Client Drive Mappings in a View Desktop
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
few solutions to accomplish their needs.
A logon script is not the most desirable solution, and we’d certainly
want to find a real scripting guy to at least clean this up before going live
with it. That said, it seems to do what
it’s supposed to do in the test scenarios that I’ve subjected it to so far
(which is not nearly as in depth as I’d like).
This script was an interesting challenge because it had to accomplish a
few distinct tasks:
1) It had to identify the Client machine
2) It had to check for mapped network drives on the Client machine
3) It had to ensure that it wasn’t conflicting with existing drives in the VDI Desktop
4) It had to map any drives that weren’t already in use
1) It had to identify the Client machine
2) It had to check for mapped network drives on the Client machine
3) It had to ensure that it wasn’t conflicting with existing drives in the VDI Desktop
4) It had to map any drives that weren’t already in use
The dictionary procedure that I used for goal #3 could be adapted to find the next available drive
letter (and in fact, that’s what the source had originally written it to
accomplish), but I elected to just skip that drive if it already exists
(otherwise you’d have to start checking mapping destinations as well as the
existence of drive letters, which would get onerous).
Identifying the client’s mapped network drives (goal #2)
proved to be more challenging than expected.
Finding the network mapped drives from the local system is a trivial
procedure (accomplished with the WMI Query: “Select * from Win32_LogicalDisk
Where DriveType = 4”), however a remote system is querying the computer’s WMI,
whereas mapped network drives are associated with a user. The long and short of it is that that method
simply doesn’t work from a remote system (in this case, the virtual desktop).
The procedure that I found for discovering a remotecomputer’s network drive mappings involved going through that computer’s registry and looking at the current
user’s hive. The original code that I
found to do this just looked at the owner of the Explorer.exe process in order
to determine who is currently logged in, however our desktops are not starting
the Explorer shell (and are instead booting directly to the View Client), so
that option was out (and I want something flexible enough that it will run
regardless of the shell that Windows starts).
Fortunately, Guy Thomas posted a very easy to use bit of code that used WMI’s Win32_ComputerSystem
class to fetch that same information.
So, with elements of those three scripts combined with a
little bit (a very little bit) of my own VDI Registry knowledge, I put together
the following script. Please feel free
to use it (or bits of it), and hopefully you’ll be able to improve on my mess…
but always make sure that those aforementioned smart people get credit where
it’s due. As always, please be wary of
unintended line breaks due to blog width and this is provided as-is, use at your own risk, etc.
'===========================================
' Dynamic Drive Mappings Based on Client Computer Mappings
'Define variables, constants and objects
Const HKEY_USERS = &H80000003
'Create a Dictionary of all local disks, to easily check
against later when mapping
'Uses Guy Thomas' code to discover the currently logged on
user of the Client system
WScript.sleep 3000
'Quit out of the script if the Client is not responding to
WMI and is therefore assumed to not be Windows
'Loop through the HKEY_USERS hive until (ignoring the
.DEFAULT and _CLASSES trees) we find the tree that corresponds to the currently
logged on user.
'Map the Client's CD Share to the E Drive
Function WriteFile(sText, bAppend)
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