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HendersonD
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Hot Shot

Persona Management Newbie, is it stable? Will it speed up logins?

We have been using VMWare View for three years with Windows 7 desktops and feel quite experienced with View

For the past month we have been working on building a Windows 10 desktop and have everything working well with the exception of login times

Since we use non-persistent desktops, every login is a fresh login. Login time under Win7 is 35 seconds. Login time under Win10 is 1:10

We are thinking about trying Persona Management as a method of decreasing login times. Two questions

  1. Will Persona Management significantly decrease login times? We are thinking it might hoping Persona Management saves many of the pieces that are put in place upon the initial login to a desktop, reproducing these quickly on subsequent logins
  2. Is Persona Management stable? We certainly do not want to roll out Persona Management to find out it is unstable, unreliable, and chews up time troubleshooting
17 Replies
mittim12
Immortal
Immortal

1:  I think this answer is going to be dependent on different environments you will need to test in yours

2:  We have had no problems with persona. 

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cH1LL1
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

HendersonD‌ - Im not sure youll gain an improvement in log in times.

we use persona on win7 64bit.

but majority of our slowness is due to group policies applying at login such as Drive mappings, etc.

our login times vary from 35-55 seconds.

On the other hand we have been using Persona for 3-5 years. -  if you configure it right it will work.

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MrBeatnik
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

1) As said, it depends. No PM and no other roaming profile method would mean a profile is created each time from the default. Depends on how big the default is. PM can therefore increase speed by not having to do a profile copy each login.

2) We had to ditch PM with View 6.1. We moved to UEM. PM was causing desktop freezing (we think during the copy back every x minutes) for users and we couldn't reboot/logoff users from the View Admin interface - manual reset required through vSphere.

Someone please correct me, but I heard that PM is no longer being worked on at VMware and that UEM is being favoured?

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HendersonD
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Hot Shot

Did UEM help speedup logins or is it still "It depends"

The reason I ask is my login times under Win7 desktops is 35 seconds which is nice and quick

We have been experimenting with Windows 10 and the best we can get logins is 1:00

If UEM can reduce that down closer to 35 seconds that would be great

I work for K-12 school district so students are logging on/off all day. Login times for us is a big deal

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lvanek
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

i would not deploy person, it is going to be EOL here soon by VMWare. UEM would be the one to deploy.

many things come into play with login times, GPO's, login scripts, etc.

However i have found 9 out of 10 times when there is slow login times there is some underlying AD issues in the customers environment.

had a case 2 weeks ago 9 out of 10 logins was 30sec or less, but that 10th could take 3mins to login, it was random hit and miss.. upon investigation i found 1 of their 8 DC's had a sysvol replication issue. that was resolved and login times are a consistent 20 seconds

HendersonD
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

I have checked our AD setup and it is sound. The issue for me is Windows 10. Our Win7 login times are consistently about 35 seconds under View and this has not changed in several years. Under Win10, it is 1:00. Anything I can do to lower the login time under Win10 I am looking at. It could be the fact that Win10 just has more overhead on login than Win7 does.

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h3nkY
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

No. it's not correct.

PM is still working on at VMware and the improvement and the development of new features are still on going.

PM and UEM work in different way. Both have advantages and it's up to users to choose depending on requirements.

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HendersonD
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Hot Shot

I agree it is always up to the user to pick and choose which technologies are best for their organization. It is up to VMWare though to make it easier to make these decisions. It is very difficult to pick out the pros and cons of Persona Management vs. User Experience Manager. VMWare should publish a blog or two about how these two products compare. For example, does User Experience Manager save the bits and pieces from a user's profile and reload those upon next login? I know Persona Management does this but even though I have scoured VMWare's website, I cannot even find the answer to this simple question.

I have read on two other websites that Persona Management would be replaced by UEM so if that is not the case, VMWare needs to do a better job getting this word out and explaining the similarities/differences between these two products

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HendersonD
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I put in place Persona Managment with my Win10 test pool. The login times, whether first login or subsequent login, between Persona Management and no Persona Management were exactly the same. My Win10 desktop is fully patched and the only other piece of software installed in Office 2016. It has been optimized using this tool

https://labs.vmware.com/flings/vmware-os-optimization-tool

So far Win7 login is 35 seconds, Win10 is 1:10 no matter what I have tried including Persona Management

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MrBeatnik
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lvanek‌ I heard about EOL too, which is why I mentioned it, but I don't know if that's official yet. I'm sure I heard that direct from VMware EUC people.

HendersonD‌ Persona Management is a little like "Roaming Proiles" from MS, but with a but more flexibility and control. Even MS are now favouring UEV instead of Roaming Profiles; UEV is MS flavour of UEM. PM will allow you to save a profile every X minutes, where UEM will only save on a logoff script running (I'm not sure, you might be able to set a SchTask to run on the machine to save back every X minutes to mimic that feature).


I would first enable verbose startup messages (GPO) to determine what is "sticking" the most.

Also set a pool that doesn't destroy desktops, and log in to the same machine with a user twice to, see if the second time is faster (the profile is already present on the machine). If it is faster, then yes it appears to point to profile "copy" at login.

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HendersonD
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I did make a pool that did not refresh desktops. First login was 1:10, second login was 20 seconds so yes copy profile is the issue. I used ControlUp to analyze logins a bit and group policies are being processed very quickly so they are not the issue. It appears that the copy profile operation under Win10 takes twice as long as it does under Win7. Still looking for any method to speedup this login

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h3nkY
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

MrBeatnik‌ I confirmed with our product management that there is no plan to EOL Persona. The information you got is not correct.

I'm lead dev of Persona and pretty sure we are improving and developing features of Persona.

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MrBeatnik
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Of course, there is a different profile with Win 10 from Win 7 - check the difference in size; it could be double.

Slowness often occurs with larger profiles with lots of small files.

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MrBeatnik
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h3nkY‌ good info for those using PM. Tech Support were steering us away, and I'm fairly certain it was your EUC guys saying it wasn't being worked on. Hope your comments clear up for anyone reading this thread.

HendersonD
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Good suggestion to look at the profiles under each operating system

Windows 7 default profile - 1,974 files, 1,226 folders, 494MB

Windows 10 default profile - 2,172 files, 1,573 folders, 340MB

At this time it does not appear that the size of the profile in Windows 10 or the number of files/folders accounts for the slow login time.

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GordonSmith4
Contributor
Contributor

This is what I was told @ VMWorld In 2015, in breakout session.  - "Persona is not being developed. There is no one assigned to it."   Certainly makes you a bit reluctant to use the product.

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h3nkY
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

I understand that it makes confusion.

But in fact I'm still developing and improving Persona.