Auto Login & Reusing Thick XP Clients

[krismcewan]

Hiy Guys

I have a couple on interesting View client Questions i woudl appreciate some help with.

First of all we are deploying View 5 to a customer and they are re-using XP thick clients to connect to the VDI Windows 7 Desktop.

Now unlike most places these Xp thick clients will have a dual use of being a VDI desktop for VDI users but a normal thick XP Desktop for those users who are not VDI users. Think of them as Hot Desks with some users using VDI and some not.

Now we have devised a way of having a single boot machine and using login scripts to determine when they user logs onto the Thick Client if they are a VDI user then the VIEW CLIENT will launch automatically and log them into a Virtual Desktop.  If not a VDI user then they log into the full thick Desktop as normal.

Issues are arising and these are what I need asistance with.

Issue 1.
The login script calls the command line for View Client ("C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware View\Client\bin\wswc.exe" -loginascurrentuser true -serverurl "BROKER NAME" -desktopname "POOL NAME" -noninteractive) and lauches the VDI Windows 7  desktop seemlessly to the user.  In View 5 it seems you always have to choose a desktop even though you may only be entitled to one desktop pool. We want to remove the -desktopname switch from the command line and have the desktop they are assigned autostarted. This worked In previous versions if you only had entitlement to one desktop the desktop launched automatically.

Anyone have any ideas on how to do this?

Issue 2.

When pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL on the VDI Windows 7 Desktop session the Thick desktop takes over. We don't want this to happen and if a user presses CTRL + ALT + DEL in a VDI session the action is sent to the Virtual Desktop and is ignored by the THICK Desktop.

Anyone now how this can be done? Remember that the THICK Desktop must be able to function normally when not used with VDI.

Any assistance would be greatfull.

[mittim12]

Issue 1.   I don't ever remember it working this way.  There is an autoconnect option in the shade where you can specify which pool to connect to on logon but I from as far back as I can remember you have always had to pick your desktop unless scripted.

Issue 2.    I have seen some other post about this before so you might find some information by searching the forum.   I think you will end up having to disable ctrl, alt, del on the physical machine or train your VDI users to always use ctrl, alt, insert.

[dvhorvath · Accepted solution]

I agree on issue 1. There is a setting on some zero client machines to auto-connect if the user is only entitled to one desktop, but I don't know how that's being done. I imagine you could use PowerCLI for View to find out which pool(s) the user is entitled to use and then use the results of that query in the launch script if there's only one entitlement. Something along the lines of the example Get-User -name "mydom\fred" | Get-PoolEntitlement might work, but I'm not familiar enough with the PowerCLI commands to say for sure. That might be a place to start, though.

As for issue 2, there's no way to disable CTRL + ALT + DEL on the XP machines if there's a requirement that they must function normally when not used as VDI client machines, so that's not an option. There is a GPO settings in the pcoip.adm template to "Disable sending CAD when users press CTRL+ALT+DEL" which would at least prevent users from sending the same key sequence to both the View desktop and the XP machine at the same time. They would still be able to send CAD to the XP computer, but would have to use CTRL+ALT+INS within the View desktop that way. This would only apply to users connected using PCoIP though, and would have no effect on RDP sessions. I agree with mittim12 that it's more a user education issue than anything that can be fixed with a technical solution.

Dave

[krismcewan]

Thansk gents for your help.

You have confirmed my thoughts on the CAD issue.

I like the PowerCLI aspec of pool lookup and i will keep that in mind.