Best Practice: Roaming Profiles and Folder Redirection (a.k.a. User State Virtualization)
Virtualization is currently a buzz word and it seems that Microsoft is falling over itself to brand as many products as possible with the “V” word (e.g. Hyper-V, App-V & Med-V). So “User State Virtualization” is the term that Microsoft now uses to describe what used to be call Roaming Profiles and/or Folder Redirection.
The idea is simple… a user can logon to any computer in an organisations and have all their personal files and setting apply to that computer as it was the last time they used a computer. This is really a Win/Win for Users and IT Pros as for a user this is a big time saver as they no longer need to waste time setting up their drives, printers and other personal settings when they have to use another computers. IT Pro’s also benefit when there is an un-expected failure or loss of a computer then they don’t have to go through what could be a lengthily, costly and if not impossible, process of recovering the users data.
Now theoretically User State Virtualization can be totally done with just a Roaming Profile, however this quickly becomes impractical as users often store a LOT of data which can make users profile impossibly large. To get around this Microsoft users folder redirection to essentially redirect parts of a users profile to a file share on a server where it is centrally access whenever they logon to a computer.
Reference: Managing Roaming User Data Deployment Guide
Folder Redirection provides a way for administrators to divide user data from profile data. This division of user data decreases user logon times, and Windows downloads less data. Windows redirects the local folder to a central location, giving the user immediate access to their data when they save it, regardless of the computer they are using. This immediate access removes the need to update the user profile.
By redirecting these folders to a server they are only access when needed and therefore very large files do not slow down the profile update process. The obvious disadvantage of doing this is that when a user cannot access the redirected folders (e.g. disconnected laptop users) they lose access to these files. However this restriction is also mitigated by ensuring that the user has a cached copy of these redirected folders.
Below I am going to go through a number of tips and tricks to make sure you get the most out of a User State Virtualization setup in your environment and to ensure that you don’t fall into some configuration traps.
