VMware Horizon Community
PeteJohns
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Horizon View 7.4 "USB Redirection is not available for this desktop"

Hey,

We've in the process of upgrading to Horizon View 7.4 but are having intermittent issues with USB Redirection not pulling through.

The error in the Horizon client just says "USB Redirection is not available for this desktop". Weirdly half the time it works and half of the time it does not, even from the same underlying client.
Impacts multiple users from multiple desktops.

Horizon client 4.7.0

Windows 7 underlying and VDI

GPO set to Automatically Connect on Startup and When Inserted

Never happens on older version of Horizon View (6.x), which is still our production environment. Not sure if relevant but another oddity we see is that if a USB device is plugged in during start up, and redirection is working, the USB device installs itself on every login even when drivers are available. This is another thing that never used to happen on older version of Horizon.

Any ideas?

Cheers,

Pete

28 Replies
Lubbe176
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi, i had the same issue and managed to resolve it. My problem was running an old version of UEM, which was incompatible with the Agent used. Upgrading UEM9.0 to 9.8 (Using Agent 7.4 and 7.7 tested) fixed my issue.

matthewgONCU
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I'm also having this issues with 7.9. I don't understand as I can disconnect and reconnect and USB will start working. Is this a client issue or an agent issue?

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KjellO
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi,

Do you use UEM? If so, read this thread for a registry key to delay the timeout where UEM disables USB:

Re: uemFlags USB reg entry Fix :

Kind regards

Kjell Øyvind

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matthewgONCU
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

How is that different from this reg key? Not sure which one to use:

I found this regedit helped with the issue in 7.3:

reg.exe add "HKLM\Software\VMware, Inc.\VMware VDM\Agent\USB" /t REG_DWORD /v UemTimeouts /d 120 /f

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KjellO
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi,

I recommend that you implement a Pool for testing and then try it out.

For us this registry key fixed this particular problem when using Horizon Agent 7.8/7.9 in combination with UEM 9.7.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\VMware, Inc.\VMware VDM\USB]

"WaitForSessionIdTimeout"=dword:000000c8

Kind regards

Kjell

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matthewgONCU
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thanks KJellO. This is our test environment and test pool. Immediately after I made this change, I logged back in and got USB Redirection is not available for this desktop. I disconnected and reconnected and then all my USB devices were there. I have opened a ticket with VMWare but not really getting anywhere with them yet.

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NetworkSupportT
Contributor
Contributor

We're running into the same issue with USB redirect not working initially, until a quick disconnect/reconnect to session gets it to work. Have you head back from VMWare about a solution? I'm in the early stages of testing now, so thought I'd reach out to see if there was any update.

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matthewgONCU
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I added all the reg keys from this thread and it still didn't work all the time. I modified my UEM policies to use direct flex and I removed our disclaimer from windows (the one where the user has to hit okay every time) and that seemed to help as that didn't hold up the login process. UEM or DEM needs to figure out why this is happening as it seems to be a UEM issue and not horizon.

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DEMdev
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Hi matthewgONCU,

When DEM/UEM is installed, the USB component in the Horizon agent uses the session ID to check whether DEM/UEM has provided Horizon Smart Policies settings for that session. In recent(-ish?) Horizon versions, the Horizon agent sometimes can't determine the session ID within its default timeout of 60s, resulting in the "Can't get a valid sessionId within 60 seconds" message in the Horizon agent log.

That "disclaimer from windows (the one where the user has to hit okay every time)" definitely exacerbates this – the longer it takes before the user clicks that message away, the more of those 60 seconds are consumed. Once the timeout runs out, the USB component disables USB for the session.

The WaitForSessionIdTimeout setting that Kjell mentioned earlier in this thread is the only workaround at the moment. I wish there was something we could do on the DEM/UEM side for this, but that is unfortunately not the case.