We have been using view since 4.5 was released and are currently on 5.2.0 build-987719. We have 8 pools using 8 parents (all windows 7 32bit) with 2 floating pools and 6 dedicated pools with about 130 active sessions during the day and 200 powered on machines. I have persona management turned on for every pool saving the PM profile for all pools on a dedicated drive on our file server. We have 5 hosts in the cluster with DRS and HA turned on. 90% of my users are from 1 floating pool, 5% are in the 2 dedicated pool and the other 4% are random users in the other floating pool and 1% are single users in test pools.
For the past 3 months or so we have had users call into the helpdesk reporting that they can't print or get to "my computer" that explorer.exe crashes on them. In all the troubleshooting we've done I've narrowed it down to this:
- If it's a floating pool (most common as 90+% of my users fall in this category) we can have them disconnect from View, delete the NTUSER.DAT file from the PM storage and have them reconnect and work again. This seems to fix the issue 99% of the time with little negative effect. The other 1% of the time we rename their profile, have them sign in and then restore their desktop icons and favorites from the "corrupt profile" and delete the "corrupt profile"
- If it's a dedicated pool (much less common (twice in 3 months)) we have them disconnect, rename their PM stored profile and delete their VM (we could probably detach the user from the VM, but have not tried it yet as this is too rare for us to troubleshoot) then once they log in we restore their desktop icons and favorites.
I do have a ticket open with VMware and have provided them with agent logs from a machine/user having the issue and agent logs from a machine/user not having the issue. This ticket has been open since November 25th however and no progress has been made.
As another note we just noticed and have started tracking, but users that logged into view the previous day have not reported the issue. For example if we get a call on a Friday, that user was never signed in on Thursday. Which means that users that are in the system daily only call us with issues on Monday while users that don't use View daily might call us any day of the week.