When using Citrix XenDesktop 7.5 for VDI and Windows7 physical machine and connect to VDI Win7 PC the user attempts to use the Desktop Viewer bar and select 'Devices'.  This says 'No Devices' and it doesn't see any USB devices.

A thin client which the same Citrix Policies apply to and this works with USB, users can't currently find what they are missing from their settings. The device being used is Kingston Data Traveler 2.0.

Reviewing the client side CDF traces we could see evidence of Kingston DataTraveler 2.0 device being identified as a simple mass storage device but there was nothing pertaining to USB communication on the VDA side traces. Subsequent checks on the client drive mapping modules suggested that drive mapping had been disabled as per policy.

Enable the policy to allow removable drives resolves this issue.

Problem Cause

This is the default behavior with XenDesktop 7.x and Receiver 4.2 onwards wherein there are certain device types which we have purposefully disabled as USB devices. To use such devices, we need to enable the respective virtual channel that they can make use of. In this case mass storage device needed the CDM virtual channel to operate.

• http://blogs.citrix.com/2014/11/13/generic-usb-redirection-in-xenapp-7-6

• http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX138810 

• http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX129558