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Kjackson90
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Folder Redirection on Non-Persistent Horizon View 6.2 Environment

Hello All!

I am fairly new to the VMWare realm, my company recently did a full migration of our VDI infrastructure from Citrix to VMWare. From a overhead perspective the migration went great and our company is very happy with the performance of VMWare over Citrix but I still have a few kinks to work out.

The biggest issue of mine has been folder redirection. For all of our Non-Persistent VDI users, we redirect their Desktop, Documents, and Favorites to a network share. Generally this has always been done via group policy. Since the migration I have been seeing a large number of users that when they log into their session in the morning the machines have not applied group policy and the folders have not been redirected. With this being non-persistent users, running a GPUpdate /force on the machine does little good since it requires a log off that triggers the machine to recompose again.

If anyone has ran into this issue any assistance would be greatly appreciated!!!

Thank you in advance!

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RyanGoldstein
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Couple things pop into my head.

1.  Confirm that loop back processing is enabled if you are applying policy to computer objects.

2.  I always have parent VM in the destination OU before i compose.  (few reboots in destination OU for good measure)

3.  AD related issues, broken replication, tombstoned DC...

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childebrandt
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I think the canned response would be GPO folder redirection just sucks. You might try Persona Management. Deployment Guide here!

I have found it works way better than GPO folder redirection. There are other options for Persona's like Profile Unity. Its not free like Persona Management but it has a ton more features.

@childebrandt42
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Kjackson90
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We actually own a corporate Appsense license. I have not done to much digging on how powerful it really is, we basically just use it to capture application settings and profile specific settings so im sure there is more we could be doing there.

I have also looked into Persona Management but we have not tested it. This is something im going to research and I appreciate the link you provided.

But, if anyone else has any tips or tricks for GPO folder redirection im all ears! I know this worked fairly well in Citrix so im sure its possible to do in VMWare im just not sure what my issue is specifically. It seems to work for 90% of the user base 90% of the time, but there seems to always be one or two stragglers that seems to not get redirected.

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Raymond_W
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Hi Kjackson90,

Did you already take a look at VMware User Environment Manager(UEM). With UEM you can manage the complete workspace of the user, like personal settings, shortcuts on the desktop, drive and printer mappings etc. but also the favorites and the desktop.

If you want, I can give you a brief demo of the product. Just let me know.

Raymond

Kind regards, Raymond Twitter: @raymond_himself
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larsonm
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If your linked clone desktop are having issues receiving group policy, you can configure the adm templates directly on the parent.  While you no longer need to worry about GPO application with it being local, you do lose some agility with this, as any change made will require a recompose.

Persona Management does a good job, provided the operating environment is designed/configured properly.  I prefer to configure folder redirection using the Persona Management GPOs, redirecting everything except AppData.  I let Persona Management handle the replication of AppData and the version NTUser files.  There are a handful of KBs with some caveats - detailing that Client Side Caching should be disabled, as well as ensuring Shared Folders is not installed as part of VMware Tools.  They also suggest to exclude AppData/Local from Persona Replication, although there are some applications that store data there (Chrome for example), so that's something that can be tested and tweaked.

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RyanGoldstein
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Couple things pop into my head.

1.  Confirm that loop back processing is enabled if you are applying policy to computer objects.

2.  I always have parent VM in the destination OU before i compose.  (few reboots in destination OU for good measure)

3.  AD related issues, broken replication, tombstoned DC...

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Kjackson90
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Ryan I believe your 2nd bullet point is my issue. I do now recall it was set up like then when we ran a Citrix environment. I am going to move my Parent VMs to the correct OU and see if this doesnt resolve this. Keep your fingers crossed!

Thank you all so very much for your input and ill keep you posted! RyanGoldstein

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