VMware View and Outlook Caching

[theowood]

We are pilot testing VMware Horizon View 5.2 with Windows 7 32-bit desktops and VMware Persona Management.    Our users make very heavy use of Outlook 2007 and require Outlook caching to be turned on for good performance.

When you turn on Outlook caching, it creates an OST file under the user's profile directory.   This file is a complete copy of their e-mail so for our users it can take up to 4GB of space and puts significant IO strain on the storage. 

We are using non-persistent desktops with VMware Persona Management.

What are the best options for storing this file considering we have non-persistent desktops ?    I have seen suggestions for using Persona Management, but I have also seen that some users have issues with it since it can take a long time to copy the OST from the Persona repository.   Is it true that Persona Management would have to copy the entire OST file every time from the repository ?    The other suggestion I saw was to use folder redirection to a network share. 

[VirtualMattCT]

When I come across this, I really see two viable options:

The network share, with folder redirection, which is supported by Microsoft with Outlook 2010+ (see:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297019/en-us).  It probably *works* just as fine with Outlook 2007, just not thoroughly tested/supported as it would be with 2010+.  Perhaps you could consider this an opportunity to update Outlook/Office, to relocate those OST files to a network share.  Are you using Persona Management?

The other option is to use persistent desktops, but with everything essentially redirected except the local bits that have your OST files.  I wish there was an option to have an automated floating pool with persistent data disks, just for user data like this.

I would probably balance the risk of Outlook 2007 with network OSTs and the flexibility of the non-persistent desktops, to decide what's the right option.  It might depend on how many users you have in your environment.