Virtually Jason

One thing that we always have to do (and people often overlook) when planning a VDI project is to understand the user environment and how to gracefully recreate their current desktop environment on the virtual desktop.  This is a big challenge, as you can tell from the fact that there are so  many tools available to solve it. In my experience the best solution is usually a combination of purpose built tools, of Group Policy Objects, and of the occasional login script.  Before you can even start figuring out which combination of tools and techniques might be most appropriate, you need to understand what currently exists in the environment... and you need a fairly accurate picture of that.  If the environment is already sophisticated with heavy use of GPOs for drive mappings, printer mappings, and critical registry settings, transitioning into VDI will be far easier than if new desktops are configured by an IT guy walking over and making all of those things by han...

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 kn...