LiquidwareLabs
Optimise VDI and maybe Win an Apple TV (VMUG)
On 17th of April I will be presenting at the Leeds VMUG. Session is about Optimise Virtual Desktops & ProfileUnity. Come see my presentation, bring a business card for a chance to win an Apple TV. My session is part community part vendor pitch. People are just starting to take VDI seriously now and if you want some ideas to get started come see my session. My topics will include:
- Where to start
- Building a base image
- Deployment using a broker
- Dynamically define a desktop
- Deliver Apps
Should be interesting….remember bring a business card for a chance to win an Apple TV.
BTW…the night before there is a vBeers sponsored by Whiptail.
Alternative whitepaper – backing up VMware View
I wrote a whitepaper for my wife’s venture describing an alternative way of backing up a VMware View environment. VMware already have a best practices paper but I felt it missed a few ideas. Like how to backup the images, which images to backup and how to protect the user-state with ProfileUnity from Liquidware Labs. Hey? Using a Profile Management solution as a backup tool…well read the paper and all will make sense.
Defective Clone – Rouge Local Profile
I found an issue in my lab and I think it would be useful to post about it on my blog. In my lab I was running a 2003 Domain, vSphere 5 and VMware View 5.0. Everything was working just fine until recently when I upgraded my Domain to 2008. Straight away I noticed that my XP desktops no longer attached to the domain using VMware View Quickprep. This is common issue which is well documented and fixed with this hotfix from Microsoft:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/944043
Then I noticed my Windows 7 View desktops acting erratic but only for one user. I use ProfileUnity on my lab to manage profiles and my first thought was “delete the profile for this user” user being “ricky”. Actually this made no difference at all. I just couldn’t put my finger on it, and then I remember something. When I setup my master View linked clone image for my Windows 7 desktops I remember I logged in with the user “ricky” so that meant there was a local cache copy of a profile for “ricky” in the master image.
What I did next was open up the master image, logged on as Administrator and deleted the local cache copy of the profile folder for “ricky”
I found this wasn’t enough. In the registry there is a key also associated with this profile which I had to delete and is found:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\S-1-5-21-45054391-3288665767-689454583-1000]
The key at the end S-1-5-21-blah blah blah will differ from user to user. To find the right one just delete the one that has the username in the ProfileImagePath string.
This fixed the problem and I can only guess that the issue lay in a change in SIDs when upgrading the domain. Whatever it was my domain had its knickers in a twist with this user profile.
You could argue there is a GPO that cleans up local cache profile, however that only works when you logout. My issue was the rouge local cache profile was embedded in the View linked clone master.