Hello @ all
My name is Martin and I am an IT-technician in our company. We are currently testing VMware Horizon View 5.2 in a small scale environment (only about 10 users).
The performance of our virtual desktops is excellent and we have not yet stumbled onto any serious problems which could not be solved with a bit of research but there still are some inconsistencies.
If there is already a Thread concerning the Situation I have not found it and my old pal the Internet did not lead me there I would really appreciate a push in the right direction if you will so thanks in advance.
First about our environment:
We are using VMware Horizon View 5.2 but not all of its applications. We only use the View Connection Server and the View Composer. No Persona Management or the like.
The desktops we deploy are in an automatic pool, with dedicated user assignment and they are linked clones with persistent disks (D:\).
We have 2 domains which have a trust setup between each other. The View desktops are in Domain_A while the users who connect to their desktop come from Domain_B. > as I said above everything works great and there are no connection problems or anything because of this trust relationship.
In the Group Policies of Domain_A there are no settings along the line of folder or profile redirection (which I believe should not matter anyway because the users are part of Domain_B).
In the Group Policies of Domain_B there are settings which redirect parts of the user-profile to a network share when they log on to their physical workstation. Now this network share is also added via a script in the virtual machine after a user logs in.
Now here is the situation:
When I recompose a virtual machine the procedure starts and proceeds without errors. The User_1 is logged off at the specified time, machine shuts down and is recomposed frome the new image. Everythin working fine and goes by the book.
Now this is where it starts to get fishy. After View is done with the recomposition and User_1 logs back on the first thing is he has to do is put in his user credentials a second time - after the View Client has already established the connection to the machine. - Well that seems alright because afterwards future log-ins function as usual so no alarm bells yet.
After User_1 logs on to his machine all his files can be found on the persistent disk (D:\users\...) so you would think everything is alright - wrong! After starting the Internet Explorer or Microsoft Outlook or any other application which User_1 has specificaly set up for his use (Favorites etc.) all these settings are gone (e.g. Sites in Internet Explorer/Security Settings all deleted).
Now I am not sure what went wrong here though I do have one or two suspicions which I would like to share and maybe get feedback on.
I stated earlier that we have 2 domains - one without specific group policy settings (Domain_A = View Desktop Domain) and one with (among others) folder redirection (Domain_B = "User Source Domain"). Now I can imagine that right there might be the root of my problem. VMware View is redirecting user-profiles to the persistent disk (D:\) BUT the group policy settings of Domain_B (from which the users connect) also wants to redirect some of this information to the network share (W:\). But the network share only "appears" after User_1 has logged himself on because of the above mentioned autostart script on the virtual desktop.
Can someone confirm if this could be the source of my little problem? Do these settings (View redirection & Domain_B redirection) inhibit each other? Would the group policies from Domain_B even apply in a scenario such as this? If this is indeed the problem I might be able to work something out with the domain administrators but until I have any confirmation (or the opposite ^.^ ) of my suspicions I don't want to start "negotiatiions" for the sake of a test-environment. After all this is not a huge problem just pretty inconvenient every time we would want to recompose the pools.
Anyway thank you very much for your attention and for any help or advice you might be able to offer. If I happen to find a solution on my own I will gladly share it here in case someone has similar difficulties. Until then
Martin