#ProjectTomorrow – (Veeam) Wallpapers by GPO

I want to run through such an easy thing to do but wanted to document it nonetheless. Setting a Group Policy to have a shiny new Veeam background on all your domain machines. (obliviously you don’t have to have the Veeam wallpapers)

I as many of my visitors have their own home lab or are leveraging a public cloud for their lab purposes. I have just spent my Monday going through my home lab and have upgraded all my servers to Windows Server 2016 and I have also updated all my Veeam components to the latest version 9.5.

When I rebuilt this lab a few months back I never got around to adding the custom Veeam desktop images to each server, so decided to look at how easy this would be to deploy into a group policy so that all domain added machines would get a nice Veeam logo.

Open Group Policy Management on any domain joined machine you have.

For those not familiar with Group Policy Management the opening console will look like this. This tree will show your domains.

Depending on where you want this wallpaper policy to hit in terms of which machines you want it to appear on will determine where in the tree you select and place the new GPO accordingly.

For the purposes of my lab I want to create it at the very top so that all my domain joined machines will inherit this policy. Go ahead and name it something relevant to the task in hand.

Once created this is a blank GPO awaiting the customisation you wish to add, as you can see it sits at the top of the tree just underneath that Default Domain Policy (even in a lab I would suggest not tampering with this GPO and always start a new one)

We then want to jump in and edit this GPO with the Windows Desktop configuration we desire so it’s a right click and edit.

Next up navigate down through the tree as seen in the screen shot below. Expand User Configuration, expand Administrative Templates, expand Desktop, and then click Desktop. In the details pane, double-click Desktop Wallpaper.

You will next be faced with a configuration screen like the one below. The key parts here are the “Enabled” radio button to enable this setting and the options section where you can specify the location of your wallpaper. (on a side note I am looking at how multiple wallpapers can be entered here so you can have multiple different looks to different servers) The final thing worth mentioning because it has got so much better over the years from Microsoft is the Help, explaining in brief what this setting does.

Once configured you should have something that resembles this.

Now you will want to test that this has worked, simply log one of your domain joined machines off.

Finally log back in to find that your new wallpaper is now displayed on the machines desktop.

GitHub Repo – I also want to add a link here for the repository of Veeam wallpapers – https://github.com/MichaelCade/Veeam-Wallpapers

A very simple post and very picture orientated but hopefully this walk-through will help someone in their home lab or day to day admin work, as always please leave any feedback with me on Twitter @MichaelCade1