Profile Management

Pilot? Production?

The aim of a pilot deployment is to be able to demonstrate a solution quickly and reliably. An important goal might be to reduce the number of components in the pilot. For Profile Management, two components are the user store and the selection of users whose profiles are processed.

Policy: Path to user store

Setting up a user store for Citrix user profiles is exactly like setting up a profile store for Windows roaming profiles.

For a pilot deployment, you can often ignore these considerations. The default value for the Path to user store policy is the Windows folder in the user’s home directory. This works well for a single-platform pilot so long as only one operating system (and therefore only one profile version) is deployed. For information on profile versions, see About profiles. This option assumes that enough storage is available in users’ home directories and that no file-server quotas are applied. Citrix does not recommend the use of file-server quotas with profiles. The reasons for this are given in Share Citrix user profiles on multiple file servers.

For a production deployment, you must carefully consider security, load balancing, high availability, and disaster recovery. Follow the recommendations in these topics for creating and configuring the user store:

Policies: Processed groups, Excluded groups

The complexity of production deployments means that you might need to phase the rollout of Profile Management, rather than release it to all users at the same time. You might tell users that they receive different profile experiences when connecting to different resources while the deployment is in the process of being rolled out.

For performance reasons, Profile Management is licensed by an EULA not built-in license checking. You might choose to manage license allocation by assigning users to an Active Directory (AD) user group or using an existing AD group if a suitable one exists.

In pilot deployments, use of Profile Management is restricted by invitation to a small group of users, possibly from several departments, where no single, representative AD group can be used. In this case, leave the Processed groups and Excluded groups policies unconfigured. Profile Management performs no checking on group membership and all users are processed.

For more information on these policies, see Define which groups’ profiles are processed.

Important: In all cases, you must ensure that the number of users processed by Profile Management does not exceed the limits set by the relevant EULA.

Pilot? Production?