Roaming Profiles (Microsoft Saying Bye!)

[Asgard]

An interesting comment was posted on the JISCMail Windows mailing list yesterday which has sparked quite a debate, so I thought I'd share the original comment!

 

A thread on technet lead to this being posted by a Microsoft engineer:

Regarding Roaming User Profiles (RUP) support, RUP is supported on Windows 10 but we’re no longer investing in new features.  We do plan to deprecate RUP in the future but the timing has not been determined.

Our recommendation is to use our modern solutions for roaming user data:

* For settings and application data, use UE-V or Enterprise State Roaming (ESR)

* For user data, use Work Folders or OneDrive for Business

 

One of the Uni's have commented that they saw 103 unique logins to a PC in a single day... that's some first time login profile creation

Edited January 7, 2017 by Asgard

[Ephelyon]

Thanks for this useful cross-post. And now I am going to make a "cross" post.

 

So here we are again. Six months ago it was "you WILL use the cloud, and it will be OUR cloud, and you will use it for EVERYTHING (and, psst, we will train you up to sell our products to your leadership teams)". Now we have more of the same with dumping locally-hosted RUP and trying to pull ESR settings down from the cloud all the time... every sixty minutes... for hundreds of people... this is madness!

 

Oh, and the olive branch for locally-hosted is supposedly UE-V? So I'm going to waste hours packaging individual apps with settings when we could perhaps just not deprecate RUP because it works perfectly fine?!

[Asgard]

Oh, and the olive branch for locally-hosted is supposedly UE-V? So I'm going to waste hours packaging individual apps with settings when we could perhaps just not deprecate RUP because it works perfectly fine?!

 

Before I stumbled across the first version of UE-V I'd been giving our users the appearance of roaming profiles whilst still actually being based on a Mandatory Profile.

 

Most of the staff in the college basically see a roaming profile as essentially "changing the word toolbar" , so we wrote a hack that on logout takes that part of the reghive exports it to their home area and re-applied it on login. Essentially what UE-V does.

 

With them baking UE-V into the OS they have certainty put a mark in the sand. So maybe I'll have to dedicate some time to looking at UE-v properly.

 

I have been toying with the idea of binning Mandatory Profiles to give a bit more flexibility (onedriveclpudmapper) , etc and was leaning towards roaming Profiles or some variant but now I'm probably going to have to rethink it.

Edited January 7, 2017 by Asgard

[Ephelyon]

Our staff use Roaming, while students use Mandatory but both have their AppData redirected so they still get a fair bit of customisation. Profiles through Azure AD or anything OneDrive-related is still going to use bandwidth, though, that I'd rather not have to commit from the Internet connection when I've a perfectly good internal network and servers that could be taking that load. It just doesn't make sense to be constantly pulling and pushing that kind of data from the cloud when you've got hundreds of people essentially hot-desking around the site every hour...

[Asgard]

It just doesn't make sense to be constantly pulling and pushing that kind of data from the cloud when you've got hundreds of people essentially hot-desking around the site every hour...

 

Your comment absolutely hits the nail on the head. The amount of internal redundancy we all have (switches/fibre(LAGs) /servers) stacked up against 1 internet link is worrying.

 

Ok we might be lucky that we have 1gb outgoing and a "backup" 500mb Virtual Ethernet Extension to the school in our MAT but it's not the point.

 

And their idea of onedrive for primary storage :

I can think of our media department that use Vegas/Premier Pro; our Art&Design who use AutoCad/Maya/Solidworks Oh and cross college use of Creative cloud all saving/opening over a wan link 🤢🤢🤢🤢

Edited January 7, 2017 by Asgard

[Ephelyon]

Ah, but of course M$ will tell you the answer to all this is ExpressRoute!

 

So that'll be the recurring cost of another leased line plus about £750/annum for the service, then... plus around 2p/GB for all outbound traffic over that line (saving back ESR data, for instance)...

[markwilfan]

Am I missing something? We redirect home folders and user folders and have moved away from roaming profiles due to a variety of reasons. This works absolutely fine for most users and first login is about 30 seconds. Rup going rip isn't such a bad thing is it?

[Ephelyon]

Depends whether you mean students or staff, to an extent. Also depends how much you want to deploy on logon in terms of GPP Registry settings. Then there's whether you redirect AppData or not.

[KK20]

Am I missing something? We redirect home folders and user folders and have moved away from roaming profiles due to a variety of reasons. This works absolutely fine for most users and first login is about 30 seconds. Rup going rip isn't such a bad thing is it?

how often do you clear profiles off machines? Do you have profiles cleaned on logoff? I was finding hundreds of profiles not clearing properly until I moved to roaming - then the issue went away. The GPOs for clearing profiles simply didn't work reliablyfor us (so we were running out of space locally on the popular machines). delprof2 aside this was a bit of a nightmare.

[markwilfan]

I have a dynamic collection on sccm that publishes a delprof script should the disk space get lower than 10gb

[synaesthesia]

Our machines run delprof on shutdown every night. All users bar 3 have mandatory profiles. Works wonders!

Interested to see what we can do with UE-V though, it's part of my planning/testing with Win10.

[burgemaster]

Hi synaesthesia. Could I please ask if your staff use Outlook? How does this deal with then firing up outlook and having to download a large OST file every time?

[sister_annex]

Hi synaesthesia. Could I please ask if your staff use Outlook? How does this deal with then firing up outlook and having to download a large OST file every time?

Just jumping in on this one, we were finding that Roaming Profiles and Cached Outlook didn't work. We have pushed a GPO out that disables the outlook cache. Yes this means that there is more load on the server but we have not had any more issues with OST and RUP since doing so.