MED-V tips for your Helpdesk Admins

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imageI recently had a great question from one of our customers on how to best allow helpdesk personnel to troubleshoot issues with MED-V applications.  No, this wasn’t necessarily what we refer to as a break/fix type issue with MED-V itself, but rather how to allow remote helpdesk admins to access the Full Desktop in the VM on the user's machine as needed for troubleshooting.

There are a couple different ways to approach this:

Method 1: A MED-V workspace is a combination of a VPC linked to MED-V policies so it’s possible to have the same VPC image linked to multiple MED-V policies, essentially creating multiple MED-V workspaces that use the same VPC image.  For example:

  1. Configure a MED-V VPC image.
  2. Configure a MED-V workspace, linked to the above VPC image, that includes all desired policies including seamless windows UI and configure the access list on the workspace so that it will be deployed to non-admin end users.
  3. Configure another MED-V workspace, linked to the above VPC image, that includes all desired policies including full desktop UI (instead of seamless UI) and configure the access list on the workspace so that it will be deployed to admin users.

This will allow non-admin uses work with the VPC with seamless UI integration and allow admin users to work with the VPC image via the full desktop UI. 

But what if you have a user who has a problem with the copy of the VPC image on their machine (a problem with an application installed in the VPC, for example), and the administrator needs to access the full desktop UI of the user's VPC on the user's machine using that user’s credentials?  As we know, sometimes problems in the OS or an application can be related to a specific account.  If that’s the case then you could always try this alternative method instead:

Method 2: You can enable Diagnostic Mode.  To do this:

    1. Right-Click the MED-V System Tray -> Select Help -> MED-V Diagnostics.
    2. When a workspace is running, you have the option to click the hyperlink "Enable Diagnostic Mode"

This will show the workspace within a VPC Window.

Hope this helps,

J.C. Hornbeck | Manageability Knowledge Engineer