Hide VMware Tools Tray Icon on Citrix XenApp
Summary
On many situations, you may want to hide the VMware Tools tray icon on Citrix XenApp or RDS servers. This can be achieved by implementing a registry entry.
This could be problematic especially when publishing Citrix XenApp seamless applications which presents the VMware Tools icon to show on user’s actual system tray.
You can hide the VMware Tools tray icon by implementing the following registry entry on the Citrix XenApp server.
Manual Registry Edit
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SoftwareVMware, Inc.VMware Tools
Set value name as “ShowTray” as REG_DWORD and set the actual value to “0”.
Applying via Group Policy Preference
In most cases it will be preferred to set the value via a Group Policy Preference as shown below.
Use Group Policy Management to update an existing policy or create a new one that will apply to the affected Citrix XenApp servers. Navigate to Computer Configuration\Preferences\Windows Settings\Registry. Right-click Registry, select New, Registry Item.
Enter the values as shown below and click OK.
This post references the option to hide the VMware Tools tray icon. This does not prevent users from launching VMware Tools if they manage to access the executable. For more information, see the references below.