Publishing a Network Folder from a Guest VM

You can publishing a filesystem folder via UNC path to open in Windows explorer. To minimize the number of configuration steps, a special publishing item is available that allows you to publish a network folder from a guest VM.

To publish a network folder:

1. In the RAS Console, select the Publishing category and then click the Add icon below the Published Resources tree (or right-click inside the Published Resources box and click Add in the context menu).  This will launch the publishing wizard.
2. On the Select Item Type wizard page, select Folder on the file system and click Next.
3. On the Select Server Type page, select Guest VM and click Next.
4. On the Virtual Desktop UNC Folder wizard page, specify the usual application properties.
5. In the UNC path field, enter the UNC path of the folder you wish to publish. Click the [...] button to browse for a folder (it may take some time for the Browse for Folder dialog to open).
6. In the Guest VM settings section, specify from where the virtual desktop should be published. First, you need to select an option in the Connect to drop-down list and then specify an additional parameter in the field below it, as explained below:
   • Any guest VM. Use the from Pool drop-down list to specify a pool.
   • Specific guest VM. To select a guest VM, expand the Guest drop-down list. This opens the Guest VM List dialog. Please note that in order to select a guest VM, it must have RAS Guest Agent installed. To verify this, look at the Status column, which should say "OK". If you select a guest VM that has any other value in the Status column, you will be asked to install the RAS Guest Agent in the VM before you can proceed (note that if the selected guest VM was stopped, it will be automatically started).
   • Guest VM. Specify the pool in the from Pool drop-down list and then specify where name equals Username or IP.
   • Specific RAS Template. Select a template by expanding the RAS Template drop-down list.
7. Select the Persistent option to mark a guest VM as persistent the first time the user connects to it.
8. Click Finish to publish the folder and close the wizard.

When published, the network folder will appear in the Publishing > Published resources list, just like any other application. To view its properties, select it and then click the Virtual Desktop Application tab:

• The Target property will always be set to PublishedExplorer.exe. This binary is created automatically (via agents pushing) and is simply a copy of the standard explorer.exe executable.
• The Parameters property specifies the network folder that we want to publish. The folder path can be in any format that the explorer.exe can handle.