Persona and Folder Redirection philosophies

[TomHafemann]

Hello all,

I am new to VMWare view and all of its glory, and am a bit stumped on how to handle Folder Redirection, and all the ways to do it.

I have had a traditional workstation/server environment.  Each user has a single workstation and signs onto it, and their entire profile is contained on that workstation.  There is no folder or profile redirection.  Sometime in the past with this company they tried roaming profiles and since then, they never wanted to do anything else.

Well, with VDI, we know that with Persona, we can have their profile on a directory share, and as a part of the persistent disk...I believe.  Initially we thought that the persistent disk was only going to contain Appdata.  As it turns out, it contains the ENTIRE profile by default...at least with what we have set.  We see that a test user's entire profile is set on the profile share, and it kinda acts like a roaming profile....kinda.  When a user logs into a workstation, they get that Persona.  When they log into a VDI session, they get that persona.  However...this is okay with a new virgin user.  What about those users that have a 50 gb profile because they saved everything local?  Our persistent disk is only 5 gb.  There is no way that they can have a 50+ gig persistent disk....so we thought...folder redirection.

We already know about the folder redirection stuff in Windows.  Yet there is a folder redirection thing in the vmware persona group policy too.  Which one should we use?  I have looked up and down the internet and it seems like there is bad and good to them both.  What happens to those people who sign into both a computer and a VDI session at the same time?

Right now, we are at a bit of loss on what to do or the best way to handle Persona and folder redirection and would love to engage anyone who has done it successfully in their environment.  We have a vmware partner onsite and we are working it out with them too.  I just want some more ideas on how to do this.

TIA

[h3nkY]

Hi Tom,

If you use Persona as user profile management, you should use Folder Redirection on Persona not Windows. Persona + Windows Folder Redirection is not supported configuration.

Just little bit correction. You can't use persistent disk as Central Profile Store (CPS). Please use windows network share folders.

Thanks.

[TomHafemann]

Okay....now that I understand that the Windows folder redirection is not supported, I will look into doing the VMWare method.

However, it still doesn't answer why I have every file still in the local profile in the Persistent Disk and not out on the file share.

On a side note, QuickPrep or Sysprep?  This one goes against everything that I understand on how to image PC's.  We should NEVER reuse machines with the same SID/GUID, and quickprep goes against my grain.  How can we get away with Quickprep? 

TIA

Tom

[BZatWS]

We have had great success by abandoning Windows roaming profiles and Persona management and using Folder redirection through a GPO that hits our physical and virtual desktops.

We are a public school environment so faculty login to the same 2-3 physical computers and any of 700 random, identical, refreshed nightly VM's multiple times a day as they move between classrooms and labs.

We redirect their Desktop, Favorite and My Documents folders - encourage them to save to their home drives and ignore AppData.  This way the redirected folders are the same for physical and virtual sessions which keeps their "personalized" data consistent day to day, login to login.  AppData is created and maintained in the local profile on the physical machines they use.  AppData is created new on each VM login which has not been a problem for us or our users -  this is the one you have to sell yourself on but once you get used to the idea you can sell your users on it.  If your users have their own VM then this is not an issue for you because they will create a local AppData on their VM too.

Another thing we try on the VM gold image to minimize the impact of no AppData redirection is to start each piece of software and customize the Save location home path, go through any first time startup routines, turn off automatic updates, etc..  Anything we can touch that might end up in a users AppData folder.  Then copy this local profile over the Default Profile so it becomes the baseline for all users.

Before VM's we had a horrible time with corrupted roaming profiles.  With VM's we found roaming profiles and persona effected login times and we still saw some corruption.  With folder redirection users never lose their files and favorites to corruption, see fast logons and the default profile saves most of them from missing AppData.

[h3nkY]

Hi Tom,

> However, it still doesn't answer why I have every file still in the local profile in the Persistent Disk and not out on the file share.

If you want to remove local profile when user logoff, you can enable "Remove local persona at logoff" Persona GPO. By enabling this GPO, persona will remove local profile when user logoff regardless persistent/non-persistent disk.

In regards to persistent disk, this type of disk will back to the last disk checkpoint with the VM is refreshed.

> On a side note, QuickPrep or Sysprep?  This one goes against everything that I understand on how to image PC's.  We should NEVER reuse machines with the same SID/GUID, and quickprep goes against my grain.  How can we get away with Quickprep?

I'm not sure I understand your question. But quickprep or sysprep will change machine's CMID (Client Machine ID) so ADC (Active Directory Controller) can identify each machines differently.