Managing profiles with persona management and multiple Profile servers

[stevericks]

Hi,

For the past 2 years we have been using Microsoft roaming profiles to manage our profiles for our horizon view desktops. because we have 5-600 staff we have 6 servers storing profiles and redirected folders. We have group policies that say, if you are a member of prof1, store your settings and folders on server prof1. This works quite well but we do keep getting problems whereby users get temporary profiles every so often.

So I have been looking at using persona management.

This works well if you only have one server storing profiles. The group policy for persona management/Roaming & Synchronization is a computer setting and not a user setting. Obviously when we set up windows roaming profiles, we can do it per user and assign them to different servers.

I could set up one pool of desktops for each profile server, with its own OU and put group policies in that OU, but that would be a pain as at present we tend to have pools of desktops set up per department.

I thought about ue-v with folder redirection, but that seems to set up a new profile each time the user logs on??

Does anyone else have a setup with multiple profile servers?

Hope that all makes sense....

Steve.

[FROGGY_VMware]

User Environment Manager (included in Horizon Enterprise) would give you much more flexibility to redirect users data to different shares. UEM includes an extensive list of conditions so you can build policies that can address any special circumstances in your environment.

[stevericks]

Thanks Froggy, Unfortunately we don't have Enterprise and are unlikely to pay for it.

Back to the drawing board.....

Steve.

[h3nkY]

The only way to differentiate the path of each users is by using user environment variables in the profile path or folder redirection path.

i.e.

user environment variable:

%REDIRECTION_PATH%=\\server1\\redirection

Persona GPO (My documents for example)

%REDIRECTION_PATH%\%USERNAME%\Redirection\Personal

This should work in 6.2.4 or next upcoming 7.0.3.

[alsmk2]

This sounds look a good use case for DFS.

Deploy the DFS-N role on all of the six servers, create a namespace and add the existing profile shares to it. That way instead of referencing the server names in the UNC path, you can reference your domain & namespace instead (Eg, "\\domain.com\Persona"). You could set it all up and test it without making any GP changes until you're happy this way too. Long term it would also free you up to chop and change file servers without worrying about managing share or server names.

You should be able to adjust your existing policies to fit - If you are a member of Prof1, store your settings on \\domain.com\persona\profile1, etc etc.