VMware View 5.3 with persona problems

[mougT]

We are experiencing some View Persona problems after upgrading to Horizon View 5.3. During log on the View Persona Service crashes. The default recovery is to restart the service in 1 minute. We have adjusted this to 0 minutes as a workaround, but problems still occur for some users. We can not find any indication in the Persona logs why it crashes. The service just stops writing in the log in the middle of a sentence. We have created another test pool from an earlier snapshot, and the problem is not present until we install 5.3.

We have a floating linked clone pool with Windows 7.

The Windows template have the latest OS patches installed.

Office and some other programs are installed on the template.

We use approx. 15 streaming ThinApp's which are added to the pool in View Administrator.

Any suggestions or other people experiencing the same problems?

[Binary1010]

When you installed the new View Agent after upgrading to View 5.3 did you just upgrade from the installer or Uninstall Manually from Programs and Features?

When I moved to View 5.3 I had to manually uninstall the agent before the Agent would work properly.

Another possibility is, for a test template, to remove the ThinApp's out of the picture.

[mougT]

Thanks for your response.

I originally upgraded the agent, but have since manually uninstalled it, rebooted and reinstalled. Still no success. I have also tried a test pool without ThinApps as you suggested, but even though it seems to result in fewer crashes, the service still crashes on most of the log on attempts.

I have since my original post also tried with a new clean Windows 7 image. I have added all the ThinApps to this test pool, and put the vm's in the same OU so the same polices get applied. On this pool the View Persona service does not crash. So there must be something on my original template that causes View Persona 5.3 to crash...

[Binary1010]

Just another question then,

are the persona management ADM(X?)  templates being pushed from a domain controller or local? There were updated ones that came out with the new release.

If they are being pushed via GPO, is the new "test" win7 image receiving the same group policies?

[mougT]

View Persona is controlled by AD, and both the original vm's and the test vm's are placed under the same OU. I have used the classic adm templates, but I have not replaced them with the new ones...

[peterbrown05]

so Persona should not be crashing. So there is something obviously wrong here.

If Persona does crash, it writes out a dump file which we can then use to analyse what went wrong. If you are willing, can you find it and get that file to me?

if will be saves here:

C:\ProgramData\VMware\VDM\Persona Management\data\

with a filename in the format:  RTOLOGONSERVICE_MINIDUMP_<PID>_<TID>_<Exception code>_<Exception string>_<date>__<time>.dmp

for example:

RTOLOGONSERVICE_MINIDUMP_3856_256_0xC0000005_ACCESS_VIOLATION_12_10_2013__15_32_32_0289.dmp

cheers

peterB

[mougT]

The dump file is attached. Thank you for your asistance.

[peterbrown05]

Hi mougT - I shall follow up with a private email, as there are some more steps we'd need you to take to dig into this further,

If / when we find the solution, then we can post back here for others to enjoy.

cheers

peterB

[peterbrown05 · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the various exchange of files. So we took a look, and might see the cause of the problem - it certainly shouldn't crash (and we will be investigating that seperately, but hopefully we can get you up and running with a config change)

We can tell you are configuring Folder Redirection incorrectly, which may be leading to this problem.

When configuring folder redirection in the admin template, the paths need to be given as unc paths.  However, you are configuring them as local paths.

For example, for Temporary Internet Files you configured "d:\temporaryInternetFiles\someuser"

It’s fine for the target to be on the local machine; just needs to be a UNC path like      \\<local machine>\TemporaryInternetFiles\%username%

can you try changing that and see if the problem persists?

cheers

peterB

[mougT]

I changed the path to "\\%computername%\d$\temp\TempInt" instead, and so far the service has not crashed! Thank you so much !!!

The policy was the same with the 5.2 agent. We experienced no problem with that agent, so I guess this error is unique to 5.3.

[peterbrown05]

excellent news... we are investigating why the crash happens now, so hopefully we can get that fixed up soon.

glad we got you up and running again.

cheers

peterB