Excellent white paper by Benny Tritsch: "Things You Always Wanted to Know About Windows Profile Management"

Thanks.

Great read, although Benny IMO got it wrong with his definition of Profile streaming. The whitepaper states

"Profile streaming – also referred to as profile virtualization – redirects all local profile read and write operations to an alternative location in the network."

Now, this might be what his own product does, but hardly what people usually associate with the word "streaming".

Kimmo,

our own product - Immidio Flex Profiles - and some other profile management solutions do what is referred to profile segmentation or profile granularity. Products like RTO Virtual Profiles (now VMware Virtual Profiles) or Citrix User Profile Management do profile streaming or profile virtualization. In a nutshell they use file system filter drivers to redirect profile data streams in pretty much the same way as App-V also does it for applications isolation and streaming.

I know that Kevin Goodman from RTO/VMware was happy with this naming convention when we did our joined BriForum session together with Shawn Bass. User profile segementation and user profile streaming are two fundamentally different methods to fix user profile issues.

Benny

Can I call it personality forwarding?

Thanks Benny,

If Imidio FlexProfiles is (still) exclusively a profile segmentation based solution, then why did I get this answer from RW: “Yes we do profile streaming in combination with profile segmentation” on direct question?

Further, I agree with you that Citrix UPM and, perhaps more significant, VMware Virtual Profiles (or whatever the new name is) do streaming a lot similar to App-V – but, even if Kevin Agrees to the term

“../redirects all local profile read and write operations to an alternative location in the network”

it’s by quite some stretch to define streaming profiles in those words. In all essence the requested file parts are fetched from the network by demand but computed locally.

So, you see I’m a bit confused here :) It surely would be nice for Kevin and Helge to add  a comment or two in this thread.

Streaming is a term that's being overused a lot in this industry because somehow it seems to convey the notion of coolness.  And everyone loves to be cool. Now I'm not saying that Benny's product isn't streaming-based because I'm not familiar with it, and I certainly haven't had a reason to use a third-party profile management product in my environment thus far. We're fairly stateless when it comes to the application portfolio we're delivering to our 500 users.

I think for a product to qualify as a streaming product, it must deliver content on demand using a streaming protocol. Softricity uses (or used to use) RTSP as their streaming protocol, while CPS uses a proprietary UDP-based protocol.

As far as profile management products are concerned, I assume for such product to be streaming-based, it would have to function in such a way that when a user logs on, the profile isn't loaded into the session in its entirety. Instead, individual components of the profile are "streamed" down to the session on an as-need basis, per the Windows OS's request.

And that should certainly be differentiated from the segmentation-based products.

Edgie  

If people even pose the question "segementation OR streaming" it is because their products cannot do both. Putting those marketing aspects aside, both segmentation and streaming have their merits. The ideal product does both.

Streaming can greatly reduce logon times and also (depending on configuration) reduce the amount of data transferred from the file server hosting the profiles to the machine the user is logging on to.

Segmentation simplifies troubleshooting and enables what I like to call "partial profile reset" - if there are problems with some application and the technician suspects "inconsistent data" (reminder: corrupt profiles exist mainly in theory: blogs.sepago.de/.../corrupt-user-profiles-do-they-even-exist) he or she can easily delete only the settings from the affected application.

As to the question how to define streaming:

1) Reducing streaming without a "real" streaming protocol like RTSP to marketing talk obviously does not help.

2) Equating streaming with redirection (an old and not so hot technology) does not correctly reflect how streaming works either. Instead, it is an on-demand fetching of files inside the profile just when they are needed (accessed for the first time in a session).

This just in time (JIT) population method has the drawback that initial application launches can be delayed because first a potentially large number of files need to be copied down from the fileserver. The upside of JIT population is that only those files are transferred that are required during the session (which is bandwidth-friendly).

I personally prefer another method, which can be described as full asynchronous background copy. It works just like a regular logon, i.e. all profile files are transferred to the local machine, but in contrast to roaming profiles that does not happen synchronously but asynchronously in the background - the user does NOT have to wait for the process to finish.

@Helge

RTSP was merely mentioned to illustrate the on-demand nature of a typical streaming protocol. As I said in my previous post, the only thing a profile product has to do in order to qualify as streaming-based is to deliver profile components on demand. This is what you referred to as JIT population. You can use an transfer method you want, and it would still be called streaming. CPS is a typical example of a no-name/non-standard streaming protocol.

@edgeseeeker:

We do seem to have the same understanding of what should be called streaming after all ;-)

@Helge

Must be the 25% German blood in me. :)

For those interested, sepago has its own white paper on profile management. It is more extensive with 19 pages on traditional Windows roaming and local profiles and 7 pages on Citrix Profile Management. It can be downloaded here:

blogs.sepago.de/.../user-profile-whitepaper-for-citrix-user-profile-manager-20

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