Filtering Printers for Virtual Printing

When the virtual printing feature is enabled, users can print to any printer available on their client systems from their remote desktops and applications. You can use the Specify a filter in redirecting client printers agent group policy setting to prevent the virtual printing feature from redirecting specific client printers to remote desktops and applications.

The Specify a filter in redirecting client printers group policy setting is provided in the VMware Horizon Printer Redirection ADMX template file (vdm_agent_printing.admx), which is bundled in the VMware-Horizon-Extras-Bundle-x.x.x-yyyyyy.zip file. For installation instructions, see Add the ADMX Template Files to Active Directory.

When you enable the Specify a filter in redirecting client printers group policy setting, you must type a filtering rule in the Registry value name: PrinterFilterString text box. The filtering rule is a regular expression that specifies the printers that should not be redirected (a black list). Any printer that does not match the printers in the filtering rule is redirected. By default, the filtering rule is empty, which means that all client printers are redirected.

The following table lists the attributes, operators, and wildcards that you can use in filtering rules.

Table 1. Supported Attributes, Operators, and Wildcards for Filtering Rules

Attributes	Operators	Wildcards
DriverName, VendorName, and PrinterName	AND, OR, and NOT	* and ?

Following are several examples of filtering rules.

(DriverName="DrName1" OR VendorName="VeName1") AND NOT PrinterName="PrNa.?e"

PrinterName=".*HP.*" OR PrinterName=".*EPSON.*" AND DriverName="PDF"

PrinterName!=".*PDFCreator.*"

You enable the virtual printing feature when you install Horizon Agent on a virtual desktop or RDS host. For installation instructions, see the Setting Up Virtual Desktops in Horizon 7 and Setting Up Published Desktops and Applications in Horizon 7 documents.