Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?
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@wrx7m FSLogix is now included with Remote Desktop Services CALs. That User Profile Disk (UPDs) setup is a step up from the native UPDs.
We've been using UPDs since they were included in RDS. It makes the need for roaming profiles of some sort for larger farms moot. We locate the UPDs on a decent performing file server and make sure to set up the defaults with data growth in mind.
Let's say we set a default size of 30GB for the UPD. We can then mount the template file and shrink the partition in there down to say 5GB. Then, when a user comes close to running out of space we can increase their partition size within their UPD very easily.
We still redirect Desktop and My Documents plus the subfolders to provide some security to the user's data.
We have yet to deploy a RDS Farm using FSLogix. That's next on our RDS To Do List to thrash the setup.
EDIT: When migrating a user to a new farm they get a new UPD and thus the need is there for a bit of post logon configuration. We usually do this when setting the user account up in the new collection.
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@PhlipElder said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
FSLogix is now included with Remote Desktop Services CALs.
I totally missed the announcement on that. At one point it was being looked at here but dropped for cost. Will have to look again.
UPDs were a bit dodgy when we experimented with them but I'm reasonably sure that was due to GPO cruft. Hoping to get that cleaned up for another attempt soon.
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@dafyre said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
It's funny...I get something completely different out of that article. That article seems to make it sound like you can do a UPD actually on the client systems NOT using VDI.
that is the whole purpose of that article - is to show you how to 'break the rules' and do it on a local client, but he does say at the top that it's meant for VDI and RDS.
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@dafyre said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
In the case of using VDI though, everybody would be on the SAME versiion of Windows. So you wouldn't need separate profiles for Win10 1607, 1709, and 1903 (or whatever)... You'd upgrade your Master image to 1903, and then deploy it (after heavy testing, of course). Bam! Everybody's on Win10 1903.
That doesn't answer how you migrate profiles though from one version to the next.
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@Dashrender said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
@dafyre said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
It's funny...I get something completely different out of that article. That article seems to make it sound like you can do a UPD actually on the client systems NOT using VDI.
that is the whole purpose of that article - is to show you how to 'break the rules' and do it on a local client, but he does say at the top that it's meant for VDI and RDS.
Well dang... I need to go back and read that again, lol.
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@Dashrender said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
@dafyre said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
In the case of using VDI though, everybody would be on the SAME versiion of Windows. So you wouldn't need separate profiles for Win10 1607, 1709, and 1903 (or whatever)... You'd upgrade your Master image to 1903, and then deploy it (after heavy testing, of course). Bam! Everybody's on Win10 1903.
That doesn't answer how you migrate profiles though from one version to the next.
If all you're saving in the Profiles is Desktop,Docs, Pictures, and Videos... Why do you need to migrate the profiles?
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@wrx7m said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
was meant for vdi only. I'm not doing vdi, so I I guess that makes the decision between migrating profiles or recreating them manually.
You can actually UDP even without VDI, they are not only meant for VDI for sure. That's how I have multiple RDS deployments.
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@dbeato said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
@wrx7m said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
was meant for vdi only. I'm not doing vdi, so I I guess that makes the decision between migrating profiles or recreating them manually.
You can actually UDP even without VDI, they are not only meant for VDI for sure. That's how I have multiple RDS deployments.
Yeah, it's made for both RDS and VDI. In the Wizard for setting up a VDI or RDS Collection asks about UPDs.
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@dafyre said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
@dbeato said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
@wrx7m said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
was meant for vdi only. I'm not doing vdi, so I I guess that makes the decision between migrating profiles or recreating them manually.
You can actually UDP even without VDI, they are not only meant for VDI for sure. That's how I have multiple RDS deployments.
Yeah, it's made for both RDS and VDI. In the Wizard for setting up a VDI or RDS Collection asks about UPDs.
Yeah, I was going to say that too.
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@dafyre said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
@Dashrender said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
@dafyre said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
In the case of using VDI though, everybody would be on the SAME versiion of Windows. So you wouldn't need separate profiles for Win10 1607, 1709, and 1903 (or whatever)... You'd upgrade your Master image to 1903, and then deploy it (after heavy testing, of course). Bam! Everybody's on Win10 1903.
That doesn't answer how you migrate profiles though from one version to the next.
If all you're saving in the Profiles is Desktop,Docs, Pictures, and Videos... Why do you need to migrate the profiles?
You're not - it has everything the profile has in it.. all the settings, etc. And they are version dependent.
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@dbeato said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
@wrx7m said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
was meant for vdi only. I'm not doing vdi, so I I guess that makes the decision between migrating profiles or recreating them manually.
You can actually UDP even without VDI, they are not only meant for VDI for sure. That's how I have multiple RDS deployments.
Exactly - but the article I posted was a person who went against the purpose of UPD and found a way to use them on local Windows 10 machines... so, sure, it can be done, it's just 100% no supported by MS.
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@NDC Our main pain with them was "Disk was surprised removed" messages in the Event Logs and the occasional Session Host that refused to let the UPD go after the user had logged out that brought about a support call.
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@PhlipElder said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
@NDC Our main pain with them was "Disk was surprised removed" messages in the Event Logs and the occasional Session Host that refused to let the UPD go after the user had logged out that brought about a support call.
What version of Windows was that on for you? My current set up is 2012 R2 and we've not had any issues with it.
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@dafyre It's been a very long time, so I'm going to say 2012 R2.
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@PhlipElder said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
@dafyre It's been a very long time, so I'm going to say 2012 R2.
Curious. How many users at once? Our system is generally low usage during the summer, but during the year, we have anywhere between 50 and 150 users at a time. Never had any issues like that.
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@dafyre Usually just one though the Surprised Removed message could be quite frequent with no impact to users. They were Event Log pollution.
We had one client we set up a pair of clusters for that decided to go with FSLogix because of the issues they were experiencing with native UPDs. That was on Server 2016.
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@PhlipElder said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
@dafyre Usually just one though the Surprised Removed message could be quite frequent with no impact to users. They were Event Log pollution.
We had one client we set up a pair of clusters for that decided to go with FSLogix because of the issues they were experiencing with native UPDs. That was on Server 2016.
I'm liking what I see from FSLogix. I'll have to build an environment around that now that it's part of Microsoft.
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@dafyre Concur. It's on our To Do List to get done soon as we have some farm building coming up that we'd like to deploy FSLogix UPDs on.
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@PhlipElder said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
@NDC Our main pain with them was "Disk was surprised removed" messages in the Event Logs and the occasional Session Host that refused to let the UPD go after the user had logged out that brought about a support call.
The problem here was that I couldn't get them to reliably connect at logon.
I've seen that this is typically caused by the UPD not being unlocked properly after the last session but so far as I could tell ours were not locked.
I used the MS tool for checking up on such things and could see the system lock an open disk when logon began, then unlock it 1/2 way through the process, leaving the user at the desktop with a temp profile.
This would happen to test users after a week of successful logins. Some accounts it seemed to get stuck that way more or less permanently, others would switch back and forth between success and temp profiles seemingly at random.
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@NDC OK. Thanks for sharing your issues. I am just going to use regular profiles on a standard disk. I don't have time to deal with those types of issues.
