CertificatePolicy = New-Object TrustAllCertsPolicy
[System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.SecurityProtocolType]'Ssl3,Tls,Tls11,Tls12'


#API Call to make the intial connection to the Horizon Reach Server##
$HZReachLogonAPIcall = "$HZReachServer`/api/Logon"

#The body payload that comprises of the login API request
$body = @{
    username = "administrator"
    password = "enteryourpassword"
} | ConvertTo-Json

$HZReachlogin = Invoke-RestMethod -Method Post -uri $HZReachLogonAPIcall -Body $body -ContentType "application/json"

#Header along with the JWT token is now saved for future API calls
#You need to call this header in all subsequent calls as it has the token
$Headers = @{ Authorization = "Bearer $($HZReachlogin.jwt)" }

#API Call to fetch the consolidated (as many pods you have) Horizon Farm information##
$HZReachFarms = Invoke-RestMethod -Method Get -uri "$HZReachServer/api/Farms" -Headers $Headers -ContentType "application/json" -UseBasicParsing | Format-Table -Property displayname, baseimage, snapshot, enabled, health, isProvisioningEnabled

Write-Output $HZReachFarms

#API Call to fetch the consolidated (as many pods you have) Horizon desktop pool information##
$HZReachPools = Invoke-RestMethod -Method Get -uri "$HZReachServer/api/pools" -Headers $Headers -ContentType "application/json" -UseBasicParsing | Format-Table -Property displayname, baseimage, snapshot, enabled, healthDetail, isProvisioningEnabled

Write-Output $HZReachPools

GitHub – scripts/HorizonReach-Farms-Pools-Info at master · askaresh/scripts (github.com)

Observations:

• Farm Output:

• Desktop Pool Output:

• The following information (Display Name, Snapshot, Base Image, Health, Provisioning Mode) is pulled using the above scripts. I was much interested to see the snapshot versions of each Farms/Pools along with Health and provisioning status. Feel free to extract whatever details you are looking for there are plenty of other properties.

I hope you will find this script useful to fetch helpful information from Horizon Reach. A small request if you further enhance the script or make it more creative, I hope you can share it back with me?

Thanks,
Aresh Sarkari

Tags: API, Desktop Pools, Desktop Virtualization, Horizon, Horizon Reach, PowerShell, Published Application, VDI, VMware, VMware Horizon, vSphere