During a View implementation this week a customer asked the question of how to un-associate a user from a desktop if they were using an automated pool of persistent workstations. This would be required if you had a pool of assigned workstations, meaning that once a user logged into a session the VM they were connected to is always mapped to them after that point. Then, for example, say a user left the company and you want to remove their workstation from the pool so it can either be re-allocated or destroyed, this is how to accomplish that task.
Using the vdmadmin tool execute the following command from the View Manager server while logged in as an admin:
vdmadmin.exe -L -d poolName -m machineName -u UserName
Alternatively, if you want to assign a desktop to a user, meaning that the first time they go to log into View they receive a specific, pre-created VM, then use the following command:
vdmadmin.exe -L -d <pool_name> -m <vm_name> -u <full_user_name>
Where <pool_name> is the View Manager pool name, <vm_name> is the virtual machine name as seen in VirtualCenter (vCenter), and <full_user_name> is the user name formatted as DOMAIN\username .
Below is a usage sample for this command:
vdmadmin.exe -L -d MyPool -m WinXP-VM -u MYDOMAIN\administrator
The vdmadmin.exe tool is located in the “%ProgramFiles%\VMware\VMware VDM\Server\bin” directory and is accessible from the command prompt.
