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From: fractalsphere on 10 Mar 2010 13:34
The configuration is as follows.. (you'll love this)

People are using Sunray 270's as thinclient connections into a
correctly configured Load Balanced pair of 2K8 R2 RDS servers. About
20-22 clients per server, running general Office 2K7 apps, including
Visio. Those two servers have enough CPU/Memory to handle the users.

The configuration I'm seeing that's a problem is the profile creation...

Users are NOT configured with Roaming Profiles in AD, there's only a
Terminal Server GP set up with some folder redirection. The "User
Config/Policies/Windows Settings/Folder Redirection" section of the GP
does not handle, nor can it handle from what I see the "Appdata\Local"
folder (which, of course, holds Outlooks PST files).

This has caused the dilemma of users who log into both TS servers
(remember they're Load Balanced, so it's pretty much random) having
separate and DIFFERENT profile sizes on each server. Browsing in
Properties of the Computer/User profiles shows the local profile type
been changed to Roaming Profiles - but they're roaming profiles that
never roam anywhere. They're not being redirected via GP, the type has
only been changed on each local server, accomplishing nothing.

GP properly redirects some folders (My Docs, favorites, desktop, etc)
to a File/Print box with a SCSI array attached. It has plenty of space
free to handle the profile load.


My ideas to fix this, and what I'm looking for input on, are twofold;

(the easier, but less effective solution)
1. Configure in each users account (only 50+) a proper path to a
roaming profile and copy the appropriate profile data from one of the
TS servers to that location. (The current File/Print box with array storage)
When the user logs in next the change/redirection should be transparent in
terms of their data and Outlook info, but will introduce a Logon Lag since
some of their
profiles and PST data are in the multi-gigabyte range.

OR

(the harder, but ultimately "better if it works" solution)
2. Move the physical SCSI array and set it up as a shared storage
directly connected to the pair of Load Balanced TS servers, and then
follow my step 1, only pointing to a profile stored essentially locally
on the TS server farm.



The questions I have which I'm having a hard time finding answers to are;

1. Can I share an array like that between non-HA/clustered failover
servers? Can the shares name be tagged to the server farm name, as
opposed to a single server?
2. Can a profile be 'roaming' and pointed to a share that is
technically local to the server a person is logging in to?
2a. Will that essentially locally stored profile simply do a file copy
from the Array drive to the local C drive upon logon? That would be an
acceptable delay, as opposed to copy-over-the-wire.
2b. Could that essentially locally stored profile be used 'live' with
no file copy or cached mode being engaged? (not necessary, but would
be a time-and-space-saver.)


_______________
Thank you for your time taken to read this. I hope to get some real input
and discussion on this one. ;-)

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