Virtually Jason

One of my customers recently asked that I make the View client’s CD-Rom accessible to the virtual desktop through a PCoIP session.  While that is, strictly speaking, not possible, the customer was adamant.  After much discussion, I eventually determined to use a network drive mapping on the VDI Desktop to the Client machine’s CD-Rom.  This doesn’t allow the customer to listen to audio CDs, however it does allow the customer to copy files off of their CDs and generally perform work functions.  In order to accomplish this, I decided to use a simple logon script that would pull the client’s identification. Some poking around on google pointed me at the %viewclient_ip_address% environment variable, so I wrote up a quick test script (after configuring a share for my client’s CD-Rom called “CD”) that added the drive mapping.  I executed it and it ran flawlessly, so I set that as a logon script and immediately forgot about it as I went on to work on other, more pres...

This is probably going to be a relatively short one.  Here we are, 4 years after the initial release of Server 2008.  4 years after the initial implementation of KMS licensing… and I’m still coming across all sorts of confusion about how it works and how to use it.  I’m tired of seeing unintentional rogue KMS servers pop up on client networks, and so I’m going to rehash what many other people have already covered: how KMS licensing differs from Volume License Keys.  They are not at all the same, and if you try to use a KMS license key the way you would have used a VLK, your environment is going to get messed up. First, here’s some supposition about why the change happened.  When someone’s VLK leaked into the wild, it was basically a gravy train for every pirate who knew how to use google.  Since, by its very nature, a VLK was designed to allow many systems to activate, it meant that many pirate systems would be activated.  At best, Microsoft could k...

View Persona Management is a new feature to View, as of version 5.0.  People have had some difficulties in getting it up and running, and I am most certainly included in that list.  After more work than I’d care to admit (and several calls to VMware), we’ve gotten it up and running.  Now that I’ve seen it in action, all that I can say is “wow”.  It was a painful process to get it to where we are now, but now that it’s running it’s working really well and has satisfied my customer’s user customization needs spectacularly.  Here’s my implementation notes, to hopefully make my (and others’) future deployments go more smoothly. First, a brief overview of what Persona Management is, for the uninitiated (if you already know, feel free to skip this and the next paragraph).  Speaking plainly, Persona Management is another option instead of Windows Roaming Profiles.  It does have a few very important distinctions that make it work much better than Roaming Pr...