MED-V Tip: Offline Folder/File Synchronization Should Be Disabled Inside MED-V Guests

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05/18/2011

Hi everyone, Steve Thomas here and today I wanted to pass along a couple tips about configuring offline folder and file synchronization within MED-V guests. The issue is that folder redirection does not function within Windows XP SP3 guests without removing the ability to sync offline files. It can cause one or more of the following in MED-V version 2.0:

Guest Hibernation Issues.
Differencing Disk Corruption causing entire MED-V Workspace for a user to become unusable.
Conflicts if both Host and Guest folders are redirected to the same network path.

In addition, this was also problematic when using redirected folders in MED-V 1.0 as well. Folder redirection for MED-V 1.0x was a critical feature as there is no native MED-V means to pass data from the host to the guest. Customers needed to enable features such as folder redirection to allow them to save and use files across the guest and Host operating systems. For V2, it is recommended to use the redirected local folders via RDP for host-guest file synchronization rather than leveraging network-redirected folders. In either case, the use of offline folders (client-side-caching) in the guest is not recommended as it can cause problems.

Disabling offline folder/file synchronization is recommended for all MED-V guests.

One quick way to do this is to deploy the following command to existing workspaces.

REG ADD HKLM\software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\NetCache /V Enabled /T REG_DWORD /F /D 0

You can also disable this interactively in the guest by doing the following (either before or after image deployment.)

1. Open My Computer.

2. On the Tools menu, click Folder Options.

3. On the Offline Files tab, de-select the Enable Offline Files check box if it is not already de-selected.

More information on Offline Folders in Windows XP can be found here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457104.aspx

In addition, if you have group policies that may have this enabled, you can create a custom GPO for your MED-V workspaces by turning the following setting off:

In addition, you will likely want to turn the following settings on:

Hope this helps,

Steve Thomas | Senior Support Escalation Engineer

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MED-V Tip: Offline Folder/File Synchronization Should Be Disabled Inside MED-V Guests

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