Persona Management vs Folder Redirection

[TedH256]

depending on the answer to an earlier posted question, I find myself wondering:

What are the advantages of Persona management over just using Windows Folder Redirection? Is the primary difference the ability to do periodic uploads of writes/changes to "locally held" files? If redirection is used - the files are just written to the network (unless of I suppose you are using older applications that try to write to the direct local path instead of reading the APIs to write)?

[ElevenB2003]

From the Persona Management Deployment Guide, Page 3:

"Advantages of View Persona Management

Before the advent of View Persona Management, View administrators handled user profiles by:

• Implementing Windows roaming profiles

• Using third-party virtual profile managers

• Keeping the user profile local by using a dedicated pool of persistent desktops, or persistent disks attached

to nonpersistent desktops

Traditional roaming profiles have serious performance issues when a large number of users log in or log out

simultaneously. In addition, managing user profiles through Windows Active Directory may have repercussions

for more users than intended.

Choosing to implement a dedicated pool of persistent desktops, or persistent attached disks, is not optimal

because of the storage space required for individual desktops or disks.

VMware includes in View 5 an integrated virtual profile management system that is easy to set up, minimizes

login and logout time, and allows for flexibility in choosing desktop pool types."

Also, only the settings/files that are needed are loaded during login which makes the login process a lot quicker.

Hope that helps a bit.

[TedH256]

Well I appreciate the response, and the list is nice, so thank you!

But - it addresses a question that I did not ask, and does not answer the question that I did ask!

My question is: if we want to get rid of (roaming) profiles (and we do), then what are the advantages of View Persona Management over ... just simply re-directing desktop, my docs, favorites, etc ... with standard windows folder re-direction? For most people this accomplishes the major things that they like about roaming profiles.

What is BETTER about Persona Management (which involves in essence still having roaming profiles - just architected better, I think?) than folder redirection and having NO profile?

[gmtx]

How are you going to save and load user registry hives with only folder redirection? That's one of the things PM will do for you, along with a bunch of other stuff as you've seen.

In our environment we use classic GP folder redirection policies (not the PM folder redirection policy) and then use PM to handle saving the balance of the "profile" - mostly user reg persistence, along with redirection of some local user profile directories (app data/roaming).

Geoff

[ElevenB2003]

If you're only looking to redirect files, then Persona Management may require a little more overhead than you'd like.  However, it is really quick and works very well.  Also, your users will appreciate that their settings and other relevant info will follow them (you can even extend it to physical machines, again, the same as roaming profiles).

[TedH256]

Do you know whether we can use the folder redirection settings in the persona management section of the view agent ADM template - without enabling persona management profile redirectionper se?