Persona Management – Failed Folder Redirection

Last week a user would save a document to her Documents folder and noticed it wasn’t in her I: drive (AD Home Folder) which point to the same location. I checked her persona profile and saw Documents and Favorites folders, which was odd because they should be redirected to \server\UserDocs%USERNAME% location.

Environment:

• Horizon View 6.0.1

• Persona Profiles and Redirected folders are being saved to a 2012 R2 server on separate drives:

  • Persona Profile location: \server\Persona%USERNAME%

    • All other folders (i.e. Pictures, Videos, etc) are excluded from roaming

  • Redirected folders location:

    • Desktop – \server\UserDocs%USERNAME%\Desktop

    • Favorites – \server\UserDocs%USERNAME%\Favorites

    • Documents – \server\UserDocs%USERNAME%\Documents

• Set permissions per VMware/Microsofts documentation found here

  

Persona Management created the Desktop folder inside of my test user’s redirected location without any issues. It would not create the Favorites or Documents folder.

I checked the VMWVvp.txt log file located: C:\ProgramData\VMware\VDM\logs. I opened the log file with notepad performed a search for Documents and came across this error:

The 0x80070005 is typically an access denied aka a permissions issue. I called VMware support to discuss this issue further and they also confirmed permissions were indeed set correctly per their documentation.

Resolution

Granting the Security Group for our VDI users Full Control – This Folder only instead of List Folder/Read Data, Create Folders/Append Data, Read Attributes – This Folder Only. After the permission change tested again and Poof! Like magic all folders were now being redirected without any issues.

Granting Full Control to the UserDocs folder brought up concerns that a savvy user could easily change permissions / take ownership of other user’s folders and gain access to their files.

I logged into the pool and tested by trying to change permissions and take ownership of Demotest: