View 6.2.6 Persona Management Issues regarding Repository maximum and Windows 10

VMwareSEinKorea — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 08:06:33 GMT

Hello, everyone~

This is my first time asking help here on VMTN. I would like to appreciate in advance.

Our View environment is as follows:

View Agent: 6.2.6

View Client : 4.5 (mainly)

Guest Client Windows : Windows 10 2016 LTSB (14393.2396)

Pool type : Floating(Stateless)

Server : Dell Blade PowerEdge M630

Storage : NETAPP_AFF8080EX (Unified type servicing SAN Volumes for VMs and NAS for Persona Repository via 10G ethernet altogether)

We have operated "Persona Management" to provide minimum conveniences such as bookmark on IE and private certificate working on Windows uniquely in Korea with stateless VMs.

Thus, the folder size of each individual is tiny, less than 5 MB. However, the total number of the profile folders (I mean users) is huge, about 7,000.

Before we deployed, we studied the best practice guide, VMware-View-Persona-Management-Deployment-Guide.pdf provided by VMware as always.

According to the System Requirements and Recommended Hardware section of the document on page 5, it reads

Persona Management has no system requirements beyond those for VMware View itself. However, VMware

recommends particular configurations for servers, network speed, and file server memory to provide you with

the best performance for Persona Management of user profiles.

VMware recommends the following infrastructure for a View implementation with Persona Management

enabled:

• Servers: One or more file servers, each one storing profiles for approximately 1000 users. If a virtual machine

is used as a file server, the volume storing the profiles works optimally if striped across four virtual disks, each

with its own SCSI controller. A file server on a physical system works best in a similar configuration. Consult

your SCSI controller documentation regarding the supported maximum number of concurrent commands.

• Network speed: At least 1Gbps between the desktops and the file servers.

• RAM on each file server: 8GB

Your own results may vary, depending upon:

• Your storage capability

• Your network speed and latency

• Number of users

• The frequency that users access data in the user profiles

• Storage

• IOPS

We asked the Netapp storage technician to provide 11 NAS repositories (or share mounting points) based on our 11 desktop pools accordingly to scatter the traffic, which was an effort to make sure to meet the recommendation even though we had only one NetApp storage with 2 storage controller units, a high end all flash unified product until a couple of years ago.

My first question is whether it will be okay to build a huge repository to service all the 7,000 users sufficiently rather than the smaller repositories broken down as it is now because the number and size of synced files are seemingly small. The main reason why for this needs is that many of the users are likely to move from one pool to another on a regular basis, which means we have to migrate the profile folders to the designated repository as well manually. It does not matter to create a windows NAS VM with gigantic spec such as 16 cores and 64 RAM to meet the required resource.

Secondly, we are experiencing frequent log-in problems by random users after we switched from windows 7 64 bit sp1 to Windows 10 32 bit for some reasons. I believe we did not experience the same problems back then. The GSS said Persona with View 6 does not support windows 10 officially, however, I cannot agree on it because the KB mentions the stand-alone persona, not the one included in view agent itself and view 6.2.x release notes keep mentioning Windows 10 along with Persona Management as well. In fact, it works overall, but does not work randomly and frequently with a few users, roughly tens out of thousands. It is a headache!! That is why we are even considering to return to the old Windows 7.

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Horizon-6/6.2/com.vmware.horizon-view.installation.doc/GUID-3C199DB1-F154-40D8-9B1B-CD788CC31918.html

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2150305

Here is the screenshot of a troubled VM along with windows event viewer below albeit in Korean.

The blue warning message reads roughly : "You can solve this problem with log off and re-login. Unless you are going to all the newly created files,.."

Here is the Persona GPO setting screenshot below.

Any advice will be appreciated. Thanks~

This document was generated from the following discussion: View 6.2.6 Persona Management Issue with Windows 10

Re: View 6.2.6 Persona Management Issues regarding Repository maximum and Windows 10

VMwareSEinKorea — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 17:44:53 GMT

Well, I found out that Persona Management is not a popular issue as I could not catch threads dealing with it.
I will be waiting for more active discussion and suggestion here hopefully. :-.

Re: View 6.2.6 Persona Management Issues regarding Repository maximum and Windows 10

VMwareSEinKorea — Mon, 20 Aug 2018 03:06:01 GMT

I posted this case to another community. There was a response.

View 6.2.6 Persona Management Issues regarding Repository maximum and Windows 10 - Desktop Virtualization - Spiceworks

Re: View 6.2.6 Persona Management Issues regarding Repository maximum and Windows 10

hkraaijeveld — Fri, 13 Mar 2020 15:58:05 GMT

As you have noticed, Persona Management isn't a very popular choice for profile management as there is little to no information available about troubleshooting such issues. This has many reasons. If you want to get proper information about your case, I would suggest to contact VMware Support for this (GSS).

Something you should also consider is the fact that VMware Horizon 6 does not support any Windows 10 release after 1709.

Check this article for more information:

Supported versions of Windows 10 on Horizon Agent Including All VDI Clones (Full Clones, Instant Clones, and Linked Clones on Horizon 7) (2149393)

VMware Knowledge Base

Windows 10 releases also have their lifecycle, depending on the version (pro, edu, enterprise). See this article for more information and specific EOL dates for all Windows 10 releases: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13853/windows-lifecycle-fact-sheet

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View 6.2.6 Persona Management Issues regarding Repository maximum and Windows 10

Re: View 6.2.6 Persona Management Issues regarding Repository maximum and Windows 10

Re: View 6.2.6 Persona Management Issues regarding Repository maximum and Windows 10

Re: View 6.2.6 Persona Management Issues regarding Repository maximum and Windows 10