Late last year, I wrote a KB for a solution that I wanted to bring up here- hosting Horizon’s VDI user directories on FlashArray™ File with folder redirection controlled through a group policy object (GPO). I’d like to discuss this for a couple of reasons:
1. Configuring FA File was surprising easy, especially compared to what I remember from setting up a Windows file server was for the same purpose in a previous role.
2. Why I landed on using folder redirection for this KB instead of roaming profiles or another solution for user shares in a VDI environment.
When I have managed or set up VDI environments from scratch in previous jobs, there were always a ton of considerations that went into the VDI environment. From determining the appropriate amount of virtual resources to deploy to each VDI user to determining how much hardware I actually needed to buy to support the full deployment, each step can be more painful than the last. Any opportunity we can take to help ourselves be successful in the project is a good step to invest in. But when that step is easier and I don’t have to invest any resources to get the benefit of improving the success of the project, I have to take a step back and appreciate what just went so well.
It took me roughly 30 minutes to deploy and configure FA File in my existing Active Directory environment in my lab the first time. That included carefully digesting all the applicable new-to-me Pure documentation. From what I can recall with this process from my previous roles, that was at best a 2 hour job with a carefully put together and well documented Active Directory environment with automated Windows server deployments; at worst, that might have taken me a full day or two when I had to build everything from scratch. When any task took a day or more, I always had interrupts that would drag the process out and I ended up taking more time to review what I had done and what I needed to do from a documentation perspective.
On the point of why I used folder redirection instead of roaming profiles with Active Directory, VMware has this very helpful KB that outlines decisions you might make if you are using Dynamic Environment manager (DEM), but I think a lot of the points are applicable even if you aren’t using DEM. I’d like to highlight some disadvantages they list of roaming profiles:
Disadvantages
-Large roaming profiles might get corrupted and cause the individual roaming profile to reset completely. As a result, users might spend a lot of time getting all personalized settings back.
-Roaming profiles do not roam across different operating systems. This results in multiple roaming profiles per user in a mixed environment, like desktops and Terminal Services.
-Potential for unnecessary growth of roaming profile, causing long login times.
When I saw these three specifically, I decided to go with folder redirection instead of roaming profiles. Anytime corruption is mentioned I try to avoid it. With VDI projects (let’s be real, most IT projects), you always want to minimize the impact to the end users partially because it will hurt adoption of it or reduce confidence from different groups in the company.
There is more to come with FA File and data protection, so please keep this blog in mind!