Migrating network home folders to one drive but retaining local speed?

[nueon]

I am currently looking into the best way to bring OneDrive into our system. i dont want to just go down the route of enabling OneDrive and letting the clients sync and access files over the internet as i dont want to loose the local LAN speed.

 

have had a quick look at hosting sharepoint/onedrive on prem which does give me LAN speed but wants to save onedrive files locally to the machines. We only have small drives and allot of users per machine in our setup, so drives would probably fill quicly for some users/devices

 

We currently use redirect for peoples profiles and then FoldR to bridge the gap for Ipad access/Remote users, but we have found FoldR to now be a bit clunky keeps asking to sign in and isnt as easy as onedrive for our students to use. All our students have various learning difficulties so needs to be as easy as possible.

 

For staff laptops we currently use work folders/always on VPN which i love, but again the app isnt as user friendly as onedrive so fails a little on the ipad front

 

What i would like is for internal users to still use local speeds of the network but be available also from onedrive for the ipad front on site/home etc

 

has anyone has success with that or have more just gone down moving all data to onedrive in the cloud?

 

constant sync each direction from our home folders to their personal onedrive would work. i would still like the ipads to access onedrive on prem whilst in the building again to keep the LAN speed and not use up the internet line

 

anyone done anything similar?

[chaplic]

I think you are overthinking it a little, I migrated 50K clients from a homedrive to onedrive and of the many complaints (the version of windows 10 they had didn't support folders-on-demand) none of the complaints were about internet speed. IF users are constantly using the same device then it's going to be faster than your local fileserver.

 

If you must, look at FsLogix which allow a local roaming copy of onedrive and OST etc.

[nueon]

i get what you are saying just worried on that front around our shared devices getting full they are only 256 and could potentially have 50+ users on them. does the drive just fill or can one drive start to release the old files back?

[psydii]

Files on Demand (enabled by default) and Storage Sense (configurable via GP or Endpoint/Intune Policy) solves this for us. Devices with 256 gb storage do not run out of space. Some of them have 90-120 profiles on them.

[nueon]

it would certainly simply our setup with multiple sites and cross site users. ill run some test clients see how we get on. What about shared drives we currently have on prem shared drives but do have multiple teames/sharepoint online. sharepoint app for the ipads live with the speed for larger file access?

[psydii]

you can sync Sharepoint sites in the onedrive app and storage sense takes care of these too.

 

We have seating plans which reduces the need to roam settings or repeat the First time logon experience. (I actually held off the OneDrive migration a couple of years until management implemented this!)

[KK20]

Onedrive and teams are little monkeys for caching files BTW, depending on how you sort your profiles/appdata redirection etc you will run into this. Typically our teams caches hit 500mb easily. We havent found internet speed to be an issue at all, latency perhaps but not speed. Edited March 2, 2021 by KK20

[nueon]

thats my worry around the speed, we access locally now via a full NVMe storage and can see the difference just accessing files from sharepoint online the delay. most of our sites operate behind a 100/100 line and have to run everything via that. some sites struggle now few ipads using youtube etc we max out on a few quite easily. we are in the process of upgrading these though too. i like the idea of the ease of the one drive just feel its perhaps going back in time a little in terms of speed? we know internally the bottleneck is the wifi point speed or cable. appreciate with on demand the files will be local but not the first time they are accessed?

 

will look at sharepoint sync as we are steering towards sharepoint per site instead of the staff drives being a local mapped drive.

 

appreciate the help from people that have already done this

[free780]

Its the sync when they log off which is usually the issue.

Microsoft really need some sort of local cache server to deal with it. Or applications have a direct connection to onedrive instead of relying on the sync client.

Its an issue for shared devices. If all your students have 1:1 devices it will probably eliminate a lot of these issues.

[psydii]

We did have a period of adjustment as people got used to files taking a few moments to re-hydrate (be pulled down from the internet). We were lucky that in 2014 our plan was to move to the cloud before the next server refresh, so we never went to SSD/NVMe 10Gb/s servers, but that said our SAN and 1Gb/s lan was/is way faster than many legacy networks out there, and colleagues were a little frustrated with OneDrive performance vs SMB shares. Once hydrated though, it is all local file access - so actually faster than SMB file shares.

 

On the topic of your internet connection(s), I would suggest that 100/100 might be a problem particularly if people have large files. You'd want at least 500/200 or 1000/200.

When we moved to 500/500 we were using 100% of the 100Mb/s line most of the day (pre-OneDrive). With OneDrive we see peaks of 400 down and 200+ up. (the way the statistical monitoring works, we do see many many bursts of 500-900 Mb/s, but when reporting over a 24hr period these are smoothed out to 400 or less).

[bald_pig]

thats my worry around the speed, we access locally now via a full NVMe storage and can see the difference just accessing files from sharepoint online the delay. most of our sites operate behind a 100/100 line and have to run everything via that. some sites struggle now few ipads using youtube etc we max out on a few quite easily. we are in the process of upgrading these though too. i like the idea of the ease of the one drive just feel its perhaps going back in time a little in terms of speed? we know internally the bottleneck is the wifi point speed or cable. appreciate with on demand the files will be local but not the first time they are accessed?

 

will look at sharepoint sync as we are steering towards sharepoint per site instead of the staff drives being a local mapped drive.

 

appreciate the help from people that have already done this

 

Hate to say it, but I think you should have spent less on your storage server, and more on your internet connectivity!

 

Here, we're planning to migrate all user areas to onedrive, and all shared areas to Teams. Teams files still use sharepoint in the backend and can be mapped using the onedrive client too.

[jmak]

i get what you are saying just worried on that front around our shared devices getting full they are only 256 and could potentially have 50+ users on them. does the drive just fill or can one drive start to release the old files back?

File on Demand releases space by overwriting the least recently used file when it runs out of space. Users can mark files that they never want to be deleted, although little need for that.

 

I haven't tested to see what happens when the least recently used file is in a different user profile - I'd be interested if anyone else knows what the expected behaviour is.

 

For OP, it'd be worth looking at Storage Sense as that gives some more options for admin control over how file storage is managed on the client machines.

[MicrodigitUK]

If you must, look at FsLogix which allow a local roaming copy of onedrive and OST etc.

 

1+ for FSlogix Profiles and Office containers!

 

That’s the magical change for keeping local cash copies and roaming between devices. Although having run it now for several months myself, you do need to watch out for space requirements to store the local cash Fxlogix VHDX profiles and Office containers (for OneDrive/Outlook cash). They can grow rather large in size.

[nicholab]

We are using Azure files for fxlogix storage. Edited March 2, 2021 by nicholab

[mrbios]

Its the sync when they log off which is usually the issue.

Microsoft really need some sort of local cache server to deal with it. Or applications have a direct connection to onedrive instead of relying on the sync client.

 

This is literally the only thing that's stopped me from moving our stuff to the cloud yet. I trialled moving a handful of users (like 5 people) and had a problem with them the first day because of they're so used to the (admittedly bad practice) of making a document, saving at the end of a lesson, logging off and walking away to their next lesson. Not allowing enough time for the OneDrive client to sync their document.

 

If MS just came up with a write caching server or something that takes local changes instantly and syncs them on behalf of the client, only storing them during sync, that'd be the perfect solution imo.

[free780]

This is literally the only thing that's stopped me from moving our stuff to the cloud yet. I trialled moving a handful of users (like 5 people) and had a problem with them the first day because of they're so used to the (admittedly bad practice) of making a document, saving at the end of a lesson, logging off and walking away to their next lesson. Not allowing enough time for the OneDrive client to sync their document.

 

If MS just came up with a write caching server or something that takes local changes instantly and syncs them on behalf of the client, only storing them during sync, that'd be the perfect solution imo.

I think the endgame is for all users to have a 1:1 device and never log off apart from the monthly Windows Updates so sync can occur when a device is idle. No idea how those in education can afford that scenario. We have a situation where our customers (students) require devices to achieve however shared devices are seen as an after thought which is why many of us won't deploy the sync client to shared devices. It has got better with WVD and the per machine client but you have to go through the pain of lost work or try and find it and never delete profiles.

[psydii]

This is literally the only thing that's stopped me from moving our stuff to the cloud yet. I trialled moving a handful of users (like 5 people) and had a problem with them the first day because of they're so used to the (admittedly bad practice) of making a document, saving at the end of a lesson, logging off and walking away to their next lesson. Not allowing enough time for the OneDrive client to sync their document.

 

If MS just came up with a write caching server or something that takes local changes instantly and syncs them on behalf of the client, only storing them during sync, that'd be the perfect solution imo.

This is so frustrating. Back in W95 days they tried to make the way to create documents the same as classic mac and now Google - just create a new one in the filesystem and open it up.

 

The OO paradigm never really took hold in the Windows user base, and so, still today the answer to the question "where did you save it" is "in Word"

[mrbios]

Looks like there have been simpler, less involved, but slightly effective uservoice requests to MS to 1. make the sync client block the pc going to sleep during sync and 2. force a sync to finish before a pc shutsdown.....those are roughly along the lines of what we need..............those requests have been tehre since 2016

 

Oh well, I'll just stubbornly be old fashioned and keep everything on site until the features i want are there. Got more than enough storage space, and we're entirely shared devices.....so no chance I'm contending with the constant lost work as people move around every lesson!

Edited March 3, 2021 by mrbios

[Katy]

OneDrive with Files on Demand and Storage Sense since... about 2018 I think, not had any issues - we bumped up the 100/100 connection to 1000/1000 before migrating anything though. The fact it's a little slower if it has to download the file is offset by the fact they can access all their personal and shared files from anywhere off site without having to mess about with remote desktop or VPNs.

[free780]

I did look at using attrib on a logout script to force a sync and validate the results. So it's automated for the users using shared devices. Or you go though training every user to wait for the solid cloud before logging off.

[titch]

I did wonder if there were any useful GPs/scripts anyone had setup to help remedy this. Something along the lines of a countdown timer on logof?

[Katy]

I did wonder if there were any useful GPs/scripts anyone had setup to help remedy this. Something along the lines of a countdown timer on logof?

I had a look when we first moved to OneDrive to see if there was a way to query its sync status, closest I got was seeing what the icon was set to but it didn't really work in the end. If it's shared devices they just have to learn to watch the cloud. Rarely get anyone with issues with 1Gbps upload though.

[KK20]

We use IAMCloud mapper, this maps onedrive to the H: on user logon (plus a couple of sharepoint libraries to other drive letters). Initially we used IAMCloud mapper as a crutch for teachers who couldnt get used to losing their data drive letter (these were sanitised and pushed to a sharepoint library). This might be why we havent had as many "blue cloud sync" issues - people use the H: drive to save online.

[nueon]

Sorry for the delay i've been pulled into other things but have had a little play and like the results but do agree with some of the concerns above.

 

We currently run a combination desktop/docs redirect and work folders for our laptops set via GPO.

 

on a blank fresh user i have the SSO one drive sign in configure on its own and set desktop/docs to backup and all works as expected.

 

what do people do around existing users that have GPO's set for the redirects already? we have to make a new GPO to turn redirect off which works fine but then this GPO then stops OneDrive from backing up the desktop/docs folder until you then remove that GPO and replace it with a no redirect one. so kind of looks like you need 1 GPO to turn them off and another to then get rid of them all together, or am i missing something easy here? problem with that is the multiple device users

 

Internet line at our core site is already 1GB/1GB and the rest are following suite as the contracts are ending.

 

i did do some testing of putting sharepoint/oneprem on site which kept traffic local but our issue is we have 6 physical locations with staff/students sometimes moving between the sites on a daily basis and then needed 6 local setups of sharepoint which over complicated things. benefits were all internal devices would use the internal speed and not reply on the internet as such. did seem to work but costings and over complicating things were a draw back.

 

Storage sense has been setup and tested and can see that working fine hopefully maybe just tweaking the days as we go live.

 

migrating of data i only did my own as a test but went without hitch. its really the solution to try and silently move people from local redirect/workfolders to onedrive. what have others done around that?

 

Appreciate the help

[psydii]

Use the SharePoint Migration Tool to migrate the folders. You can run it multiple times across the same sets of folders. Then use the two GPO trick you describe.

 

We're quite heavily into laptops and seating plans so people tend to use the same devices over and over again. Also the set of folder they need for say, Music are different tot he set of folders they need for Maths, so not having the music folders instantly available through Explorer when they are on the maths computers isn't much of a problem.

 

Staff each have a dedicated laptop they carry with them. If they ever use a temporary or shared device they just use the web interface to access files.