App Volumes with user profile only not saving some settings

[DSJordan]

Hello!  We have installed App Volumes 2.15.  The instant clone is Windows 10, 1607 with UEM and the App Volumes agent installed.  The test user has a profile-only writable volume, is excluded from UEM, and can login, but some of the settings are not retained.

Things that ARE saved:

Calculator settings

Taskbar settings

Background settings

Internet Explorer settings

These settings all persist across logins.

Things that are NOT saved:
ANY Firefox settings, although we can see the FIrefox profile being updated in AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles.  If I, for example, change the default page, close Firefox and restart it, the default page change is not retained.

System volume

We are currently using UEM to persist massive amounts of data, causing login times to grow to 2 or 3 minutes in some cases.  I am investigating using App Volumes to retain user profile settings.  Firefox is the only application currently installed.  I initially tried putting FireFox in an AppStack, but found the settings were not being saved.  I put Firefox into the Gold image to see if that helped.

Thanks for any help or suggestions as to why these settings are not being persisted across logins.

[Ray_handels]

If settings are not being retained when stopping and starting FireFox during the same sessions your issue is not the writable. If settings do not retain after a logon and logoff, it could be your writable.

I would suggest looking at other places than the writable for that. Does this user have a FireFox UEM settings and are you removing local profile settings maybe?

[Ray_handels]

Sorry my mistake. We were able to track down release notes for 2.16. On of the fixes is below. So I would suggest upgrading to 2.16..

• When you log in to a VDI session with a Writable Volume attached and change Firefox settings, the changes are not saved when you close and restart Firefox.

[LukaszDziwisz]

We have switched over to Profile only writable volume when we upgraded to AppVolumes 2.15 and so far we like it a lot. It appears to be working fine and saves a lot of time trying to figure out UEM settings to persist some settings, however there are still someitems that need UEM as the writable volume doesn't capture everything.

So far we have encountered couple of applications like SecureFX, SecureCRT etc that needed direct flex enable to properly save licensing data. Also right now we are trying to figure out Cisco Webex Meetings Desktop App that replaces Meeting Center and Productivity Tools. The problem we are seeing is that users have to sign in to it everytime they log on to their vm. Base don initial investigation it appears that is saves that information somewhere in HKLM but we were not able to pin it down yet.

Does anybody have a good advise on how to track down those type of  applications so that we could make UEM persist those changes? Or, was anyone successfull with Cisco Webex Meetings Desktop App?

[DSJordan]

Well.  That took some "doing".  I started the upgrade in a server that was running Server Core.  It said it had to upgrade the SQL server, but it couldn't.  So I tried to upgrade SQL server from the command line, but that had problems, too.

So, I did a fresh install of Server 2016, with Desktop Experience.  Installed the Microsoft updates, then installed App Volumes 2.16, but no volumes would mount.  The App Volumes server had three HTTP errors listed in a row, and the login would just hang.

So I uninstalled App Volumes and reinstalled it.  After it was reinstalled and rebooted, it was asking to join an existing App Volumes server.  So I uninstalled it again, and reinstalled it, selecting the "overwrite the existing database" option.  Success!  At least, I could log in.

I still have the same problems, though.  Firefox settings are lost WITHIN THE SAME SESSION.  So if I load Firefox, change a bunch of settings, then close Firefox, then restart Firefox, it is like Firefox has never run.  The speaker volume setting is not retained between sessions, either.

Does anyone know if the volume is a setting that should be retained in the User Profile Only writable?  Any thoughts why the Firefox settings are not retained in the same session?

Thanks for any help!

[Ray_handels]

Does anyone know if the volume is a setting that should be retained in the User Profile Only writable?  Any thoughts why the Firefox settings are not retained in the same session?

Did I ever tell you that Windows 10 sucks???

Anyway, the way sound settings are being retained is that it creates a GUID for an application and keeps the info inthere. Because it seems as if this info is randomized you cannot hold that info through a session. Huib Dijkstra wrote a blog post about that ( https://www.huibdijkstra.nl/how-to-save-the-volume-level-of-remote-sessions-with-vmware-uem/ ) in which you need to use UEM to retain that info. Unfortunately there is no other way.

Regarding the FireFox. I would suggest raising a ticket as 2.16 release notes explicitly states that this issue would be resolved so they are aware of an issue with FireFox.

[DSJordan]

Ha!

We have a working instant-clone environment using UEM.  The users with larger profiles can take in excess of 2 minutes to log in.  I was hoping App Volumes would capture everything for the user.  And be faster.  While it appears that it maybe measurably faster, it is starting to appear that it is not a comprehensive way to capture and restore user settings.     I suppose we could look at a combination of UEM and App Volumes for user settings.

I wish I had seen that article a couple of years ago about saving the settings in UEM.  I ended up writing a program to save and restore it each time.

I just found that when I use the UIA + Profile template (before I was using Profile Only), the Firefox settings are retained.  Firefox is installed in the Gold Image.  They are retained in the same session as well as after logging out and logging back in.  Audio volume, however, is still not retained.  I have a UEM fix already working for the audio volume, but makes me wonder what other settings might not be retained.

Thanks for the help!

Scott

[Ray_handels]

For the record, the fact that audio settings are not being retained is not an issue of Appvolumes per say but more the way Microsoft works with it's audio management.

You can quite specifically say which settings should be retained and which not. In the snapvol.cfg of the writable you can add exclusions so settings won't be saved.

And if Firefox settings are only retained if you are using a UIA + profile and not with profile only it means that settings are not being saved in either the folder c:\Users\%username% or the HKCU but are retained in the HKLM. This is just bad programming if you ask me.

And adding either UEM or a writable does not speeds up logon for Windows 10. If you use both you even end up with longer logon times because you need to import the writable (which takes some seconds) and the UEM settings.