VMware Horizon Community
stevesimoes
Contributor
Contributor

Roaming Profiles XP Non-Persistent Linked Clones

I can't get roaming profiles to work. Do I need to have my AD group add a path to the user's Active Directory account, or, like the terminal servers I manage, can I get around that via the GPO?

As for the GPO I have begun setting up, I have tried specifying the path in both possible spots in the GPO. I have turned on Loopback Processing. I have set the permissions to full control for all users as a troubleshooting step on the share and it does not work at all. All profiles end up Local.

I administrer terminal servers and had no problems getting roaming profiles to work, and whiler I am not ruling out a typo or being an airhead, i think I know what I am doing. Can someone list all the steps to take? no links to Microsoft documents please.

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gunnarb
Expert
Expert

Not sure how much help you are going to get, you are describing a Microsoft issue not really a View issue. As far as AD is concerned your View desktops are just desktops. So I would recommend taking View out of the equation and figure out how to get roaming profiles to work on your network on normal desktops. Once you have figured that out, take that knowledge and apply it to View.

To answer your question though: all you should have to do is use GPO and manage it from there.

Roaming profiles has always sucked with Microsoft, TS profiles work well but they are not the same as roaming profiles. Be sure you know the difference (I'm sure you do, but I have to mention it).

As with any environment, I'd suggest not using roaming profiles, if you must use them I'd highly recommend a third party application to get them to work properly. Otherwise keep plugging away.

-Gunnar

Gunnar Berger http://www.gunnarberger.com http://www.endusercomputing.com
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jdaconsulting
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Here is an excerpt from our process. This strategy has worked flawlessly across numerous customer refreshes of the virtual environment.

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stevesimoes
Contributor
Contributor

Jda,

I see in step four that for this to work it requires the user's AD account be setup with a roaming profile path. I can't do that. Will this work using a GPO instead?

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jdaconsulting
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I'm not aware of a GPO solution for this that works consistently. What is the reason you cannot configure the user account profile setting?

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stevesimoes
Contributor
Contributor

My group works indepently of most of the IT team at this very large university, and to get a system in place where we can modify some user accounts will be a pain the rear end.

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jdaconsulting
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

If you can't populate the profile directly in the user object, the only thing I can suggest is this option, straight from Microsoft Technet:

Another way to populate the profile path is to use an Active Directory® Service Interfaces (ADSI) script. ADSI provides a single set of interfaces for managing resources on the network. You can use ADSI in combination with Microsoft® Visual Basic® Scripting Edition (VBScript) or JScript scripts to manage Active Directory resources such as users and services.

For information about ADSI and ADSI scripts, see the Microsoft Platform SDK link on the Web Resources page at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/reskits/webresources.

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stevesimoes
Contributor
Contributor

I can take a look at that. SInce I only have one Parent vm using non-persistent clones, is there way to modify the parent to make it store the profiles on a file server instead of locally? I know of ways to store profiles on different disks in terminal servers to impove performance. How about drives instead? I can then update the clones and get what I want.

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JoJoGabor
Expert
Expert

Did you manage to get this working with a GPO? I am having exactly the same issue with View 4.6 - it only works when setting via the user account, which I cant do in this environment. I have set this up in View 3.0 without any issue.

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