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?

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.

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.

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.