Horizon 7.5, Persona Management and AppVol compatibility?

[MrCheesecake]

Happy Friday!

This week, we upgraded our View infrastructure from 7.4 to 7.5 and AppVol 2.13 to .14. Our linked clone desktop pools are Win7 and we updated the View and AppVol agents to the same versions as well. All desktops have been reprovisioned and are running the new agents.

We normally redirect folders (Desktop, etc.) with the Persona Management GPOs but they don’t appear to be working correctly after the upgrades.

Looking at the persona mgmt log files on the Win7 client system, it shows all the folders that it should be redirecting per our GPO so it looks like it’s getting the policy setting. If I grab the desktop from a console and run a ‘gpupdate /force’, log off and then log back in, the folders are redirected. We may be able to script this but haven’t had to do so before.

I just browsed the release notes notes for View 7.5 (after installing... d’oh!) and found a bullet towards the bottom of Compatibility Notes indicating that Persona Management isn’t compatible with AppVol.

Is this a typo or a real thing?  I know Persona Management isn’t compatible with Instant Clones but that’s why we’re still running Linked Clones for now.

Thanks for any tidbits of wisdom you can offer!

[vJoeG]

It's definitely not a typo and was also in the Horizon 7.4 release notes Release Notes for VMware Horizon 7 version 7.4

Are you indicating that with your 7.4 environment Persona was still working for you?

[MrCheesecake]

Hi Joe!

i didn’t realize that but everything was working well for us on 7.4.

We spent some more time on this today and found that PM was working under 7.5 but only around 25% of the time. I found that rebooting a linked clone before logging in increases the success rate dramatically.

We’re planning to hold our production environment to 7.4 until we can identify a workaround (which doesn’t sound likely given that VMWare doesn’t support this combination anymore) or we start work on migrating to UEM.

But inquiring minds want to know- what changed “under the hood” and why is this happening intermittently?

[vJoeG]

I wish I knew more to tell you. Being in the End User group doing client planning and deployment I don't have much insight into the dev process and what was changed in 7.5 to cause these results to PM in your environment.

[MuFunk]

We just upgraded from 7.1 to 7.5.1...  The persona issue happened to us on Win10 and Win7.   Not good. 

Rolled back to the 7.4 client and things work again.

[gpapacharalampo]

It's really unfortunate and very bad for a company like vmware to change a really good feature like that.

Until version 7.4 persona profiles worked perfectly.

Even though, the documentation mention on 7.4 appvolumes was incompatible with persona managment.

We have all the company on linked clones at least 100 application in app volumes and all the users have persona profiles.

Now, because they liked, like that we have to go to UEM????

I open an SR abou the issue and the enineer mention that "they are looking to find a solution, but the prefered way for profiles is UEM"....

The problem is that we have production... we are not working on sandbox.....

They should be more responsible for changes like that...

[Lieven]

I heard that VMware is not doing any development anymore on Persona Management. They are indeed pushing to UEM.

Since you have AppVolumes you are probably using VMware Horizon View Enterprise which also includes UEM licences.

The setup of UEM is very simple. See also my articles on UEM:

- https://www.ituda.com/vmware-user-environment-manager-9-2-components/ 

- https://www.ituda.com/vmware-user-environment-manager-9-2-installing-and-configuring/

- https://www.ituda.com/vmware-user-environment-manager-9-5-download-configuration-files/

Follow VMware Knowledge Base  ​to migrate from Persona Management to UEM

It's worth while investing your time in UEM

[gpapacharalampo]

Thank you for the info.

My complaint is the "silent" way vmware choose to go away from persona management and i suspect form composer and linked clones.

When we are in business and we base our infrastructure in their technologies they should make a big announcement and declare EXACTLY when they will stop the support.

No "silently" with hidden "announcements" and let the engineers, to speak to the end users....