Today I’m going to tell you about Citrix Profile Management and Microsoft roaming Profiles. Well, we see a lot of customers as well consultants struggle with User profiles, however, I have got some tips to share with you today! So I will do so with the Citrix profile Management and the MS Roaming Profiles.
The problem with Microsoft Roaming Profiles today
- They grow uncontrollably. For example, when we add more applications and those settings are saved into the roaming profile. When we delete it from our system, it will still be in the Roaming Profile. This tends to be a big issue for the terminal servers as login time will increase after a while because profiles are growing and growing quite fast however they are never cleaned up! Or cleared! If a user has an issue we just delete the user profile and the user has to setup all the applications all over again.
- Profile Corruption – This is a common problem, almost happening more than once a day for my experience. If we delete 5 profiles for a day, the users who want to login will have to set up the icons and applications just the way they like it all over again, which is tedious and frustrating both for the user and those at the Service desk.
- Difficult to fix
- Slow – This is caused when because. When you login the whole profile will be copied into the Terminal server which is where u login and when you log off the profile will be copied back to the file share. Regardless of If your profile is 5MB, 1GB or 3GB or more…. It will slow down your login time.
- Susceptible to “last write wins” and resultant settings loss where application silos exist
- No Special modifications.
- Easy to implement.
- The user profile is accessible from any XenApp server.
- Settings are saved across sessions.
There are many alternatives rather than using the MS roaming profiles such as MS UV-E, Appsense and Citrix UPM and more... But in this article I’m going to talk about UPM and its advantages and disadvantages.
I have seen the lots of customers who are using Citrix but not using UPM because they stick with MS roaming which is easy to implement and etc….
Why Citrix UPM??
Citrix UPM is agent installed on each Xen app or Xen Desktop Servers and gets setting from GPO and it’s adm or admx where we import to Active Directory we setup setting in AD and apply GPO and the agent reads from there!
- Included in XenApp enterprise and above
- It comes with Xin Desktop advanced and above as well.
- Eligible on both XD and XenApp as well as on your local computer.
- Last write wins – for example When a user logs into two different Xen App or Xen Desktop servers using the same user account and the user loads the same roaming user profiles, the user will run Visa on Server 01 and user will edit a word document on Server 02 and log off However the user can continue his work in Visma on Server 02 after an hour of being logged off. Citrix UPM is built to solve last write wins. So in this case UPM overwrites the changes the user has done in his word document but in MS roaming it will copy the whole profile instead of overwriting it.
- Offline profiles.
- Citrix steamed User Profiles – This loads the settings that you need during the login and after you logged on it will stream the rest of the files in background. This will increase the login time.
- Support for Folder redirection.
- Active write back.
- It will take 30 mins to configure it and start using it.
- 70MB User Profile and near 500+ files = 4 minutes login time.
- After converting existing MS roaming profile to Citrix UPM.
- It took only 10 -14 seconds to login.
Hope you have learn something from this! See You Soon!
4 comments
I will show how to implement and migrate from Microsoft Roaming to Citrix Profile Management in my Next Post!
Replynext post is done?
I am configuring now, when do you expect the next article?
Replymdoolittle@wichita.gov
Thanks, great article.
ReplyLooking forward to reading the second part!
Waoo I was confused alot about roaming and upm..your article cleared my confirmation ..now i understand clearly..thanks a lot for such amazing article..please keep doing more
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