One of the VMview forum threads mentioned some ways to map a drive from a Virtual Machine back to the physical machine running the VMview client.
After looking at the suggested scripting, I decided to see if I could do it manually. Within the remote virtual desktop, use these steps:
- Windows File Explorer.
- Menu | Tools | Map Drive.
- Select a drive letter.
- Enter a source –> example… “ \\xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx\c$ “.
- When prompted, enter login credentials.
Replace xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx with the IP address of your physical client machine.
The steps I used to test how well this would work and verify what protocol the file transfer would use included:
- map the drive from the VIEW VM back to my laptop.
- Launch Wireshark on my laptop and filter traffic on “net xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/xx”.
- Moved about 340MB of files thru the View Client session.
- Analyzed the protocol/traffic results in the Wireshark capture.
- RESULT –> observed ~340MB of traffic over UDP 50002 (PCoIP).
The forum thread mentioned an area of the VM’s registry where a script can look for the user’s client IP address.
\HKEY_CURRENT_User\Volatile Environment
Quite a bit of session information in here, including:
- LOGONSERVER \\SERVERNAME
- USERDNSDOMAIN YOUR.DOMAIN
- ViewClient_Broker_DNS_Name ViewConnectionManager.YOUR.DOMAIN
- ViewClient_Broker_URL http://ViewConnectionManager IP:80
- ViewClient_Broker_Remote_IP_Address “your client machine’s IP Address”
- ViewClient_IP_Address “your client machine’s IP Address”
- ViewClient_LoggedOn_Domainname “your client machine’s DOMAIN”
- ViewClient_LoggedOn_Username “your client machine’s HOSTNAME”
So it certainly appears we can build scripts/policies for the View sessions which make decisions based on which domain or network the user’s physical client comes from. Or, in the event we deploy multiple connection brokers/URLs, we could base policy/script decisions on how they connect to the View environment (which URL, which security level, which protocol, etc.,)
