Windows User Profile Disks are Good but…

With the widespread adoption of Microsoft Office 365, OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox Enterprise, etc., Windows user profiles are now more bloated than ever before. In virtual workspace environments this can be a big challenge because if your users don’t have very fast access to their large user profile, user experience suffers greatly. Some type of profile containers/disks are now available from most desktop virtualization vendors. Profile disks, offloading the user’s profile to a virtual disk hosted on an SMB or in the cloud, is the very baseline type of profile that you must have to have a profile persist in virtual non-persistent desktop environments.

You likely already have a profile disk feature/capability included in your virtual desktop platform of choice. How easy or difficult it is to create and manage those profile disks varies greatly from vendor to vendor.

As stated earlier, a profile disk enables administrators to modify the way Windows works to offload the entire user profile to a profile disk (VHD or VMDK). This approach allows for an otherwise large profile to be read at a block-level (very efficient) over the network. Liquidware ProfileUnity features the option to automate the creation of a ProfileDisk^TM and additional profile containers in ProfileUnity. Profile disks and profile containers can be great – but there are many pitfalls you may experience if you rely on profile disks alone for your users.  Here are the Pros and Cons that you should know before you rely solely on a profile container/disk to provide an excellent user experience.