View 5.3 - Persona Management - High Writes on Profile Server

[six4rm]

Hi,

I've just enabled Persona Management across our environment (650 users) and it had a strange result. We were previously using Windows Roaming Profiles and we witness a large amount of reads during the login period, as you'd expect with Roaming Profiles. Having enabled Persona Management, it's flipped the other way, and now I'm seeing less reads, which is expected I guess as that is the point of Persona, but loads of writes. The high amount of writes has brought our environment to a standstill! Users are reporting 30-45 minute logins, they're just sitting on the Windows 7 Welcome screen with the spinning blue circle.

Upon checking Resource Monitor on the Profile Server (Windows Server 2008 R2) it appears to be System Volume, NTFS Master File Table and NTFS Volume Log that are top of the write culprits.

Has anyone come across this before?

I've had to disable the Persona Management Group Policy as a result and within an hour things are back to normal levels.

This login issue is crippling us and even using Roaming Profiles we're seeing 10-15 minute logins, hence my reason for going down the Persona route thinking that it would reduce the IO required at login.

Any suggestions would be welcomed!

Thanks in advance.

[nzorn]

So using Windows Roaming Profiles takes you 10-15 minutes to login, and using Persona Management takes you 30-45 minutes to login?

How long does it take you to login without a profile?

What's the average profile size?

What sync interval do you have Persona Management set at?

I'd verify to make sure a GPO isn't delaying your login times.

Might check this out too: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2100337

Also make sure your OS is optimized: VMware OS Optimization Tool – VMware Labs

[six4rm]

Hi nzorn‌ and thanks for the reply.

That is correct, at peak time in the morning we're seeing 10-15 minute login times using standard Roaming Profiles and having enabled Persona yesterday this massively increased. I disabled Persona mid-morning yesterday and this morning we're back to 10-15 minute logins again. I think the issue here is a combination or large profile size with a high quantity of small files and also our Profile Server becoming a bottleneck. I've tried researching best practise settings for Roaming Profile Windows based file servers and all the documentation seems to be around permissions, which isn't to do with performance at all. Any pointers here?

Q: How long does it take you to login without a profile?

A: Do you mean a new user with no Roaming Profile or as a local user?

Q: What's the average profile size?

A: Probably around 100MB, this is due to Google Chrome data sat in the profile, which definitely doesn't help!

Q: What sync interval do you have Persona Management set at?

A: I left it at the default 5 minutes.

Q: I'd verify to make sure a GPO isn't delaying your login times.

A: I'm not sure how to do this.

Q; Might check this out too: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2100337

A: Good shout, those reg keys are present in our image.

Q: Also make sure your OS is optimized: VMware OS Optimization Tool – VMware Labs

A: Well that's bloody cool! Having analysed our template we have 56 optimisations that haven't been applied, however I know some of these are applied by GPO rather than being set within the template, like disabling Windows Update for instance. I shall definitely look at each in detail though.

[nzorn]

What kind of storage are you running?  Maybe your storage is the bottleneck.

Q: How long does it take you to login without a profile?

A: Do you mean a new user with no Roaming Profile or as a local user?

Yes, I would try creating a new user that has not logged in yet, and see how long it takes.

Q: What's the average profile size?

A: Probably around 100MB, this is due to Google Chrome data sat in the profile, which definitely doesn't help!

100MB is small.  I have some users with 300MB Windows Roaming Profiles that login under a minute.

Q: What sync interval do you have Persona Management set at?

A: I left it at the default 5 minutes.

You might want to increase that number and see if you have better performace.  Any reason you need it to sync every 5 minutes?

Q: I'd verify to make sure a GPO isn't delaying your login times.

A: I'm not sure how to do this.

Need to work with whoever manages your GPO's then, either disable all of them and test login times, or start disabling one at a time.  Also check Event Viewer.