Roaming Profiles? What is best?

[norstarboston]

I currently manage a citrix farm with 2 servers running metaframe 4.0 with only the desktop pulished. I have about 100 users with local profiles and I put 50 users on server1 and 50 on server2 so that their profiles will always be the same. I would like to change this model so I can turn on load balancing and possibly move to roaming profiles or folder redirection. What would be the best setup for this? I just want to make sure they can login to either server at anytime and maintain their outlook/exchange settings as well as all their documents. I experimented with straight roaming profiles at one time and noticed a huge lag in the profile loading. Many users must maintain large documents to complete their work. Thanks

 

[Andreh]

Norstarboston,

You are thinking the right way to go about it.

What I usually do is enable TS profiles (Terminal Server Profile tab) within the properties of user accounts to go to a central location on the Domain Controller and remove all the existence of local profiles on the Citrix / TS servers. The user profile share settings should look like this:

\\Server\TSProfiles\%username%

(%username% is a variable that will populate the user name in the folder that is created)

You need to create a network share for this much like that of roaming profiles (Profiles Tab) if you wanted users to use different pc's. Use the following example as a guide:

Server\d$\TSProfiles

You will need to share the above folder at the TSProfile level with permissions to allow users the create folders. Once you have created the folders, give the user decent rights (write) to use the folder.

\\Server\TSProfiles

You also need to create GPO's to be applied to the Citrix servers that will remove the profiles from the local server when a user logs off. There are 3 specific settings that you need to enable for this:

1) Add the Administrators security group to the roaming user profiles
2) Delete cached copies of roaming profiles
3) Do not check for user ownership of Roaming Profile Folders

This is probably a good start. There are plenty of guides on the net to assist but feel free to ask any questions you like.

Good luck


"Assumption is the mother of all f#%kups!

 

[MLandin]

Check out Flex Profiles .