So the other category of systems that I mentioned that benefit from loop back processing are these so
called remote desktop servers, terminal servers, Citrix servers and VDI or virtual desktop infrastructure
deployments.
And where these are different from, you know, a typical desktop or a typical user scenario is that,
for example, an ARDS server might allow multiple users to log in and run applications on that server.
And so the users are all sharing a single OS and essentially have to play nice and have to do behaviors
that don't impact the resources against other users.
And so they need to be limited in terms of what they can do.
And that's where group policy and loopback processing can come in.
So in that scenario you have loopback enabled on the RDC server or servers and the user logs in and
gets a different experience from their normal desktop when they log in.
Now VDI machines are a little bit different because a VDI desktop is really just like a physical desktop,
except it just happens to be running in a virtual machine environment.
So there's typically only one user per machine.
But it also benefits from group policy limiting that user activity because in a lot of VDI implementations
you get so-called non persistent desktops.
And what those are are desktops where the users, the desktop is actually spun up when the user logs
on and discarded when the user logs off.
So you don't want the user to be able to, for example, save any user data persistently to that desktop
because it'll just be deleted when that machine when they log off that machine.
So group policy can help here as well.
Some of the settings that you can use for these shared systems.
From a computer perspective, the turn off the system.
Restore turn off system, restore policy.
What that does for you is it gives you especially on VDI systems.
It prevents activities like System Restore, which really don't have any meaning in a VDI environment
and certainly not in a non persistent VDI environment.
Don't have any meaning to those systems.
So you can turn off some of those features.
You can disallow offline files.
So what does is let's say you've got users with folder redirection, their redirected folders are not
automatically cached on that shared system.
So it might be an RDA server or it might be a VDI server, but you don't want the user's data to be
cached there because over time with lots and lots of users connecting or with those non persistent desktops
in the VDI world going away, it doesn't make sense to cache files.
So this allows you to turn off that feature when the user is on one of these shared systems.
And then there's a whole slew of options under the remote desktop services, admin templates, settings
under remote desktop session host that lets you tweak and configure the remote desktop session as it's
hosted by either an ARDS server.
Or if you're using VDI with the Microsoft technology stack and you're using RDC to connect to a VDI
instance, then these settings hold as well for that.
So there's a whole bunch of settings to look at there.
I would also recommend using either GP preferences or security settings system services to turn off
Windows services that are not needed in these environments and especially in VDI environments.
I think this can come in handy.
So in addition, you've got some user policy settings that are useful in these shared system environments
and kind of related to the offline files are the Microsoft Outlook Settings for turning off exchanged
cached mode.
So again, just like offline files, you don't want a user logging into an RDC server or a VDI instance
and having their entire outlook inbox cached there.
It'll take up disk space if multiple users are doing it over time.
In the case of an RDA server or in the case of a VDI server, it may just get deleted when the user
logs off, so there's no value in it.
So I like to turn off using this policy.
Now notice that this policy is a listed as a microsoft Outlook TSX.
I left the version number open there because this is available in multiple versions of Outlook and Office.
But this does require the separate admin x files from Microsoft Office that are available on the Microsoft
download site so you can get office admin template files and add them to your GPOs as I described in
an earlier module in order to get access to these outlook settings.
Another one that I like is personalizing and forcing the specific screensaver.
So you don't want to let the user choose one of the 3D screensavers that ends up chewing up a bunch
of CPU cycles on a shared machine or on a VDI instance on a shared infrastructure.
You want a force like a blank screensaver.
And so using this policy allows you to do that, allows you to get basically force the user to use a
specific screensaver that's not going to be impactful if it switches on.
So that kind of covers the two different scenarios where loopback processing comes in handy.
And now I'm going to summarize what we've learned in this module.
And then in the next module, we're going to shift gears and go back to talking about how you can manage
and take advantage of some of the management features in group policy.