The VMware Tools is a good set of optimized virtual device drivers and utilities for the virtual machine environment. If during VMware Tools setup the complete installation option is chosen, the shared folders, or HGFS, functionality will be included together with all the essential components. However, HGFS is not supported on ESX and the bad thing is that turning it on will probably make bad things, especially if the virtual machine serves as a terminal server.

When a user with a roaming profile logs-on to such a terminal service server, the user profile for the session is being synchronized on the terminal server. Afterwards the HGFS system drops in a hgfs.dat file on the user profile directory. The issue begins when the user tries to log-out of the system. During this process the roaming profile is being synchronized and will probably fail to copy the hgfs.dat file, throwing out an error message that the file cannot be accessed.

This situation also causes the profile directory to be left on the system and whenever the same user will log-on to the system – a separate (e.g. user.000, user.001 and etc.) profile directory will be created. In the end, all in all this issue will make some mess in the system. Continue reading “VMware Tools HGFS and Terminal Services profile issue” »