You should follow best practices for configuring Horizon Persona Management to enhance your users' desktop experience, improve desktop performance, and ensure that Horizon Persona Management operates efficiently with other Horizon 7 features.

Determining Whether to Remove Local User Profiles at Logoff

In some cases, you might want to enable the Remove local persona at log off policy to speed up the login time in case the profile size is greater than 1GB or the number of files and folders is greater than 10,000. You can also redirect some folders if the size is large.

Administrator Permission

If you want your remote profile to have Administrator permission, you must enable the group policy Add the Administrators security group to roaming user profiles. You can find this setting in the Group Policy Management Editor in the Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > User Profiles folder.

Handling Deployments That Include Horizon Persona Management and Windows Roaming Profiles

In deployments in which Windows roaming profiles are configured, and users access Horizon desktops with Horizon Persona Management and standard desktops with Windows roaming profiles, the best practice is to use different profiles for the two desktop environments. If a Horizon desktop and the client computer from which the desktop is launched are in the same domain, and you use an Active Directory GPO to configure both Windows roaming profiles and Horizon Persona Management, enable the Persona repository location policy and select Override Active Directory user profile path if it is configured.

This approach prevents Windows roaming profiles from overwriting a Horizon Persona Management profile when the user logs off from the client computer.

If users intend to share data between existing Windows roaming profiles and Horizon Persona Management profiles, you can configure Windows folder redirection.

Configuring Paths for Redirected Folders

When you use the Folder Redirection group policy setting, configure the folder path to include %username%, but make sure that the last subfolder in the path uses the name of the redirected folder, such as My Videos. The last folder in the path is displayed as the folder name on the user's desktop.

For example, if you configure a path such as \\myserver\videos\%username%\My Videos, the folder name that appears on the user's desktop is My Videos.

If %username% is the last subfolder in the path, the user's name appears as the folder name. For example, instead of seeing a My Videos folder on the desktop, the user JDoe sees a folder named JDoe and cannot easily identify the folder.

Using the Windows Event Log to Monitor the Horizon Persona Management Deployment

To help you manage your deployment, Horizon Persona Management provides improved log messages and profile size and file and folder count tracking. Horizon Persona Management uses the file and folder counts to suggest folders for redirection in the Windows event log and provides statistics for these folders. For example, when a user logs in, the Windows event log might display the following suggestions to redirect folders: 
Profile path: \\server.domain.com\persona\user1V2
...
Folders to redirect:
\\server.domain.com\persona\user1V2  Reason: Folder size larger than 1GB
\\server.domain.com\persona\user1V2\Documents  Reason: More than 10000 files and folders

Additional Best Practices

You can also follow these recommendations:

  • By default, many antivirus products do not scan offline files. For example, when a user logs in to a desktop, these anti-virus products do not scan user profile files that are not specified in the Files and folders to preload or Windows roaming profiles synchronization group policy setting. For many deployments, the default behavior is the best practice because it reduces the I/O required to download files during on-demand scans.

    If you do want to retrieve files from the remote repository and enable scanning of offline files, see the documentation for your antivirus product.

  • It is highly recommended that you use standard practices to back up network shares on which Horizon Persona Management stores the profile repository.
    Note: Do not use backup software such as MozyPro or Windows Volume backup services with Horizon Persona Management to back up user profiles on Horizon desktops.

    Horizon Persona Management ensures that user profiles are backed up to the remote profile repository, eliminating the need for additional tools to back up user data on the desktops. In certain cases, tools such as MozyPro or Windows Volume backup services can interfere with Horizon Persona Management and cause data loss or corruption.

  • You can set Horizon Persona Management policies to enhance performance when users start ThinApp applications. See Configuring User Profiles to Include ThinApp Sandbox Folders.
  • If your users generate substantial persona data, and you plan to use refresh and recompose to manage dedicated-assignment, linked-clone desktops, configure your desktop pool to use separate View Composer persistent disks. Persistent disks can enhance the performance of Horizon Persona Management. See Configuring View Composer Persistent Disks with Horizon Persona Management.
  • If you configure Horizon Persona Management for standalone laptops, make sure that the profiles are kept synchronized when users go offline. See Manage User Profiles on Standalone Laptops.
  • Do not use Windows Client-Side Caching with Horizon Persona Management. The Windows Client-Side Caching system is a mechanism that supports the Windows Offline Files feature. If this system is in effect on the local system, Horizon Persona Management features such as folder redirection, offline file population during logon, background download, and replication of local profile files to the remote profile repository do not work properly.

    As a best practice, disable the Windows Offline Files feature before you begin using Horizon Persona Management. If you encounter issues with Horizon Persona Management because Windows Client-Side Caching is in effect on your desktops, you can resolve these issues by synchronizing the profile data that currently resides in the local Client-Side Caching database and disabling the Windows Offline Files feature. For instructions, see KB 2016416: View Persona Management features do not function when Windows Client-Side Caching is in effect.