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Profile Management
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Share Citrix user profiles on multiple file servers

August 6, 2024
Contributed by: 
C C B

The simplest implementation of Profile Management is one in which the user store is on one file server that covers all users in one geographical location. This topic describes a more distributed environment involving multiple file servers. For information on highly distributed environments, see High availability and disaster recovery with Profile Management.

Note: Disable server-side file quotas for the user store because filling the quota causes data loss and requires the profile to be reset. It is better to limit the amount of personal data held in profiles (for example, Documents, Music and Pictures) by using folder redirection to a separate volume that does have server-side file quotas enabled.

The user store can be located across multiple file servers, which has benefits in large deployments where many profiles must be shared across the network. Profile Management defines the user store with a single setting, Path to user store, so you define multiple file servers by adding attributes to this setting. You can use any LDAP attributes that are defined in the user schema in Active Directory. For more information, see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/adschema/attributes-all?redirectedfrom=MSDN.

Suppose that your users are in schools located in different cities and the #l# attribute (lower case L, for location) is configured to represent this. You have locations in London, Paris, and Madrid. You configure the path to the user store as:

\\#l#.userstore.myschools.net\profile\#sAMAccountName#\%ProfileVer%\

For Paris, this is expanded to:

\\Paris.userstore.myschools.net\profile\JohnSmith\v1\

You then divide up your cities across the available servers, for example, setting up Paris.userstore.myschools.net in your DNS to point to Server1.

Before using any attribute in this way, check all of its values. They must only contain characters that can be used as part of a server name. For example, values for #l# might contain spaces or be too long.

If you can’t use the #l# attribute, examine your AD user schema for other attributes such as #company# or #department# that achieve a similar partitioning.

You can also create custom attributes. Use Active Directory Explorer, which is a Sysinternals tool, to find which attributes have been defined for any particular domain. Active Directory Explorer is available at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/adexplorer.

Note: Do not use user environment variables such as %homeshare% to distinguish profiles or servers. Profile Management recognizes system environment variables but not user environment variables. You can, however, use the related Active Directory property, #homeDirectory#. So, if you want to store profiles on the same share as the users’ HOME directories, set the path to the user store as #homeDirectory#\profiles.

The use of variables in the path to the user store is described in the following topics:

Share Citrix user profiles on multiple file servers
August 6, 2024
Contributed by: 
C C B
August 6, 2024
Contributed by: 
C C B

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