Archive for the ‘GPO’ tag
Location based Printing in View 4.5
A great enhancement in VMware View 4.5 is the Location based Printing feature. With Location based Printing you can always print on a network printer, which is located nearest to you. The feature can be enabled via a Microsoft Windows Group Policy option and is computer specific. The functionality is relatively easy. There is a translation table which contains rules e.g. Map printer NP54621 if the client’s IP address is in the range 192.168.178.10-192.168.178.40. If the user logs on from a client device which is in the given IP address range, the network printer will automatically be mapped into the virtual desktop session. This is great for people who often change their workplace as seen in the healthcare or financial areas but there are a lot more good use cases for that.
Hiding drives on the virtual desktop
Recently I wrote an article about the handling of client mapped drives when using VMware View. RDP supports the redirection of the clients drives which will be forwarded to the virtual client and shown as network drives. With an GPO template which is included in View or the default Active Directory policy you can control this mapping. But what if the drive is a local drive like the OS disk in a automated linked clone pool?
Easily managing Server/Client/Agent option with GPO’s
When browsing the file system on the View connection server you’ll find four ADM files in the server’s program files directory: C:\Program Files\VMware View\Server\Extras\GroupPolicyFiles. With those files you can easily manage the View Server, View Client and View agent configuration settings.
Direct RDP connections are not longer blocked by default
Since Virtual Desktop Manager 2.1 the VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure got a default setting which blocks direct RDP connections to the virtual desktops. When a user tries to connect to the desktop with a standard Microsoft RDP client he will get a message stating: Access denied. In case that there was a requirement for connections from non-View/VDM clients the administartor needed to change a registry parameter to enable the access.
Using client drives
With VMware View and RDP the administrator can redirect the client drives to the virtual desktop through a standard RDP function. The client drives are connected as network drives. Without any additional configuration all local client drives will be redirected to the virtual desktop.
