Persona Mgt and Folder Redirection

As a full explanation of the process I would recommend starting with the View Persona Management Deployment Guide as it also covers folder redirection: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/view/VMware-View-Persona-Management-Deployment-Guide.pdf


Below are the general settings that I would normally use for folder redirection and persona management with floating desktops. The puts the profiles in a Profiles share, creating a directory for each user. The redirected folders go into a User's share again creating a directory for each user. There is nothing stopping you having the profiles (persona management) and the redirected folders in the same share. You will just end up with two folders for each user (one for persona and one for documents).

Before you start you will need to setup a file share to host the user profiles and a separate file share to host the redirected folders. The process and security permission required are on page 232 of the View Admin Guide: http://pubs.vmware.com/view-52/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/horizon-view-52-administration.pdf#page=232

Persona Management
The first thing you will need to do is to Add in the ADM template into the GPO you have created. The View ADM files are on the View Connection Server in C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware View\Agent\bin\. The one we need for Persona Management is ViewPM.adm

Enable persona management, specify the persona repository location and tell it to override AD if configured. The format I normally use is: \\server\ProfileShare\%username%.v2 for Windows 7/ 8 desktops. This creates a Bob.v2 folder to store the persona in the profiles share.

Profiles are format version 2 when it is Win7 or 8 (actually Vista onwards). You can call this anything as long as it creates a different directory from the one we will define in Folder Redirection below and best practice is that we indicate what version the profile is (never know when a version 3 may come along).


Folder Redirection
Redirect the Documents using the standard Folder Redirection settings in the User Configuration. Note that this assumes you are using Loopback Processing as we will be applying settings to the user portion of the GPO.

The general format I use for each folder I want to redirect is \\server\UserShare\%username%\Documents

With Windows 7, I normally  also select the Pictures, Music, Videos, etc and explicitly set the properties for them to redirect.

You may want to also redirect the Desktop to catch any shortcuts or documents the users place there. Other ones to consider are the Favorites, Downloads, Start Menu and AppData (Roaming).

We then need to make sure that Persona Management excludes these folders from its replication. Back in the Persona Management settings.

Obviously tailor this list depending on what you have actually redirected in Folder Redirection. There may be other things in the persona that we would want to have replicate such as the Local Settings.