James, Thanks for responding. I've run across some product documentation on AppSense during my research. It seems like a promising product but kind of falls outside of where I'm being directed to focus my efforts. I first need to recommend a solution that provides reasonable high availability and fault tolerance. Whether it be clustered servers, replications, etc. I'm just looking to find out how others are doing it.
Once we're back on a supported environment, then I'll be directed to focus on the underlying issues affecting our roaming profiles. - Sean On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 11:31 PM, James Rankin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote: > We have a Citrix environment where we use mandatory profiles combined with > AppSense. The mandatory profiles save us from many of the major problems > that we have encountered with roaming profiles in other environments, > whereas AppSense gives users the ability to customise their profiles without > writing anything to the mandatory profile. Since we moved to this setup we > have avoided a lot of the problems normally associated with roaming > profiles. For instance, we never have to do "profile resets" any more or > such like, and we very rarely get them hanging at logoff. AppSense allows > you to reset various application settings (e.g. Microsoft Outlook) without > wiping out the rest of the profile, which I think is really cool. Logon > times are also drastically reduced as the profile itself only adds ub to > about 960KB, and we have managed to avoid having to use any user-based GPOs > or Citrix policies. > > 2008/8/26 Sean Martin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Hello all, >> >> I'm doing some research in attempt to identify how other medium to large >> organizations have architected their roaming profile environments. Here's a >> brief synopsis of our current environment: >> >> - Windows 2003 AD Domain >> - Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 - Single Farm, two Sites (Site A and Site >> B), Several Application Silos >> - Roughly 90 Citrix Servers >> - 2000 Users >> - Mix of XP SP2 PCs and XPEmbedded Thin Clients >> - EMC CX700 at both sites providing storage to Home Directory/Terminal >> Service Roaming Profile servers. We have SAN Copy and SnapView installed, >> but not MirrorView. McData Eclipse 1600 iFCP Routers facilitate data >> replication between the CX700s. >> >> Home Directories and Terminal Service Roaming Profiles are stored on >> Windows 2003 R2 SP2 file servers which are members of a DFS Namespace and >> participate in DFS Replication. (Site A = Server 1, Server 2) (Site B = >> Server 1, Server 2). We architected the DFS environment, using specific >> profile paths pointing to folder targets within Site A and Site B >> respectively, and used DFS referral ordering to lock down which servers >> users connect to in their respective site. Microsoft originally 'blessed' >> this design but ultimately still had concerns about hosting roaming profiles >> in a DFS environment. >> >> After several months of troubleshooting various profile related issues, >> Microsoft has ultimately stated they can no longer provide support because >> our configuration is technically 'unsupported'. While we're well aware the >> majority of our profile issues are a direct result of our Citrix >> environment, specifically the different application silos causing profile >> contention during logoff, it has been decided we do not want to maintain an >> unsupported environment. >> >> Our primary goal is to provide a highly available and fault tolerant >> profile environment. We're willing to look at host based replication >> software, SAN Based replication, etc. We're currently researching >> DoubleTake's capabilities. >> >> I'm looking for some feedback on how others have architected roaming >> profiles in similar environments. >> >> - Sean >> >> >> >> >> >> > > > > > ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
