Citrix Profile Management Architecture - Why it is Not Based on a Mandatory Profile Any More

User Profiles
Published Dec 4, 2012 Updated Mar 8, 2013

Ron Kuper asked in a comment why the architecture of Citrix Profile Management was changed from being based on mandatory profiles to capturing the entire profile content by default. This change happened between versions 1 and 2.

A Bit of History

Citrix Profile Management is based on the product sepagoPROFILE, which I architected and co-developed. sepagoPROFILE was a differencing solution based on a mandatory profile, i.e. the product identified which parts of the file system and registry were changed during a user session and stored those deltas in a dedicated directory per user. The reasoning behind this was that file server space would be saved since only partial copies of each profile had to be stored.

This proved to be wrong.

Mandatory profiles are typically very small. The size of a mandatory profile is negligible compared to what gets stored individually, per user, during the lifetime of a profile.

Downsides of Mandatory Profiles

With this reason pro mandatory profiles out of the way, let us have a look at the cons:

Merging large amounts of data into the registry at logon can be slow. This prolongs logons.
Scanning the registry for changes takes time. This prolongs logoffs.
Creating a mandatory profile is not as easy as it sounds. This complicates deployments.
There is no easy migration path from existing local and roaming profiles. This also complicates deployments.

Central Management of User Settings

We felt that these downsides outweighed the only really remaining advantage of an architecture based on mandatory profiles: the ability to centrally configure the user environment by changing registry values or placing icons on the desktop.

Additionally, there a much better ways to centrally manage user environments than by tweaking a mandatory profile. Either use Microsoft’s Group Policy Preferences or one of the alternatives from third-party vendors.

Switching Architectures

When sepagoPROFILE was acquired by Citrix in 2008 both teams felt that this was the perfect (and only, really) time to change architectures. While a rebranded sepagoPROFILE was released as a beta version of Citrix User Profile Manager (UPM), we modified the code to work with local profiles. That version was released as Citrix User Profile Manager 2.

Thus UPM version 1 never really existed. The first “official” version was version 2.

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Citrix User Profile Manager 5 Years Ago: Birth

Citrix User Profile Manager is pretty well-known in the SBC space today. Five years ago, things were quite different. Citrix did not have a user profile solution, and neither did sepago. But we had an idea spinning in our heads we soon came to call Smooth Profiles. Slowly that idea became code, then was renamed to sepagoPROFILE, was acquired by Citrix and renamed again to User Profile Manager and then again to Profile management (with capital P and lower-case m!). You may have heard the latter part of the story. Here is a little something from the very beginning.

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Differences Between Citrix Profile Management and Immidio Flex Profiles

From time to time I get asked about the differences between Citrix’s and Immidio’s profile management products. Here are some common questions along with my answers. Can the product be used to provide a single profile on multiple platforms? Citrix Profile Management 3.x does not have cross-platform capabilities built in. That means you cannot use an XP profile on Windows 7, but you can use the same profile on 32 and 64 bit Windows, if you dare. Citrix has a beta version of PM with cross-platform support for MS Office and Internet Explorer. Flex Profiles does not have true cross-platform capabilities either, but it can be used to make settings available cross-platform that have the same format on all platforms. Example: HKCU\Software\Paint.NET is probably a no-brainer whereas copying HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer around is probably a bad idea. Can the product be used on SBC, VDI and fat clients? This is true for both Citrix PM and Flex Profiles (licensing restrictions may apply). Can the product be used to preconfigure a user’s environment? Both Citrix Profile Management and Immidio Flex Profiles are classic profile management products without the capability to set up a specific user environment or distribute updated settings to all users. That is typically referred to as “user environment management” and two free implementations are Microsoft’s Group Policy Preferences and Pierre Marmignon’s Virtual User Environment Manager. Of course there are many alternatives by companies like AppSense or RES. Can portions of the profile be saved during a session as well as at logoff and at disconnects? Citrix Profile Management loads (respectively streams) the profile at logon and writes changes back at logoff. It also has a feature called “active write back” which, if enabled, causes changed files to be written back to the user store immediately. This works for files only, not for registry keys. Flex Profiles typically is configured to import settings at logon and export again at logoff. Since Flex uses a simple tool for the imports/exports it is conceivable to call that tool during a session as well. There is, however, no built-in support for that. Neither is there for exporting settings at disconnects. Can it be configured what to save and what not? Both products are very flexible when it comes to which parts of the profile should be saved. Yet there is one major difference: by default, Profile Management saves everything whereas Flex Profiles saves nothing. As a consequence, PM just works out of the box whereas Flex needs to be configured for each application individually.

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This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. A mandatory profile is a special type of roaming profile. As with a roaming profile, a mandatory profile is copied from its network location to the local machine during logon. But during logoff, changes are not copied back. Instead, the local copy of the mandatory profile is reset to its initial state at the next logon. In essence, mandatory profiles are read-only roaming profiles. This has advantages, but also severe drawbacks.

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