Depending on the security settings applied to an environment a variety of challenges to configure software can be presented. One to watch out for with VMware Horizon is the restriction or disablement of NTLM via group policy. In my homelab environment I repeatedly had issues with installing the second and subsequent connection servers as part of a VMware Horizon Pod where the installation would rollback and never complete. If the first connection server installs without issue, but no others can join the pod, you may have an issue with NTLM.

Below is what the configuration looks like to disable NTLM in group policy. This policy is likely applied to the domain controllers, not the VMware Horizon server so it may be more difficult to track down depending on the size of the environment.

In order to work around this NTLM exceptions need to be created for the VMware Horizon servers on the domain controllers. In my environment I made this configuration via group policy. Below is the exception I created along with the exception for the Synology NAS I have bound to my homelab domain.

These exceptions followed by a gpupdate on each of my domain controllers allowed the installations of the replica VMware Horizon servers to join the pod successfully. Another VMware Horizon mystery solved…