Planning For Deployment
Before activating your server with Zee Drive, familiarise yourself with the concepts and planning steps below.
Serverless Design
Zee Drive is a client tool, so even when activating Zee Drive as a desktop server, there is no Zee Drive service component installed on the server; only the Zee Drive client is installed and it is activated in a desktop server mode. There is a Zee Drive service component but it runs in the cloud, not on your server.
After activating the desktop server, Zee Drive will set itself to start-up automatically when a user signs in to the computer. Zee Drive will start-up, and map the user's network drives that have been configured on the subscription.
An instance of Zee Drive will start-up for each user that signs in to the desktop server. E.g. if 10 users are signed in to the server, then 10 instances of Zee Drive will start-up.
Licence Pools And Licenced Users
When activating Zee Drive as a desktop server, a pool of Shared Computer licences must be assigned to the server. These licences are .
The number of Shared Computer licences in the licence pool determines the maximum number of concurrent users supported on the server.
Therefore to calculate the number of Shared Computer licences you must assign to the licence pool, you need to know the maximum number of concurrent users you expect on the desktop servers or VDI.
Zee Drive will only start-up successfully for licenced users. A licenced user is a user that has been set up on the Zee Drive subscription with either a Personal Computer User licence or Shared Computer User licence.
For more information on licence planning for a desktop server, see Licence Desktop Servers.
Golden Images
If your virtual desktop environments or desktop server environments are based on golden images, then your target for activation should be the golden image, rather than the instances created from the golden image.
By activating the golden image, all instances created from it will automatically be activated with Zee Drive.
For example; when installing software and configuring your virtual machine instance prior to preparing/snapshotting it as a golden image, activate Zee Drive on the instance.
This approach works for both golden images for VDI, and for golden images used for the RDS servers themselves.
Username Resolution
After the server has been activated, when users sign in to the server, Zee Drive will start-up automatically. Zee Drive will attempt to identify the user to validate they are set-up on the associated Zee Drive subscription.
If the user is Entra joined on the computer, or, the server is joined to an Active Directory domain, then Zee Drive will automatically resolve their username and validate whether the user is set up on the Zee Drive subscription. In the case of an Active Directory domain, review Configure Active Directory Username Lookup to ensure the look-up attribute is configured correctly.
if Zee Drive can't resolve the username automatically, then the user will be prompted to enter their Zee Drive username manually, but only for the first time Zee Drive starts-up. After which, Zee Drive will remember the user's selection and will start-up automatically thereafter.
Here's the end user experience where Zee Drive requires them to provide their username:
A pop-up notification will show in the user's system tray informing the user they need to enter their username. The user can either click the pop-up notification, or, click the blue Z icon in their system tray
The Zee Drive window will pop-open. The user should enter their username, then click the Validate button. On successful validation, the green tick mark will show. The user should click the Next button
Zee Drive is now ready to start-up. The user should click the "Startup" button. Zee Drive will now start-up and map the user's network drives. When the user next signs in to the server, they will no longer be prompted again and Zee Drive will start-up automatically
Enabling The Zee Drive System Tray Icon For RemoteApp Environments
If the server you plan to activate is a RemoteApp server, and you want the Zee Drive system tray icon to show for users, then you will need to make a change to the server registry to allow tray icons from the server to show on users' desktops.
To enable the Zee Drive system tray icon on RemoteApp and XenApp environments;
Open the Windows Registry Editor and navigate to the path Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server and identify the key RailShowallNotifyIcons
Verify that the value of RailShowallNotifyIcons is set to 1 (REG_DWORD). If not, then double-click RailShowallNotifyIcons, set the value to 1 and then click OK
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