Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?
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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.
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Just disabled the UPD options on the new server. I think I am going to instruct each person to login to the new server to create a fresh profile and just copy in some stuff.
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@wrx7m said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
@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.
I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out what was going wrong and never saw anyone else with a similar problem in all my searching.
I don't get the impression that this is common at all. Most people seem to think they just work and are an upgrade on old school roaming profiles.
I don't think I'd let the one anecdote of trouble rule it out as an option unless you are in an extreme hurry.
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@NDC I just don't want to do the setup twice. Ain't nobody got time for that.
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@wrx7m We have not deployed anything RDS related without User Profile Disks in close to a decade now. I can think of maybe one exception and that was because it was a very small setup with no need for anything else plus it was temporary.
User Profile Disks whether native or FSLogix, which is now included with RDS CALs by default, is the way to go.
They make adding Session Hosts or additional collections to the farm so much easier to do when located on a file server.
If someone blows-up their profile or it gets corrupted then SIDFinder to figure out their UPD, log them off, rename the UPD, log them on, configure their profile, mount the old UPD, and copy the needed data in if this is needed at all. Note that I am speaking specifically of something within the local profile getting corrupted here.
We would not deploy an all-in-one or farm RDS configuration at all without a UPD setup. Period.
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@PhlipElder said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
We have not deployed anything RDS related without User Profile Disks in close to a decade now.
Gah! I need to get off the seesaw lol. OK. I will test them out to see how well it handles the 3 apps that people will be accessing.
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@PhlipElder said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
User Profile Disks whether native or FSLogix, which is now included with RDS CALs by default
Interesting. I need to check it out. Not sure what it does.
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@PhlipElder So, UPD should be stored on a completely separate file server?
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@wrx7m Correct.
Putting them elsewhere offers true user portability. In my experience the only extra step we take from there is redirecting Desktop and the My Documents folder. We do that by default for all of our clients.
There are some additional management and features available in FSLogix. It's been a while since I've looked at it though.
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@NDC 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?:
@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.
I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out what was going wrong and never saw anyone else with a similar problem in all my searching.
I don't get the impression that this is common at all. Most people seem to think they just work and are an upgrade on old school roaming profiles.
I don't think I'd let the one anecdote of trouble rule it out as an option unless you are in an extreme hurry.
As much as Scott is likely against this - I would have request permission to open a case with MS - The $250 call would have likely provided you direct access to MS engineers to assist in the issue. I'm guessing you could have saved a lot of money (i.e. your salary time) getting to a solution faster - and if not, then MS would refund your money, but at least you would have had them sitting side by side with you working the issue.
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@wrx7m said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
@PhlipElder So, UPD should be stored on a completely separate file server?
It works through a file share. If you have a RDS farm, then likely you want a server with fast disk to provide access to these, and not be reliant upon any of the farm members to be active, providing this service (storage location).
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@Dashrender said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:
@NDC 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?:
@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.
I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out what was going wrong and never saw anyone else with a similar problem in all my searching.
I don't get the impression that this is common at all. Most people seem to think they just work and are an upgrade on old school roaming profiles.
I don't think I'd let the one anecdote of trouble rule it out as an option unless you are in an extreme hurry.
As much as Scott is likely against this - I would have request permission to open a case with MS - The $250 call would have likely provided you direct access to MS engineers to assist in the issue. I'm guessing you could have saved a lot of money (i.e. your salary time) getting to a solution faster - and if not, then MS would refund your money, but at least you would have had them sitting side by side with you working the issue.
A coworker spent some time with MS support as I recall. Since I wasn't involved in the call(s) I don't know how well that was handled on either end but we didn't get a resolution.
