Where do you store your profiles?

[zag]

Quick question but where do people store their roaming and mandatory profiles?

 

Currently ours are on our file server but it seems to effect the speed of file access when big groups are logging on at the same time.

 

Anyone have a dedicated profile server or put them somewhere else?

[Fuzzz]

We have a server for students wich stores the roaming profiles, software etc. of students. We have another server wich does the same for staff-data.

 

If the logins are slow, you should try to determine what the bottleneck is. Is it the server or is it the network?

 

If it's the server, maybe you can upgrade the server or buy another one and split the accounts in half; one half for server one, the other half for server two.

 

If it's the network, check what the bottleneck is. If it's the uplink of the servers, you can try teaming multiple NIC's. Or maybe your edge-switches have an 100Mbit/s uplink wich can be upgraded to 1Gbit/s

[Michael]

I create a folder called 'Profiles' and share it as 'Profiles$' giving Full Control to everyone.

 

This can be on any server within your structure, but make sure you have enough disk space and the server has plenty of resources. It can make quite a difference to logon speeds.

[gshaw]

Same as above, I once tried putting the profiles in SYSVOL thinking that replication might be a good idea but it made them do some strange things so went to a more conventional setup!

 

I teamed the NICs on the profile storage server (also our file server for our teaching network machines at the moment) and it seems OK for the 150-200 machines we have...

[maniac]

My mandatory profile for students it stored on the Netlogon share, seems to function fine from that location, never really had any issues.

 

Staff Roaming profiles are on my storage server in a share called staffprofiles, they seem to work perfectally happily from this location.

 

Mike.

[elsiegee40]

In the Profiles$ share as above... we only have one server

[Michael]

I would never place profiles within NETLOGON or SYSVOL. Profiles can easily become very large and this can bring the whole network down to a snail pace. Only scripts, BGInfo or similar should be placed within NETLOGON.

[rh91uk]

I place my mandatory profiles on a share called mandatoryprofiles$ on my shared areas server, same with roamingprofiles$ on the same server.

 

Then on the other server are our work areas!

[maniac]

I would never place profiles within NETLOGON or SYSVOL. Profiles can easily become very large and this can bring the whole network down to a snail pace. Only scripts, BGInfo or similar should be placed within NETLOGON.

 

It's a mandatory profile on my Netlogon share, which is a fixed size of 4.45MB, and can't grow because it's mandatory and read only

 

Mike.

[srochford]

As you say, with a read-only, mandatory profile it's fine to put it in netlogon (and if you have more than 1 server then you get automatic replication and DFS for free :-))

 

If you want a default profile for all users on your network, netlogon is the only place to put it because that's where an account with no profile specified will look for the default

[dtakias]

On small networks, the structure I use involves storing the profiles in a separate partition on the DC and use an admin share under D:\data\profiles$ with the correct security permissions.

 

cheers

nick