Windows Virtual Desktop and FSLogix – What you need to know?

Expanding on my last post on Windows Virtual Desktop,  let’s talk about FSLogix.  So, let start at the beginning, FSLogix was founded by Randy Cook and Kevin Goodman, VDI industry veterans, tackling user experience problems with virtual desktops.

FSLogix was one of the first along with Liquidware to use virtual hard disks as a way to migrate the user’s profile data between virtual desktops and sessions.

Giving users local admin rights on Windows desktops has become a thing of the past.  More and more apps (for example, Modern Apps) install themselves and their caches directly into the user profile (because the user always has permissions to write there).  While there are proven solutions for using only the required parts of the user profile and ignoring things like app installs some administrators prefer the approach of just roaming everything and not trying to manage the contents of the profile.

In the last couple of years, the attention has shifted from user profile roaming to solving the problem of roaming Office 365 caches in virtual desktops, so that they perform and feel as fast as a physical desktop. Microsoft’s early attempt using this approach – User Profile Disks, as introduced in Windows Server 2012 – was a step in the right direction but was lacking, and the acquisition of FSLogix allows them to accelerate their support for this capability. Then another great business tip is to use a virtual office so that you can have a business postal address in a capital city like London as these just look amazing so work really well.

When a user logs on to their Windows session, the Windows User Profile is loaded. The profile includes everything from the user’s download folder to their mouse scrolling speed preference and everything in between. So you can imagine that profiles can get big.  Check out my blog post on Windows Users Profiles – The Untold Mysteries to learn more.

There are also some programs that create massive profile data like AutoCAD – which – due to Nvidia GRID, works great in a VDI environment but easily generates GB’s of profile data. If the user’s profile grows this big, a roaming profile solution won’t work. Logon will take minutes or in some extreme cases hours to complete because the FileServer will copy all the profile data to the endpoint. Even “just in time” profile technology like Zero Profiling isn’t able to handle the big application data quick enough for a good user experience because it also just copies the data from a FileServer to the endpoint but not in one big chunk like roaming profiles.

So, how does FSLogix Profile Containers help?

FSLogix Profile Containers creates a Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) file on a FileServer and stores the user profile including registry in the VHD file. Sounds relatively simple, right? Although, why does this improve speed? Well, during login the only thing that is happening is that the endpoint mounts the VHD file as a Virtual Hard Drive and then the profile is just accessible. So there is NO data copy! This results in lighting fast logons. And eliminates FileServer and network bottlenecks from login storms.

FSLogix Profile Containers also has additional benefits for the end user native support for Office 365 products, such as Outlook, Search, OneDrive for business, SharePoint folder synchronization, Teams, and Skype for Business GAL

Profile Containers Cloud support

It’s worth mentioning that FSLogix has a cool tech called Cloud Cache. This functionality adds the possibility to add multiple storage repositories to the existing products to provide high availability to on-premises and cloud environments.

Imagine a workspace scenario where you are running a VDIWVD environment in Microsoft Azure. Typically, you store your profile data on a Windows file share in Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service. The Cloud Cache Driver makes it possible to provide the store of the Containers directly on much less expensive Azure Blob Storage. This is just one of the significant use-cases which FSLogix is solving with this tremendous new Cloud technology.

Other uses of Cloud Cache include high availability in the event of storage or network interruptions, profile storage server migrations, cloud migrations, offline access to FSLogix containers, and more.

So, how do you setup FSLogix Profile containers?

As always first, download the software here.

Next, you need to push the installer to your endpoints.  To make your life easier, use these silent install parameters:

“FSLogixAppsSetup.exe /install /quiet /norestart ProductKey=YOURPRODUCTKEY”. 

With the install, you also get a FSLogix.ADML and ADMX file. You need to copy these to your PolicyDefinitions folder in YOURDOMAINSYSVOLPolicies. Next, you need  to create a new GPO object and set the following options:

Make sure you don’t forget to disable roaming profiles and enable local profiles on the endpoint. You can monitor if the Profile Container is working correctly with the easy FSLogix Tray application located in: “C:Program FilesFSLogixAppsfrxtray.exe”.

And that’s it. 🙂  Your users can now log in with the speed of Flash Gordon and you never have to worry about profile issues again. It’s a winwin!

FSLogix technology will be available to Microsoft customers with the following licenses vs just WVD as they had originally stated:

    • M365 E3, E5, F1  – These are subscriptions that include the Windows OS which also includes everything in the Office 365 license and additional tools and security software.
    • Windows E3, E5 – These are subscription licenses of the Windows OS
    • Any Microsoft RDS Server Cal holder  (For example, Citrix XenApp users and this is the newly added part that makes it more available)

Now that we understand how it works, a basic understanding of the setup and licensing.  My next blog post in this series will be a video walkthrough on the setup and usage.

Until next time,

Rob

Windows Virtual Desktop now in the Wild – Public Preview Now Available

The Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) product and strategy announced last September is finally here in public preview.  Something near and dear to my heart for the last 6 months.  I’ve been in private preview and had to keep a lid on it 🙂 Yea!!

What is it?

Simply put, it’s multi-session Windows 10 experience with optimizations for Office 365 ProPlus, and support for Windows Server Remote Desktop Services (RDS) desktops. It means users can deploy and scale Windows desktops on Azure and on-premise quickly.

The service brings together single-user Windows 7 VDI and multi-user Windows 10 and Windows Server RDS and is hosted on any of Azure’s virtual machine tiers or what you could call DaaS (Desktop as a Service) in a way.

Licensing

Microsoft is pricing WVD aggressively by charging only for the virtual machine costs; the license requirements for the Windows 7 and Windows 10 based services will be fulfilled by Microsoft 365 F1/E3/E, Windows 10 Enterprise E3/E5, and Windows VDA subscriptions. The Windows Server-based services are similarly fulfilled by existing RDS client access licenses. This means that for many Microsoft customers, there will be no additional licensing cost for provisioning desktop computing in the cloud.

The virtual machine costs can be further reduced by using Reserved Instances that commit to purchasing certain amounts of VM time in return for lower pricing.  All of this just means simpler licensing for Office and Windows as opposed to the crazy license models of the past.  I am not saying that crazy licensing models are gone but have gotten much simpler.

What’s the deal with Windows 7 and Support?

The new service will be available to the production environments in the by June before Windows 7 support ends in January 2020.

But, there is a big incentive, Windows 7 users will receive all three years of Extended Security Updates (ESU) at no extra cost. This should ease the cost of migration to the service; this is in contrast to on-premises deployments that will cost either $25/$50/$100 for the three years of ESU availability or $50/$100/$200, depending on the precise Windows license being used.

WVD and O365

WVD will also provide particular benefits for Office 365 users. In November last year, Microsoft bought a company called FSLogix that develops software to streamline application provisioning in virtualized environments.

Outlook (with its offline data store) and OneDrive (with its synchronized file system) represent particular challenges for virtual desktops, as both applications store large amounts of data on the client machine.  This data is expected to persist across VM reboots and redeployments. FSLogix’s software allows these things to be stored on separate disk images that are seamlessly grafted onto the deployed virtual machine. WVD will use this software for clients running Office 365, but this can be optional.

Liquidware and WVD

The technology of ProfileUnity and FlexApp only complement what Microsoft includes with FSLogix.  But do understand, if you need a simple soution for Profile Disk, then FSlogix is the way to go and save yourself some money. Over my next few blog posts, I plan to show how to set up WVD and a full walk-through of FSLogix running with WVD.

Sizing WVD?

Liquidware has a product called Stratusphere UX. It’s an EUC monitoring tool that allows you to properly size your Azure environment for WVD. This helps make smart decisions on migrations to WVD.  It doesn’t stop there, Stratusphere provides ongoing metrics and alerting that help IT Pro’s to continue to maintain a high performing WVD environment into the future.

How do I get it?

Azure Market Place 🙂 The preview is available in the US East 2 and US Central Azure regions; When GA is announced, it will be available in all regions.

In Microsoft’s eyes, its time to kickass and take names 😉

Check out my next post on WVD and FSLogix.

Until next time, Rob