We asked for a way to disable it from the admin console, but that is not possible either. It actually made it worse, because the faculty and students had no way to disable the option once it was turned on. They have a group policy option that will hide the “Options” menu on the windows client, but that does not solve our problem. I asked for a way to disable autoconnect all together. We also involved VMware tech support with minimal results. It has literally taken my team months to track down all the potential culprits of the problem.
The iPad client seems to randomly enable the setting even though we cannot find anywhere to enable/disable it, and the Teradici based zero clients have a configuration option that seems to enable it depending on the firmware version of the client.
Students are occasionally turning this option on themselves. Based on our observations, we have seen several culprits for this. When the autoconnect setting is enabled, they never get the option to choose the “Online Testing” pool.įor some reason, the problem has been much worse this year. We have a special pool setup with the testing clients installed that we entitle the students to when they are ready to test. The problem comes when we are doing our standardized testing. Most of our students only have one desktop available to them, and auto-connecting to it is actually handy. This is not a problem under most circumstances. Once the setting is enabled, it affects almost all the different clients that our users access, but it can only be disabled from the windows client. Old XP machines that are restricted to only run the view client, zero clients, thin clients, iPads, Macs, Windows 7, and BYOD. We have a mix of clients in our school district. From what I have seen, this feature only appears in the Windows based client (see below). One feature/quirk of view is the “AutoConnect to this Desktop” setting in the MS Windows based client. However, no great technology ever comes without quirks of its own. It has given us an incredible amount of flexibility in the tools and software we can offer to our students, faculty, and staff. View RTAV Configuration - These settings are stored in HKLM\Software\Policies\VMware, Inc.VMware Horizon View has been a game changer for our district. X509 SSL Certificate Authentication Enabled View Agent Direct-Connection Configuration - These settings are stored in HKLM\Software\Policies\VMware, Inc.\VMware VDM\Agent\Configuration\XMLAPI GPO Setting Unity Touch and Hosted Apps - These settings are stored in HKLM\Software\Policies\VMware, Inc.\VMware VDM\VMware Unity\Filters GPO Setting Only launch new instances of Hosted Apps if arguments are different Send updates for empty or offscreen windowsĮnable system tray redirection for Hosted AppsĮnable user profile customization for Hosted Apps Unity Touch and Hosted Apps - These settings are stored in HKLM\Software\Policies\VMware, Inc.\VMware VDM\VMware Unity GPO Setting Minimum validity period required for a certificate TrueSSO Configuration - These settings are stored in HKLM\Software\Policies\VMware, Inc.\VMware VDM\Agent\CertSSO GPO Setting Smartcard Redirection Local Reader Access - These settings are stored in HKLM\Software\Policies\VMware, Inc.\VMware VDM\Agent\SmartcardRedirection GPO SettingĪllow applications access to Local Smart Card readers Serial COM PortSettings - These settings are stored in HKLM\Software\Policies\VMware, Inc.\VMware VDM\SerialCOM\Agent\Settings\PortSettings\PortSettingsX (X=1-5) GPO Setting Serial COM - These settings are stored in HKLM\Software\Policies\VMware, Inc.\VMware VDM\SerialCOM\Agent\Settings GPO Setting Scanner Redirection - These settings are stored in HKLM\Software\Policies\VMware, Inc.\VMware VDM\ScannerRedirection\ConnectAtLogin GPO SettingĠ - none, 1 - autoselect, 2 - last used, 3 - specified Scanner Redirection - These settings are stored in HKLM\Software\Policies\VMware, Inc.\VMware VDM\ScannerRedirection GPO Setting Server URLs to include in invitation messageĪgent Security - These settings are stored in HKLM\Software\Policies\VMware, Inc.\VMware VDM\Security GPO Setting Separator used for multiple e-mail addresses in mailto: linksĬollaboration - These settings are stored in HKLM\Software\Policies\VMware, Inc.\VMware VDM\Agent\Configuration\CollaborationServerURLs GPO Setting 0 View GPO Bundle Agent Configuration - These settings are stored in HKLM\Software\Policies\VMware, Inc.\VMware VDM\Agent\Configuration GPO Setting I find myself often needing to do a quick test on a machine and rather than building out group policies we can simply manually create the appropriate registry keys! I spent some time documenting each of these and hopefully you can find some value from them yourself one day.īelow is a list of corresponding Horizon Agent registry settings to the Horizon 7.