Smokebomb

The problem with all the drive mappers for OneDrive we have used is that they use the WebDAV protocol to connect to Office 365 (@IAMCloud_Leon please correct me if your product does it a different way). File Explorer doesn't always play nice with this and it can be slow, even on our 1Gb internet connection (especially if you are trying to upload large files such as video). Test thoroughly before going this route. In 2017/18 we provided students on-premise H drives and OneDrive mapped to O with a competing product to IAMCloud. We did away with mapped drives for students this year and embraced the OneDrive client with Files-on-demand. While we have had teething issues along the way I would say the client has come a long way from where it was at in September 2018. Look at installing it per-machine which significantly speeds up initial setup at logon. The only PCs we have had space issues on have 120GB SSD's. We have some maintenance scripts running delprof2 to tidy up old profiles which helps. Anything with a 240GB+ SSD has been fine (while utilising files-on-demand).

If you plan to use OneDrive sync client or similar then you should go for 240GB, otherwise you'll soon find yourself having to do some profile management (even with files-on-demand enabled).

Just done some side by side testing with two identical laptops, one with per-machine sync client and one with per-user. From desktop appearing to sync client auto sign-in on per-machine laptop:16 seconds. Per-user laptop: 1 min, 34 secs. Much improved!

Thank you for responding. Managed to resolve our issue, it was related to NAT.

Hi, know this is an old thread but did you ever resolve this? We are just trying to get eduroam working with a Ruckus controller and appear to be having a similar problem. Thanks

I would imagine the licenses are per VM, but speak to your Microsoft reseller for clarification. You should be fine putting a few infrastructure VMs in your cluster, we do that too. We’ve been doing desktop virtualisation since 2011, starting with VMware Horizon View, and if you have fast storage and lots of RAM your bottleneck will always be CPU. We went with AMD for the View VDI solution with 64 core boxes but found the performance to be poor, Xeon boxes were a lot better even with fewer cores. Granted this was a while ago so I’m sure AMD have improved. IE and Chrome processes can eat CPU, and don’t even think about putting something like the Impero classroom management app on there. It can eat 5-15% of CPU per user session. There is nothing wrong with Broadberry’s proposed model, but you risk the all “eggs in one basket“ scenario - over the last few months we’ve had various issues with our RDS farm caused by Microsoft bugs. One issue was caused by a botched cumulative update which would prevent users logging on after a random period of time, we’ve also had “black screen of death” at login which turned out to be a bug in Microsoft Firewall creating over 100,000 firewall rules on each host (acknowledged by Microsoft, no fix yet and bodge fixed by us with a nightly powershell script), we also have intermittent issues with Start Menu not working (still waiting on a fix from Microsoft on that one) So as you can see, if you come across an issue like this that Microsoft introduce in a cumulative update you could potentially have a third or two thirds of your provision down by no fault of your own. Spreading the load over more VMs means you can easily isolate and contain issues that arise. Something to think about.

Also, in regards to your RDS infrastructure I’ll pass on our experience over the last 18 month. May help with your setup (although every environment is different). We started off with several RDS host VMs with 8 vCPU and 48GB RAM, targeting about 40 users a box. As the rollout has progressed our experience is that you are better off with more VMs on the host to spread the load rather than having Uber RDS hosts. For example, we have around 200 concurrent staff users logged in at once (we have approaching 400 thin client endpoints). The hosts specced as above could get bogged down at between 30-40 users. Sweet spot for us is 15-20 users per VM. We’ve dropped vCPU to 6 per VM and my SysAdmin (who’s a ConfigMgr genius guru - you know who you are if you’re reading this!) has built us a Task Sequence for deploying new 2016 RDS hosts. We now have 14 in the pool which gives us loads of room for growth and allows us to take hosts out for maintenance without affecting users.

We used Celeron/Pentium NUCs with Windows 10 LTSC 1607 and a freebie product called ThinKiosk. PCs autologon and launch ThinKiosk which loads up our RD web login page. You can get it to bypass Explorer all together, although we recently re-enabled that to facilitate Bitlocker to Go. Working well, we use our existing ConfigMgr management for deployment and lock everything down with Group Policy. You can use this type of solution on old PCs and just convert them. If you then ever decided to have a VDI collection instead of session-host you don’t need a VDA license for the endpoint.

We bought around 15 75” Clevertouch boards last year. Very good, but expensive and the staff weren’t using the Android features. Quotes for a new one we’re coming in around £4500 fitted with floor to wall stand. Instead we have just bought a Benq RP653K 65” board which came in around £2500. Seems to do everything we need it to at a more palatable price.

Its beyond a joke really; bad enough that we have to deal with their shoddy exam clients but this is making them look even more incompetent. Tempting to shop them to the media to force their hand on GDPR compliance!

Yes, I think this statement sums the situation up nicely

In preparation for GDPR we are about to make USB pens read only for staff (bar the odd exception). Some feedback we have received is "what about when we send X materials to the exam board on USB pen?" I can't believe Pearson, AQA et al haven't started to think about this to ensure they are GDPR compliant. You would think they would have a secure method of digitally uploading materials to them rather than requesting things be sent in the post. Yes, we can encrypt the content on USB before it goes, but I would be interested to hear if anyone has had any communications from the Exam bodies on how they expect data to be transferred to them securely with the new GDPR rules?