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Profile Management
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Profile Management and Provisioning Services

September 28, 2020
Contributed by: 
B C

This article contains advice on maintaining Citrix user profiles on virtual disks (vDisks) created with Citrix Provisioning Services. Before following this advice, understand how your vDisk configuration affects your Profile Management configuration as described in Persistent? Provisioned? Dedicated? Shared?

Supported modes

You can use Profile Management on vDisks running in standard image and private image modes but not difference disk image mode.

To remove non-essential, locally cached profiles from the Master Target Device

To prevent any non-essential, locally cached profiles being stored, ensure that these profiles are removed from vDisks running in standard image mode before taking the Master Target Device image. But do not remove the currently logged-on local administrator’s profile. A good way of achieving this is as follows. During this procedure, error messages might appear.

  1. Right-click Computer.
  2. Select Properties.
  3. Click Advanced system settings.
  4. On the Advanced tab, click Settings in User Profiles.
  5. Highlight each profile you want to remove and click Delete.

Retrieve log files from vDisk images

This topic provides guidance on using log files that reside on shared (vDisk) images created with Citrix Provisioning Services. Profile Management saves the files at logoff. But, if you use vDisk images, take account of the fact that base images can be reset, which results in log files being deleted. You therefore must take some action to retrieve the files. The action you take depends on whether the log files are being deleted at logon or logoff.

Use of vDisk images is common in Citrix Virtual Desktops deployments, so the guidance in this topic uses that product as an example.

To retrieve a log file that is deleted at logoff

If entire profiles or parts of them are not saved back to the user store on the network, the log file is also not saved there.

If the Provisioning Services write-cache is stored on the computer running Provisioning Services, this issue does not arise. And the log file is saved back to the user store.

If the write-cache is stored locally, in this procedure you might have to log on from the same device as the user. However, even this might fail if the write-cache is stored locally in RAM.

If the write cache is not on the computer running Provisioning Services, you might have to create a copy of the vDisk image. You assign it to the new virtual machine, and change the write-cache on the image so it is stored on that computer.

  1. In Citrix Virtual Desktops, create a desktop group, add one virtual machine to it, and point it to your vDisk image.
  2. Grant access to the virtual machine to one test user and the administrator.
  3. Modify the desktop group’s idle pool count to 1 for all times of the day (to stop power management turning the machine off). Set its logoff behavior to Do nothing (to prevent the machine restarting and resetting the image).
  4. Log on as the test user to the virtual desktop and then log off from it.
  5. Log on as administrator from the XenCenter or VMware console, and retrieve the log file.

Consult the Citrix Virtual Desktops documentation for more information on creating desktop groups and modifying their properties.

To retrieve a log file that is deleted at logon

If a profile is current in the user store on the network but does not load correctly when the user logs on, log file entries are lost.

  1. Map a drive to \\<vmhostname>\C$ and, before the user logs off the session, locate the log file. The log file is not complete (some entries will be missing) but if the problem you are troubleshooting is at logon, it may provide enough information for you to isolate the cause of the issue.

To relocate Provisioning Services log files

Using Standard Image mode, the Provisioning Services event log files are lost when the system shuts down. For instructions on changing the default location of the files to prevent this, see Knowledge Center article CTX115601.

Profile Management and Provisioning Services
September 28, 2020
Contributed by: 
B C
September 28, 2020
Contributed by: 
B C

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