Here’s a scenario that happened at work…

We’re provisioning farms of XenApp and XenDesktop target devices (standard mode vdisks) and using AppSense EM. We needed to set an environment variable at computer startup and decided the easiest solution was to add the setting to the Environment Manager configuration. I opened the EM configuration, expand the computer startup node, right click, set environment variable… you get the picture… and saved the configuration. The new configuration was pushed to the test target devices for validation. I rebooted the test target devices and checked the environment variable but… it wasn’t set. So what happened?

The target devices are running an EM configuration, we made a change and the new EM configuration was installed on the target devices. I rebooted the target devices but the vdisk was running in standard mode so the target devices “reverted” to the old EM configuration after the reboot. The computer starts, the AppSense communcation client checks in, the computer installs the new EM configuration but the computer is already started so the environment variable is never set. Gotcha.

If you’re planning to use EM to make changes at computer startup remember to update the vDisk with the change and push out the new vDisk. If you don’t, the computer startup actions will never run.