Bill Powell
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Profiles: To cache or not to cache, that is the question…
Once upon a time, it was all so simple. Six questions, with yes or no answers, and you could just set up UPM by following the docs, and performing a simple if-X-then-set-Y-thus sequence. But then came PVD and VDI-in-a-Box, and people started running provisioned XenApp on XenServer, and goodness-knows-what-else, and suddenly you had to think quite hard about some aspects of UPM configuration. Not because you ...
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Did I get it right? – the Profile Management Configuration Check Tool (UPMConfigCheck)
Introduction One of the most eye-opening moments for me as Development Manager of UPM was a meeting I attended of the UK Citrix Users Group a couple of years ago. I wasn’t there to promote UPM; I had gone with my team to listen and learn what Citrix users were doing with profiles. But in the pub, after the meeting, and with a pint of Fuller’s in ...
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Migrating UPM Profiles – Tips and tricks
UPM has been around for nearly 4 years now, and seems to have been well adopted, to the point where we’re starting to see some support calls along the lines of “I’ve outgrown my original user store and I need to migrate my users to a more scalable store, without losing my data. How?” There are some obvious solutions around using tools like robocopy and Profile ...
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Case Study – XD upgrade from UPM 2.x to 3.x
While I've blogged on the mechanics of upgrading from UPM 2.x to UPM 3.x, I've not yet addressed the other aspects of planning and configuration. This came up recently in-house, where we'd decided to upgrade an XD4 farm to XD5. The original request came in as: "We are creating a new CPM environment for XD5 Pooled in Showcase. We would like to take the contents of the ...
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How do you migrate from Profile Management 2.x to 3.x?
Easy. Just follow the instructions at http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/user-profile-manager-kib/upm-upgrade-den.html and http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX126659;. However, those instructions describe the ideal scenario, and assumes you have 2.1.1 already installed and you want to get to 3.2.2 (the latest version, as I write this blog), and that you've got a convenient maintenance window that you can use. What do you do if those assumptions don't apply to you? Maybe you're on 2.0 or 2.1. Maybe ...
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Notes on synchronising Internet Explorer cookies using Profile Management
This is something that comes up often enough in our support forums that it's worth lifting the covers on what Internet Explorer (IE) appears to do that makes handling cookies so difficult, and then open up a little bit on how we handle cookies in UPM. First of all, a few words about cookies and browsers in general. IE and other browsers use cookies to store little ...
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Profile Management – Load Balancing User Stores
When you're setting up a User Store for Profile Management, you configure the location in the GPMC under "Path to user store" (as described in http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX118944 ), and in the simple case, that's a single location, such as \\server1\profiles . (Actually, you'd also include the username and probably the userdomain variables as well, and a system environment variable to indicate the profile version or platform e.g. \\server\profiles \ %USERNAME%.%USERDOMAIN% ...
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Profile Management – Migration Stategy – a work in progress
Well, my first blog on migration strategy provoked a few interesting reactions, which is good, because we did need to find out whether our proposal for a migration strategy was going to be acceptable. No-one wants to go to market with a product where the pain of upgrading outweighs the gain from the new features. The messages that came back were: Network admins don't like adding OUs ...
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Long term planning for Profile Management
We're quite pleased with the new version 2 release of User Profile Manager, but of course there are new features being planned already. (Note that going forward, the name User Profile Manager will be dropped, and future versions will carry the name "Profile management" or Pm.) Without going into details, we're looking at features to improve both performance and usability. What does that mean for current ...
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Benchmarking and User Profile Manager
We were doing a benchmarking exercise recently, comparing the performance of an (untuned) User Profile Manager against standard Roaming Profiles. I say "untuned", meaning that we hadn't set up any include or exclude rules against particular files or directories, nor were we doing any special processing on the registry, and while that's missing out one of the key benefits of UPM (the ability to exclude ...