VMware Horizon Community
szilagyic
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Flash plugin in AppStack causing freezing/crashing of VM

Hello:

We've been having an issue that has been going on for a long time, in App Volumes 2.11 and still with 2.12.  I am trying to create an AppStack with Firefox, Chrome, and the Flash Plugin together.   I have done this and deployed it, but the problem is that the Flash Plugin will freeze in both Chrome and Firefox at times, and in most cases will start responding after waiting 20 seconds or so.  It is also very slow in some Flash-based websites as well.  There have been a few occasions, that it will cause a complete VM crash (the PCoIP session will terminate), and applications are closed as well because the VM actually crashes and reboots itself.

We are also using Writable Volumes, and the issue seems to happen with users that have the Writable Volumes as opposed to full clones that do not have Writable Volumes attached, but I am not sure if that is actually part of the issue.  I have been trying to figure out where the issue is, but so far no luck.  We do have all of our Writable Volumes attaching with a driveletter (although it is hidden) via the registry setting for AppVol, on our golden master image.  The issue is definitely AppVol related because I can install the exact same versions of Firefox, Chrome, Flash Plugin in a full clone VM and there is absolutely no delay or issues like there are when they are in the AppStack.

Has anybody else been able to deploy Chrome, Firefox, and Flash Plugin within an AppStack successfully without issues, and if so how did you do it?  I am looking for any suggestions.

Thank you in advance.

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DavidCraypo
Contributor
Contributor

well this won't help but we have the same problem too.  Anything flash basically bricks our VMs (even with flash optimizer).  Chrome especially would cause my other sys admins to have their VM freeze and eventually we'd have to manually log off their session.

Even with IE having all the flash plugins updated/installed, the horizon 7 web portal can't load, and some other VMware appliance pages have issues. Gotta love it.

We run horizon 7.0.3, appvol 2.12, win10 2016 LTSB, linked clones.

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szilagyic
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well this won't help but we have the same problem too.  Anything flash basically bricks our VMs (even with flash optimizer).  Chrome especially would cause my other sys admins to have their VM freeze and eventually we'd have to manually log off their session.

Thanks for the reply.  Are you having the issue with Writable Volumes attached, or without?  I've been trying to figure out if that has anything to do with this issue.  We are also on Win10 build 1607, Horizon 7.0.3 (latest server and agent versions).

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DavidCraypo
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We are using writables and they are attached for every user.

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Ray_handels
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Could it be that your users have permission to install applications themselves? Or update the flash player manually?

I've seen quite some issues with Flash (we have it installed in the golden image) that if you update it on your writable it won't work as expected anymore. Also, if you tell your users to remove the application they manually installed in the writable it will "mask" the flash player provided by the golden image or the appstack.

Also. Did you create the appstack from scratch or did you update it with a newer flash version??

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szilagyic
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Thanks for the reply... here is the additional information:

Could it be that your users have permission to install applications themselves? Or update the flash player manually?

In this case I made certain that the users did not install Flash manually or update it themselves.  It's definitely 100% being pushed out within the AppStack, and I've reproduced the problem with test VMs myself.

I've seen quite some issues with Flash (we have it installed in the golden image) that if you update it on your writable it won't work as expected anymore. Also, if you tell your users to remove the application they manually installed in the writable it will "mask" the flash player provided by the golden image or the appstack.

Yes I too am aware of these issues of manually removing, and made sure that is not the case here.  In our case we have Flash for IE installed on the golden master (which seems to be mostly OK and not having the slowness or locking issues), but we have Flash for Firefox and Chrome in the AppStack which is where we see the issues.

Also. Did you create the appstack from scratch or did you update it with a newer flash version??

Yes we created the AppStack from scratch, and I have updated it a couple of times to see if a newer version of Flash or Firefox or Chrome will help.  So far the issue has persisted.

Thanks for the thoughts.  If there's anything else that maybe we are missing please let me know.  I was hoping there might be an easy fix for this one.  It's very frustrating that it just doesn't seem to work out of the box and it sounds like others are having the same issues too.

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szilagyic
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We continue to have this problem and it's with multiple users.  Is there no solution to this?  It's definitely something with App Volumes.  We have users on Full Clone desktops without App Volumes, running the exact same browser versions with Flash and they don't have any problems.  I've been told there's a new AppVol version coming out soon but it would be nice if this was resolved or at least some sort of workaround.

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szilagyic
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Just confirming that upgrading to the Horizon Agent 7.6 seems to have helped the crashing problem, we haven't experienced actual VM crashes since.  However, Flash is still very very slow when it is inside of an Appstack and also intermittently unreliable with the browser plugin, sometimes the plugin will crash or not load for a particular site.

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