experience without having to use roaming profiles, UE-V, folder redirection, or any
other technology. The disadvantage is that the user profile disks are specific only to
the RDS environment, and the profile/data will not be available to other environments
such as a physical desktop. In fact, it’s more restrictive than that. When VDI or
session-based deployments are created with RDS, specific servers are selected to be
part of the deployment, which makes up a specific collection. An environment may
have many collections, which could be VDI or session-based for different types of
users. The user profile disks are specific to a particular collection defined in RDS,
which means that they cannot be shared between RDS collections. Therefore, if users
leverage virtual desktops from different collections, they would have a different user
profile disk and therefore a different profile for each collection, which would not be a
good end-user experience.
I think of user profile disks as a great solution for pilot environments in which
integration with a normal desktop environment is not required or for production
environments that have a set of users who will leverage only a specific RDS collection
or who do not need access to their normal profile or data. Outside of that, I think it is
better to leverage user state virtualization technologies that are usable across all
desktop environments such as the aforementioned roaming profiles, UE-V, and folder
redirection.