Requirements for a Complete Desktop Virtualization
Solution
Everything I have discussed so far is about providing an operating system
environment for the end users, but what the users actually care about is accessing
applications and the related data in a familiar environment. This requires much more
than just an operating system. Additionally, you must provide the following:
Access to a user’s data
A consistent set of user customizations; that is, their profile
Access to a user’s applicationsMany organizations already have solutions to protect and provide access to user data.
The most important data resides in collaboration solutions such as SharePoint, and
with features like OneDrive for Business, it’s possible to have a local cache on a user’s
machine that is a local copy of the data stored in the user’s SharePoint area. For
unstructured data, such as that stored on a user’s home drive, it is possible to use
work folders (introduced in Windows Server 2012 R2) and the more traditional offline
files with folder redirection.
Folder redirection allows well-known folders such as Documents to be redirected to a
corporate file server but also to be cached locally using offline files/client-side caching
to make the data available even when the machine is not connected to the corporate
network. These technologies are mature and should be used at a minimum for the
Documents and Desktop user folders. By redirecting these locations to a central file
server, the user’s data is always available, no matter which device a user is connected
to. Granular controls are available to manage which data is redirected to a corporate
file server and which data stays local to a machine and therefore will not roam with
the user.
While providing access to data is a no-brainer for most organizations, providing a
consistent user experience by making the user’s profile move between different
machines, known as roaming profiles, is a different story. While roaming profiles
have existed in Windows for many versions, they have a history of problems. Roaming
profiles in Windows 7 and newer are a fairly solid solution, but they have numerous
limitations. For instance, you cannot use a single roaming profile between Windows
XP and Windows 7 machines. You won’t use a single profile between client and server
operating systems. In addition, application settings don’t work well between locally
installed applications and those that are virtualized with solutions such as App-V. The
root problem is that roaming profiles work by synchronizing predominantly a single
file, ntuser.dat, which contains the registry of the user, and this synchronization
occurs at logon and logoff with some limited synchronization periodically. This means
that for many settings to synchronize, the user must log off, which is a problem if the
user is utilizing many devices simultaneously or needs to use various types of devices