Missing icons with Omnissa DEM and Windows 11 AppX Packages

 Dynamic Environment Manager, Omnissa, Omnissa Horizon  No Responses »
Feb 222026
 
Missing Ghost Icons with Omnissa DEM and Windows 11 AppX Packages

When deploying Windows 11 with Omnissa Dynamic Environment Manager (Omnissa DEM) you may experience blank, missing, or ghost icons when pinning AppX packages to the Taskbar, such as Calculator, the Snip tool, or other AppX packages.

AppX packages are a newer style software package commonly used with Windows 8, Windows 10, and Windows 11. In newer feature releases of Windows 11, we are seeing these AppX packages replacing common applications such as Calculator, Paint, the Snip tool, and Windows Terminal from the traditional command prompt.

These new AppX packages are deployed to the Windows install as AppX Provisioned Packages, which then get provisioned to the user space when the user profile is created.

The Problem

When using Omnissa Dynamic Environment Manager (formerly known as VMware Environment Manager), with non-persistent VDI, every time a user logs in they get a new profile, which DEM then imports their user settings which can include AppData, files, registry, and other settings that create the appearance of profile persistence.

What Omnissa DEM is actually doing is called “User Settings Persistence”.

Because a new profile is created at each log in, the AppX packages deployed in to userspace do not persist, and must be provisioned on every login. Because of this process, if a user has AppX packages pinned to their taskbar, the icon is not available, therefore resulting in a blank icon.

Missing ghost icons with AppX packages on Windows 11 with Omnissa DEM

This is not ideal.

The Fix

To resolve this issue, when prepping your gold image and snapshot for deployment, after you complete “Finalization” with the OSOT tool, you’ll need to create a folder in the default user profile.

Please Note: You must have all the appropriate DEM configuration files deployed for Windows 11 (including Start Menu, Explorer, Taskbar, etc).

To resolve this issue, post-finalization, create the “WindowsApps” folder inside of “C:\Users\Default\AppData\Local\Microsoft\” as seen below:

Screenshot adding "WindowsApps" folder to the Default User AppData for AppX icon fix

After creating this folder, continue to shutdown your image, snapshot, and push to a Desktop Pool on Omnissa Horizon.

You’ll now notice:

  1. On user logins, all AppX packages will be immediately visible in the start menu, whereas previously there was a 1-2 minute delay where they would need to be fully provisioned before appearing. You may now notice that ~30 seconds after login, a quick flash of a progress bar will appear, this is Windows provisioning these packages.
  2. Your pinned AppX package shortcuts on your taskbar will now appear properly, with their applicable icon on subsequent future logins.

I’m speculating that the OSOT tool removes this folder, which delays/removes the linking of AppX packages in new profiles. The steps above corrects this.

A big thank you to “HER_MUN” and Sunil Nair on the Omnissa Community Forums, who helped figure this out:

A big thanks also goes to Daniel Keer for spending 4 hours working through this with me!

What’s the deal with TPMs, vTPMs, vSphere NKP, and VDI?

 ESXi, Omnissa, Omnissa Horizon, VDI, VMware, vSphere  No Responses »
Oct 032025
 
What’s the deal with TPMs, vTPMs, vSphere NKP, and VDI?

In this video, I sit down and chat with Joe Cooper to find out “What’s the deal with TPMs, vTPMs, vSphere NKP, and VDI?”

We’ll be talking about everything from Physical TPMs, to Virtual TPM (vTPM), VMware vSphere Native Key Provider (NKP), and specialized workloads such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).

A big thank you to Joe Cooper for co-producing and joining me on this video.

Guest: Joe Cooper (Omnissa)

In this video, we’ll cover:

  • What is a TPM, and what is a vTPM?
  • How does VMware vSphere and the Native Key Provider (NKP) play in to this?
  • Do TPM and vTPMs have any correlation on their own, or with NKP?
  • How are TPMs handled with environments like VDI?

References:

Stephen Wagner: How to create a VDI Windows 11 Gold Image with proper vTPM for Omnissa Horizon

Broadcom: Deploy Windows 11 in virtual machine using bootable Windows PE (WinPE) Image

Omnissa: Manually creating optimized Windows images for Horizon VMs

Stephen Wagner: Create and Deploy Virtual Machines with vTPM and NKP on VMware vsphere

THEDXT: VMware vCenter Native Key Provider

How to create a VDI Windows 11 Gold Image with proper vTPM for Omnissa Horizon

 Omnissa, Omnissa Horizon, VDI  26 Responses »
Sep 292025
 
How to create a VDI Windows 11 Gold Image with proper vTPM for Omnissa Horizon

In this video, I’ll show you how to properly create a Windows 11 gold image, for use with Omnissa Horizon VDI (both persistent VM template full-clones, and non-persistent Instant Clones).

We’ll be using the manual process to create the VDI Golden Image.

In this video, I’ll show you how to:

  • Use Windows ADK and WinPE add-on to create a WinPE ISO to pre-boot the Windows 11 Installer
  • Use the WinPE ISO to pre-boot and install Windows 11, without a vTPM
  • Prepare the Windows 11 image for deployment
    • Install Omnissa Horizon agent
    • Install Microsoft 365 using the ODT (Office Deployment Toolkit)
  • Use the Omnissa Operating System Optimization Tool (OSOT)
    • Optimize the image using OSOT
    • Generalize the image using OSOT
    • Finalize the image using OSOT

Note on VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastrucutre), TPM and vTPM devices

When deploying Windows 11 in VDI environments there are special considerations due to Windows 11 TPM requirements. Windows 11 Golden images should not have a vTPM, nor should they ever have a vTPM attached and then removed. Attaching and removing a vTPM or TPM from Windows 11 is considered data loss, and can cause issues with the image.

If you are deploying persistent full-clones, after the cloning process you can add a vTPM to the persistent VM.

If you are deploying non-persistent Instant Clones, the desktop pool in Horizon should be configured to add a vTPM to Instant Clones on provisioning.

References

A big thank you goes out to Graeme Gordon and Hilko Lantinga for their documentation and techzone articles providing this information for Partners, Customers, and Community!

Refernced Links and Documents:

Update the Omnissa UAG IP Configuration via Shell or Console

 Omnissa Horizon, Omnissa Unified Access Gateway  1 Response »
Sep 242025
 
Update Omnissa Unified Access Gateway Network Configuration via SSH or Console

So you’re in a situation where you need to update the Omnissa UAG IP Configuration via Shell or Console.

Your Omnissa UAG (Unified Access Gateway) network configuration usually takes place on deployment, or can be modified via the Web Admin interface running on port 9443.

In some scenarios you may lose access, or have to change the networking configuration when you don’t have access to the web administration GUI. This could be because of firewall rules, network changes, or troubleshooting.

PLEASE NOTE: Normally it is considered best practice to deploy new UAGs if an IP change is required. UAG deployment should be automated (using the powershell scripts from Omnissa). This post is for informational purposes only for special situations, troubleshooting, or in scenarios where deploying a new UAG, isn’t possible.

Updating your UAG IP Network Configuration

If you need to update or change your network configuration on your UAG, via console or SSH, you can run the following command:

/opt/omnissa/root/scripts/scripts/configureNetwork.sh

After executing this command, you’ll be presented with these options:

You can note numerous options for network configuration of the UAG appliance.

You can then select option “1” to view your configuration, or option “6” to configure your IP, subnet, gateway, etc.

vLCM Remediation Stuck at 2%

 ESXi, vCenter vCSA, VMware, vSphere  No Responses »
Jul 132025
 

Recently I came across a new issue and scenario in an environment where when trying to perform a vLCM function like remediation or staging, resulted in vLCM Remediation Stuck at 2%.

When this occured, all the systems on the VMware vCenter Appliance were functioning with no errors or failed tasks. If you start the process and it gets stuck on 2%, it can sit there for over an hour without failing.

Before we jump in to this issue, let’s first review the process that occurs with vLCM. I will simply this for purposes of explaining what occurs.

Normally, when kicking off a vLCM action such as remediation, you’d see a workflow similar to this when starting vLCM remediation:

  1. VMware vSphere Task Created: “Remediate Cluster” (if remediating a cluster)
  2. Compliance Check on vSphere cluster
  3. Remediation of Hosts
    1. ESXi Host VM Evacuation (Requires DRS)
    2. ESXi Host Enters Maintenance Mode
    3. ESXi Host updates applied
    4. Restart (if required)
    5. ESXi Host Exits Maintenance Mode
  4. Compliance Check
  5. vLCM continues to remaining hosts in the cluster or completes if no hosts remaining

The Issue

When this issue occurs, both vLCM Remediation and vLCM Staging will result in the task (item #1) listed above “Remediate Cluster” or “Staging Cluster” getting stuck at 2%, and none of the steps in the workflow after that occur.

The process gets stuck before compliance check, or even maintenance mode.

The Solution

After troublehsooting, reviewing logs, all I could see was some timeouts inside of the vLCM logs on the vCenter Server appliance (vCSA).

Seeing timeouts with no additional information to work with, I turned to reviewing the network configuration on the vCenter server and ESXi hosts.

It turns out that the vCenter server was pointed to the single DNS server that was offline. After correcting and updating the DNS settings on the vCenter appliance, the issue was completely resolved.

“It’s always DNS”

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