Virtually Jason

So, I implemented Persona Management a few months ago and figured that I’d write a quick followup with my experiences since then.  As a technology, it strikes me as both really cool and a little difficult.  It deals with the persistency issues that you would typically enable Roaming Profiles to resolve, and  I haven’t seen any of the profile corruption issues in Persona Management for which Roaming Profiles are infamous.  So, that’s a plus.  It also does what it’s supposed to do, which isn’t always a given when you’re working with relatively new technologies.  That said, there are some issues that it seems to have introduced into this environment. 1) Rapidly logging back in after logging out causes a hung logon. 2) Loopback processing applied logon scripts are ignored after the initial Persona is created. The rapid logoff/logon issue doesn’t strike me as vital.  I’d certainly like to fix it, but that’s a fringe case and it seems to be self-correc...

One of my customers has been trying to figure out how they are going to deal with printer assignment in their View environment.  In truly stateless desktops (without Persona Management, even), you have to completely depend on external printer assignments, either through a logon script or through Active Directory.  I prototyped both solutions for this customer.  In order to minimize our logon times, we preinstalled our printer drivers in the parent image (for both tests). We found that a normal Windows 7 logon onto a stateless desktop (where it’s always the first logon and so has to create a local profile and apply group policy) takes about 20 seconds from the time the user hits “connect”.  Using Group Policy to distribute printers increased that logon time to about 45 seconds… which was a bit too much for my liking.  Using a logon script, on the other hand, does not delay the logon process (even if the printers are not actually present immediately upon log...

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...