Using Mandatory Profiles to Speed Up Logons for RDSH Servers
I was building a VDI solution for one of my customers that leveraged App Volumes to build RDSH servers, which in turn presented applications via Horizon (is it still fair to call it a VDI solution if there's no desktop OS involved?). We were managing the user experience persistence via User Environment Manager, so the RDSH servers were stateless and no unique data would ever live on any of them. It's a really cool solution, but we ran into that classic VDI issue: slow logons. Fortunately, since that is such a classic issue, there's a huge list of things to do to alleviate it. In this case, since the user's profile lives independently of the server to which they've logged on, we have a really powerful tool available to us: the Mandatory Profile. Windows does a lot of profile customization when a user logs in for the first time, which is great on a persistent desktop! In a nonpersistent environment (which, for all intents and purposes, any RDSH solution is, be...