Understanding what solution to use for your user profiles on VDIs

Today I am going to talk about the design decision on how to manager your user profiles on VDIs. This topic has been evolving over the years as technology has made new solutions possible. The important thing to point out is out of all the solutions none of them are bad. It just depends on the use case you are working with as to what is the best fit. Below you will find 6 profile solutions and details about when to use each.

Don't Use Any Solution - With this solution you chose to not do anything with the profiles. This means if you are running a non-persistent VDI when the VDI is refreshed all user data will be deleted. This has no real impact in a full persistent VDI environment.

• Recommended use case: Full Persistent VDI or Non-persistent VDI where you do not care if you do not retain user data.

Horizon Persistent Disks - With this solution you redirect the user profile to a 2nd hard drive on the VDI. This allows you to be able to refresh the C drive of the VDI but not lose the users data. One advantage of this setup is it is very easy to setup. One of the major limitations of this solution is the VDI has to be one to one mapping meaning one user per VDI.

• Recommended use case: Linked Clone pool where you want to be able to recompose / refresh the OS disk and keep the user data with out implementing another profile management solutions. Also remember this is a one to one mapping so you cant over prevision your desktop pool.

Microsoft Roaming Profiles - With this solution you leverage Microsoft solution to redirect the profile on a network server. This solution i have seen have issues with performance and reliablity.

• Recommended use case: None other then for use in Lab as there are other options that have a low or no cost.

Horizon Persona Management - With this solution it requires that you are using VMware Horizon as your VDI solution. This solution allows you to configure user profiles that are dynamically synchronized with remote profile repository located on a NAS. One thing to note is this solution requires Volume Shadow Service (VSS) to capture the changes of your profile and update the remote repository. This solution also does not scale very well.

• Recommended use case: Your VDI environment must be a VMware Horizon solution that is small and does not plan to scale in size. 

VMware User Environment Manager - With this solution you get personalization and dynamic policy configuration across not only VDI but physical desktops as well. This solution is also part of the VMware JMP solution that is packaged with Horizon enterprise.

• Recommended use case: A large Horizon Enterprise VDI environment that needs granular personalization and dynamic polices. 

Citrix Profile Management - With this solution you get personalization and dynamic policy configuration. This solution is also part of Citrix Xenapp / XenDesktop.

• Recommended use case: A large Citrix Xenapp or XenDesktop environment that needs granular personalization and dynamic polices. 

3rd Party Solutions - If you do not find what you need with the solutions provided above i would recommend checking out some of the available profile solutions from a 3rd party outside of Citrix and VMware. Two that i would look at are solutions created by Liquidware and Ivanti.