Profile Management

Citrix User Profile Planning Guide is now available

Within XenApp environments three main pain points basically existed from day one. These are

• Application Compatibility (got much better with Application Isolation / Streaming and the availability of XenDesktop for really recalcitrant apps)
• Printing (much better since UPD is available and printer drivers have been removed from kernel level)
• ...and last but not least user profiles.

User profiles are actually not a particular XenApp challenge. Even in "normal" Windows environments you will find admins complaining and users too, although they typically don't know that user profiles are causing the issues they experience. Interestingly enough in most cases it's not the user profile technology itself that is causing issues but the implementation of it. The reasons are twofold:

• Technology: Microsoft has implemented three profile types (local, mandatory, roaming), which can be combined in certain ways giving you six different options of implementing user profiles, whereof each has specific pros and cons. Furthermore many 3rd party companies (including Citrix) have build their own products to optimize the user profile flexibility, ease the maintenance and minimize downtimes related to profiles. Unfortunately many admins out there are not aware of all options, which makes it basically impossible for them to choose the optimal solution.

• Requirements: Users, applications, the Windows architecture or even the underlying XenApp/XenDesktop infrastructure have certain requirements for user profile functionality. To pick the optimal solution, an administrator has to know the requirements but also needs to know the right questions to ask.

Click here to read the full Citrix blog article

Citrix Profile Management 3.2 released

Citrix has updated it's Profile Management solution to version 3.2.

Here is a quick overview of what's been fixed in this release

1. If profile streaming and active profile write back are used, Profile management might unnecessarily copy unchanged files from monitored directories to the roaming profile store.

   [#229893]

2. If a folder name is specified in the Folders to mirror policy that does not exist verbatim in the user's profile (for example, if the folder name is misspelled), the user session can wind up locked unexpectedly. The issue occurs because the service continues to attempt to locate the non-existent folder during logoff and eventually becomes unresponsive. The service starts again after a certain winlogon time-out period but then the user session is locked by winlogon.

   [#235033]

3. When a user logs on to a computer running Version 3.1 of profile management and then to a computer running an earlier version, such as 3.0, an entry should be logged on the computer running the later version, stating that a server with an earlier version pf Profile Management exists on another server and specify that server name. Instead, the log entry states: "An older version of Profile management is running on server <Unknown>."

   [#235323]

4. Applications can become unresponsive without logging any error messages when the cachefill mechanism conflicts with anti-virus software settings. This enhancement adds an Event Viewer message indicating the problem.

   [#235486]

5. When Profile management is installed on the terminal servers, Wbemtest.exe reports new user objects. However, when users log off, the report is not updated and user objects remain on the root\rsop\user namespace. With this fix, Wbemtest does not show a namespace for the user after logoff if Delete local profile during logoff is enabled.

   [#235532]

6. When the usn journal is deleted and the Profile management service restarted, a "CJIncreaseSizeIfNecessary" error is written to the Event Log. With this fix, the error is replaced by a warning as Profile management enables journaling.

   [#235781]

7. Two or more Profile management 3.x sessions running concurrently can break backward compatibility with earlier versions of Profile management.

   [#236670]

8. In scenarios with Profile management Version 3.1, the Delete locally cached profiles on logoff (Citrix User Profile Management GPO) setting enabled, and the Application Data folder redirection (Microsoft GPO) setting enabled, an error occurs when a new user makes the second attempt at launching the same Microsoft Office application. To resolve the issue, enable the Delete Redirected Folders setting available after importing the new .adm template.

Source

Citrix Profile management 3.0 vs. Roaming profiles on XenApp 6

A comparison of user profile load times between Roaming Profiles and Citrix Profile management v. 3.0 on XenApp 6. Edgesight 5.3 is used to compare the profile load times of 3 pairs of users with 10 MB, 100 MB and 500 MB profiles, showing the gain in profile load times when using the new "Streaming Profile" feature in Citrix profile management 3.0.