Personas with Outlook 2010

[fafa24]

Dear All,

I use View 5 Personas and I do roam the local settings to the profile path.

I have seen slow loading of Outlook 2010. It can take up to 2 Minutes to load Outlook. We use Enterprise Vault, if that hellps.

I have configured View pool with floating desktop and linked clone.

I'm not sure, if the slow loading of Outlook 2010 is related to View Personas and maybe the OST file.

What are your experiience with Outlook 2010 in View environment?

Thank you,

Edy

[fafa24]

Maybe this as an additional information.

After I log in to my View Desktop I checked my profile for the local OST file. It has the date stamp of the last login time and the size looks fine.

[mittim12]

I haven't had the opportunity to deploy Office 2010 in our VDI environment but we do use Outlook 2007 with pesona and no issues.  Have you tried 2007 to see if the problem is indeed isolated to 2010 or if it's present in all versions of Outlook?

[fafa24]

We switched from XP to Windows 7 with Office 2010.

We never used Office 2007, so I can't say. Outlook 2003 was performing okay with View desktops.

Thanks,

Edy

[dvhorvath]

We use Outlook 2010 with Persona Management here, and it launches quicker in View than on my Mac. I haven't seen any slowness issues with it at all. Is this just a problem with View desktops? If you launch Outlook 2010 from a traditional desktop with the same configuration, is the login time acceptable? Do you have your View desktops on a separate VLAN? If so, can you verify that there are no network configuration issues that could be preventing the View desktops from communicating directly to the Exchange server?

Dave

[fafa24]

The login time is acceptable and the reaction of the other programs. I just find when Outlook loads it takes a long time. I stopped it a few days ago and it took 3 minutes until I could start composing an e-mail. But today and yesterday I find Outlook is faster.

Maybe it has something to do with the load of our ESX farm. I strictly followed the View optimization guide and disabled the services we don't need.

I attach the GPO of the Personas. Excluded folders from roaming is \Appdata\local\temp.

Thanks,

Edy

[blakebevard]

We ran into this same issue.  The conclusion we came to was that when the .OST file is large, View Persona Management cannot move this file down from the persona server to the user's View machine in a timely manner.  If the file is excessively large, Outlook eventually times out waiting for the file to be copied and will give you an error.  The solution that we came to was to use Microsoft Folder redirection for those folders.  This gave the users instant access to their OST files and fixed the issue of copying the data.  Outlook will then open much more quickly and you don't have to worry about this issue going forward.

What we did was create a new share on the persona server called Roaming which houses this roaming data.  It doesn't take up any less or any more space than using persona management and provides the same utility without interrupting any of the other things that persona management provides. The adm files already exist on your connection server at C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware View\Server\extras\GroupPolicyFiles and I have attached a copy of what one of our GPO's looks like.

[dvhorvath]

Aha. There’s a difference I hadn’t thought about. We disabled Cached Exchange Mode for the View desktops, as it didn’t seem necessary. If there’s a network disruption that’s keeping the View desktop from the Exchange server, chances are it’s keeping View users from their desktops, too. Since the View desktop will never be anywhere but in the data center, we decided that Cached Exchange Mode wasn’t necessary, so we disabled it with a GPO. That helps to keep the OST files pretty small.

Dave

[fafa24]

Thank you!

I didn't know that I can redirct the OST file. I will give this a try and report back.I was looking at the redirection folder of the View adm and couldn't see an option to redirect local settings.

Cheers,

Edy

[fafa24]

We cannot disable the Exchange cache mode. We are using Enterprise Vault and it wouldn't work without Exchange cache mode. To have a second thought I'm looking to redirect the whole local folder in the profile to a server, it that is possible at all.

Edy

[blakebevard]

We also could not disable cached exchange mode.  We have 22 offices and house mail out of two co-located datacenters so having cached exchange was a must for us.  The GPO I linked above has solved all of our exchange issues with both loading and storing the data.  Using the default persona would probably be fine in a non-cached environment, but people with larger mailboxes would suffer a slow initial load.

[fafa24]

@blakebevard

We have an OU with View computers only. There are no users in this OU. I see the redirection of OST part is in the user donfiguration of the GPO.

Is there a way to set GPO for users only when the log in to a View Desktops? The same users have also physical desktops and I don't want to redirect those OST, because there are Laptops too.

Thanks,

Edy

[blakebevard]

Yes, if you turn on loopback processing the GPO will apply only to the machines in that OU.  This will keep your physical machines from being effected.

[fafa24]

Hi,

Okay the loopback processing is working and it has created a xml file at the location specified. I can see the xml file get updated when I log in and log off. But the OST file doesn't relocated. Do I need to re-create the Outlook profile or how is it supposed to work?

Thank you!

Edy

[blakebevard]

In my experience the redirected folders copied the data to the new location from the disk, but I have not tried moving it from the persona to the redirected folder.   You may have to delete the old .ost file and make sure that it is recreated in the right place when you open Outlook the next time. You could try copying it from the persona folder to the correct location within the redirected folder.  I realize this will require a little extra work for your initial move, but it will definitely save you a lot of headache in the long run.

[fafa24]

Thanks I re-create the Outlook profile and it is much faster now. Though I hope it will be even faster.

Just another question for View Desktops I'm curious. How did you configure your View Desktops in terms of CPU? Number of virtual sockets and number of cores per socket?

Thanks,

Edy

[fafa24]

I was probably a bit too fast with my assumption that Outlook 2010 is much faster now after redirecting the OST file.

Today it took more than two minutes to load Outlook.When I start Outlook it says "loading Profile" and this took almost 2 minutes. Thereafter loading the addins were okay.

My OST file is about 450mb.

I would like to get my users the best experience. But I feel in this state I cannot release View yet to my users. I'm not sure why Outlook takes so long to load. Beside Outlook the experience of View desktop is fine. The other programs are performing well.

Thanks,

Edy

[iamxCPx]

Hi guys,

Excellent discussion. I just experienced the same thing with persona management so going to try the GPO solution.

Because my OST is about 2Gb and I saw other users had up to 3Gb. :smileyshocked:

On another note, does anyone in here knows how to limit the OST size?

I have read Microsoft article about editing the registry but would like to know if someone actually has done it here and working great?

Just curious.

TIA for the feedback.

[iamxCPx]

Hey Blake,

I have spent a good few hours trying to get your GPO suggestion to work and I'm still not seeing Outlook creating the OST file on the designated roaming folder. I'm still seeing the OST being created inside the %localprofile%\appsdata\microsoft\outlook\ folder that's being replicated to the profile folder of persona management and causing the Outlook to load very slow.

Is there something inside the Persona Management GPO that I need to disabled first?

Any advise would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[fafa24]

Did you set loopback processing?