VMware Horizon Community
MuraliRath
Contributor
Contributor

User writable (Profile Only template) volume attached as offline mode

Hi all -

Trying to create a user writable volume, attached to an AD group. The agent successfully mounts the VMDK, but it does it in "offline mode" so Windows can't access it. Once I get to the desktop, and set the attached volume to "online" the agent then kicks in and works appropriately. What do I have configured wrong?

Also, I'm setting HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\svdriver\Parameters\DriveLetterSettings to 1, but it's not mapping the drive with a letter (once I manually "online" the drive)

Any help is appreciated - thanks!

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Ray_handels
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Just guessing here but could it be that you've created a golden image with a domain user account that has a profile in it and you are using this user with the writable volume?

Also, do you have the same version of agent/ manager and template?

And did you refresh the machine after logon? If using a writable volume this is an absolute must. Otherwise you will have issues with multiple profiles in a writable volume.

And i believe you need to set the WritableVolumeDL=1 paramater, not the one you are using there.

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MuraliRath
Contributor
Contributor

Hi Ray -

It's a brand new install of App Volumes - agent & manager are both v2.6... the template is the base template provided with the install.

I'm trying to do a persistent desktop that uses a writable volume for the userdata so that I'm somewhat abstracting how the user is saving data. Having said that, I tried what you suggested - forced a refresh after the initial attachment, but still no such luck. In terms of your other question, no, the gold image isn't on the domain - all configuration is done using the local admin account... I then log into the desktop with my domain account.

After refresh, the volume still gets attached in offline mode. I just noticed a popup about it being due to admin policy (screenshot attached) - going to try and track that down. During an earlier build POC, I had an issue with the user removable GPO policy... but have since disabled that in favor of the VMware View USB redirect policy to prevent user USB drives.

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Ray_handels
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Looks like you indeed set a policy that disabled new disks. What we did see is when using USBDLM it gives us pop up warnings in notification area about a new disk being attached.

What happens in Windows when you login with a writable volume is that a new disk is created in windows (and depending on settings is given a drive letter) and that drive is mounted under the c:\snapvolumestemp dir.

It could be that some policy blocks this setting. To be honest i'm not quite sure what policy could be doing that but has to be something related to disks (DUH Smiley Happy)..

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MuraliRath
Contributor
Contributor

I'm not sure what policy it would be - when we had the policy set last year on removable disks, I couldn't manually override the GPO - it wouldn't work, period.

The difference being here that I can override it through Disk Manager, which leads me to believe it's not a security policy. Googling the error leads me to this VMware KB: VMware KB: Unable to initialize a second virtual disk within Windows 2008 or Windows 2008 R2 which tells me SAN Sharing is disabled... but the Win7 Desktops all have it set to Online All already.

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