Migrating NTUSER.DAT and UsrClass.DAT with Horizon Mirage

I don’t know about you but I found it to be a little weird that there is not way to tell Mirage to move NTUSER.DAT and UsrClass.DAT when performing an hardware migration.

Considering Mirage uses USMT to migrate the user state mean that this is a precise choice from VMware and not a technological limitation.

Those two files include two pretty important user settings: the user portion of the registry and the user class of the registry.

If you want to have the migrated workstation to have exactly the same look and feel, including the customization of the single applications settings, icon positioning on the desktop and so on you definitely want to apply NTUSER.DAT and UsrClass.DAT as well; I am sure there are scenarios where you don’t want this but there are also scenarios but if you want you should be able to do it.

In the Factory Defaults this is explicitly forbidden, so if you want to apply NTUSER.DAT and UsrClass.DAT too you need to follow this procedure:

• Log in to your Mirage Management Server
• Open a command line as administrator
• Browse to C:\Program Files\Wanova\Mirage Server
• Launch the Server CLI: “Wanova.Server.Cli.exe <server name/ip>” of your Mirage Management Server such as <localhost>
• Enter: “GetFactoryPolicy c:\factorypolicy.xml” (Get the current factory policy)
• Edit the file c:\factorypolicy.xml (e.g. with notepad,notepad++)
• Save the file by entering: “SetFactoryPolicy c:\factorypolicy.xml”

When editing the file, you can search for “NTUSER” and “UsrClass.dat” and just remove the lines with “”.