USB Redirection Stopped working on several Virtual Computers

[btrabue]

We have a 5.1 environment with several Windows 7 linked clones and dedicated virtual computers.  A few weeks ago we started receiving reports that some users were trying to access data off of a USB drive and the VM was not recognizing their drive.  We've done the following to try and solve the issue...

• Reinstalled the Tools and Agent v. 5.1.2
• Reimaged the thin client.  (We have both zero clients and Linux based clients)
• Made sure that the pool policy to disable the USB redirection was not enabled

Weird thing is that there are some users that their USB redirection is working.  We ran the following command on some of the VM's that were not working.  We understand that this is the PCoIP port that needs to be enabled so that USB redirection works.

netstat -a | findstr /i 32111

This is the results that we received on the VM's that USB redirection was not working.  For the VM's that USB redirection is working we will get a second line that will have ESTABLISHED at the end.

There isn't a firewall between the virtual computers and the server, so we have ruled that out.  Any one have any ideas what could be possibly causing this?  Thank you in advance for your help!

[vcpguy]

What version of Windows Server are you running? Can you restart your brokers one at a time? Did you re-install VMware tools first or View agent? order of installation is important.

[peterbrown05]

hi

did you do any kind of refresh operation for the desktop image of these users?

also, for the users that work vs don't work - are they all accessing internally via the LAN or are some connecting in via a security server?

has there been any change to firewall rules?

So to confirm - yes, usb uses port 32111, but if you are connecting via the security server then it is tunnelled (or at least needs to be).

please answer the basic questions above, and then if its still not working, maybe you can send me a debug log from a non-working agent and client, and I can take a look and try and figure out the issue.

cheers

peterB

[btrabue]

We figured out why the USB redirection stopped working, now to figure out why it happened.  We noticed that on the VM's that USB redirection was not working that both the "VMware View Virtual USB Host Controller" and the "VMware View Virtual USB Hub" in the device manager were missing.  After uninstalling the Agent and reinstalling it the USB redirection started working.  We have looked on the master image and those devices are installed so we are wondering what could be uninstalling the devices from the VM?

[peterbrown05]

if you still have a vm in that "bad" state, might be worth trying going to device manager, and right click "Scan for HW Changes". See if the vmware vhub drivers re-appear? Maybe they had just been deleted from device manager .

Do you know if the files were still on disk? or had the files been removed?

you can uninstall the usb components by doing a modify of the install from add remove programs - but you cant do this from inside a view session.

this does seem a bit odd but im sure that someone has had to do something to trigger this.

cheers

peterB