Citrix User Profile Manager: User Store Design Recommendations

Citrix User Profile Manager, co-developed by sepago and Citrix, has been released. This is the first in a loose series of articles about UPM I intend to write. I will start by giving recommendations on how to set up the central profile storage called “user store”.

Notes on the release:

UPM is available on “My Citrix”. Just follow these instructions on how to get to the download. Note that the marketing guys have recently renamed UPM to “Portable Profiles”, so make sure you look for that term. Another thing of importance is that this release is technologically rather different from the tech preview. But that is the topic of another article.

User Store Design

The user store is the location on the network where a user’s UPM profiles are kept. Any file share the user has write access to will do. When thinking about how and where to set up the user store it is important to keep in mind that it contains more than just a copy of a user’s profile. In the current release, UPM also supports synchronization of files outside the profile, but future releases may provide additional features that each require their own “compartment” in the user store. This is all rather theoretical and may sound more complicated than it actually is. Follow these recommendations and you should be on the safe side now and in the future:

• Plan for one user store per user.
• Use subfolders to segregate data from different platforms.
• Configure the path to the user store to point to the corresponding subfolder on each platform. This is accomplished easiest using group policy objects linked to OUs.

Example:

You have two platforms you want to use UPM on: terminal servers running Windows Server 2008 and clients running Windows Vista. The TS farm is divided into multiple silos, each providing different published applications. Since the servers in all silos are installed and configured in a similar way, with regards to UPM they comprise only one “platform”.

You decide to put the user stores on your users’ home drives which are mapped both on the client and TS machines. You want to store all UPM data inside one base folder. The following directory structure is desired on the home drive:

UPM               --> base folder for UPM data on each home drive
UPM\Vista         --> user data from Vista machines
UPM\Server2008    --> user data from Server 2008 machines

You use group policy objects to set the path to the user store to “UPM\Vista” on Vista machines and to “UPM\Server2008” on your terminal servers.

Wrap Up

The setup presented here is simple yet flexible. It allows for future expansions both in your environment and in the functionality UPM offers.