Does anyone have Microsoft User Experience Virtualization deployed? I have used Roaming Profiles and Folder Redirection with varying levels of success. I have a client that has users that want to be able to use different computers on different days, but want all their icons, settings, etc to follow them.
I would just virtualize their desktops, but they make heavy use of desktop scanners and I haven’t found anything that will work with that.
I haven’t used MS User Experience Virtualization, but where I work, we use virtual desktops and use Citrix to connect to them. We have a couple hundred users that use scanners in this environment. The users connect to a random virtual machine in a pool of 700 or so every time they log into a fresh Windows session.
To capture the user profiles, we’re using a combination of Folder Redirection (which has actually worked really well) and Citrix User Profile Management to capture everything that Folder Redirection does not.
I know I’m not really answering your direct question, but if you want more insight on how we manage our environment, I’d be willing to share. We’ve had this type of environment going for about 10 years now.
It’s kind of funny that you wrote that. While I was looking something else up, I noticed that Citrix has the model of scanner they use (FI-7160) on their compatibility list. I posted in another forum asking about experience running Citrix and scanners and everyone was like why don’t you just use roaming profiles and redirected folders. - mind you in the original post I mentioned that we tried redirected folders and there were still some apps that didn’t work with it.
I think I’m going to give the roaming profiles + redirected folders another go because it looks like it might be less work to get those apps working than to get all their apps to work in a virtual environment.
Some apps might not like trying to write to AppData folder if its sitting on the network and being accessed by a UNC path.
For this reason, as well as reducing a lot of network chatter, we have the AppData folder NOT redirected, and is instead handled by Citrix UPM, and are sync’d to the file server upon Windows logon/logoff. This way when an app needs to write changes to AppData, it is writing to the local C: drive.