Virtually Jason

A customer recently came to me with a very specific request.  They wanted all of the drive mappings that each user had created on their local workstation (their View Client) to be created on their VDI Desktop.  Without roaming their profile, I created a simple logon script for the VDI Desktop to execute (VMware’s Profile Migration does not capture Drive Mappings, at least not when converting from XP to Win 7).  As you’ll see below, I really just found 3 other smarter people’s scripts and mashed them together  (with some minor adjustments to work in the VDI scenario) in order to get them to do what I needed.  Since the results are highly specific (and a bit interesting), I figured that I’d go ahead and post the script.  Be aware that it abuses the fact that, in this environment, everyone is a local administrator on their physical desktop, so I expect that some of the client registry queries might fail under other circumstances.

Just so that everyone knows, the customer is considering a…

Getting control over your Default Printer in a Windows 7 VDI environment is a little more difficult than I would have expected.  There are a lot of different factors that can come into play and, depending on the type of client connection, you can get some unexpected results.  Here are the factors that I know of that can set a desktop’s default printer:
1)The user’s Profile
2)A logon script/GPO
3)Windows’s spooler behavior when the default printer that it expects is missing
4)The TPAutoConnect.exe program (which executes automagically at PCoIP session connection)

My current customer is intending to use a combination of #2 and #4.  The logon script is setting their network printer based on who they are and is responsible for 90% of the printer assignment.  TPAutoConnect.exe is used to install direct-attached client printers and map them into the VDI desktop.  The simple fact that the plan doesn’t involve #1 and #3 doesn’t remove them from the equation… they’re still happily churning ar…