ADM & ADMX templates in a multi-version View environment

[Norm_vB]

I work in a very large environment with multiple different versions of View deployed across different sites and all of which are managed by different IT teams and unlikely to be upgraded any time soon.

Previously, with the group policy ADM templates, upgrades of an individual site had no effect on another site as the ADM templates were unique to the policies they had been loaded into.

Now, with View v7.2 only including ADMX templates, if the ADMX files are added into the Central Store all policies will get updated and potentially affected.

The initial testing I have done seems to indicate group policies using the earlier ADM templates simply move the existing settings into the ADMX policy section and there is no real impact.

Has anyone deployed the v7.2 ADMX templates into the Central Store of an environment where early versions (5.x and 6.x) of View exist and what has been the impact to those environments?

Alternative options that exist might be to just use the v7.1 ADM templates with the v7.2 environment or keeping the ADMX files out of the Central Store and using a specific server to mange and edit the Group Policies.  Ideally we would be able to deploy the ADMX files to the central store without impacting any of the environments runnings earlier versions and without affecting the 'VMware supported' status of those environments.

Wondering if anyone has already come across this situation and found a workable, supported solution?

Cheers,

Norm

[Norm_vB · Accepted solution]

For anyone that comes across this at a later date:

I queried VMware directly and the response I recieved was to go ahead and deploy the version 7.2 ADMX files to the Central Store.

The advice was that there would be no adverse impact on earlier versions of View that were using group policies with the ADM files and all settings, whilst upgraded to the new ADMX format, would be retained in those policies.

Testing I have done shows that the ADMX files supersede the ADM files and the policy items within the group policy move out of the 'Classic Administrative Templates (ADM) section whilst retaining the settings.

In the environment I am in the key to doing this will be communicating the change, detailing cosmetic changes to group policy that result from it and making other staff aware of new policy settings that older versions of View will not be able to leverage.

I also tested removing the ADMX files from the Central Store and policies that still had the ADM files loaded retained their settings and reverted back to the old format.

Cheers,

Norm