Knowledge
- Configure the profile store
- Configure Virtual Profile GPOs
- Configure View Media Services for Clipboard Support
VMware introduced Persona Management to replace Roaming Profiles, which are the bane of every Server Admins life, can you count how many times you have .old a roaming profile and told the user to login again to receive a new profile due to corruption?. In fact when I deploy Microsoft infrastructure solutions we no longer use Roaming Profiles, instead we redirect My Documents and Desktop Icons so that the users data is safe and they have a consistent desktop, albeit they may not be able to run all the applications on every workstation they log into.
Anyhow, VMware’s Persona Management is different, in a couple of ways:
- When a user logs in, Persona Management only instantly downloads the parts of the profile required. Everything else is streamed on demand, think of a 10MB PowerPoint presentation on the desktop from a year ago, it doesn’t really need to be downloaded every time someone logs in.
- Changes are synced back to the ‘persona repository’ every ten minutes so when a user logs off, it’s much quicker.
Configure The Profile Store
I wasn’t entirely sure what VMware means by this, I can only assume they mean the shared network location in which we are gong to store the Persona Data.
Persona Management relies on the same requirements as Roaming Profiles, I use this Folder Redirection KB to verify the permissions.
I have created a folder on VMF-TR01 called Persona and applied the share permissions above to this.
Configure Virtual Profile GPOs
To enable Persona Management we need to configure the Group Policy. We need to import the ADM from the View Connection Server, I covered this in VMware View Objective 1.5 – Prepare Active Directory for installation under Templates.
Edit the GPO and go to Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Classic Administrative Template > VMware View Agent Configuration > Persona Management > Roaming & Synchronization > Manage User Persona > Enabled
Now that we have Persona Management enabled we need to configure the UNC path for the Persona Repository.
Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Classic Administrative Template > VMware View Agent Configuration > Persona Management > Roaming & Synchronization > Persona Repository Location > \VMFTR01Persona
We do have loads more GPO settings that can be configured, these are outside the scope of this blog post. I have however linked the GPO to my View Desktops and created a Test Text File on my Desktop and a Test Documents Folder in My Documents
I then timed this and after 11 minutes, I checked my Persona share and voila!
Configure View Media Services for Clipboard Support
The good old copy and paste between your Physical Desktop and the View Desktop.
This is controlled by Group Policies contained in the PCoIP Group Policy, again from the ADM located on your View Connection Server.
The GPO setting is located underComputer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Classic Administrative Template > VMware View Agent Configuration > PCoIP Session Variables > Overridable Administrator Defaults/Not Overridable Administrator Defaults > Configure Clipboard Redirection.
We have a number of choices, all of which are straight forward.
- Disable both directions
- Enabled both directions
- Enabled client to server only
- Enabled server to client only
VMFocus 