Quick peek at Zero Profile Technology

In RES PowerFuse 2008, we first introduced User Preferences. User Preferences allows you to be flexible with a mandatory user profile. By specifying parts of the profile that needed to be restored by User Preferences, a user with a mandatory profile was still able to have personal settings. User Preferences in RES PowerFuse 2008 can be compared with Flex Profile Kit from Login Consultants.

The downside of this feature is that you need to know exactly what part of the profile you want to save for the user.

Now, in RES PowerFuse 2010,  Zero Profile Technology is introduced. Regardless of the profile type, RES PowerFuse 2010 is able to preserve and apply user settings automatically and immediately.

In this blog article I want to give you a demo of my environment running with Zero Profile Technology and mandatory profiles. I also used different OS and bit version. I will not further explain all Zero Profile options as this information can be found in the RES PowerFuse 2010 Administration Guide! (page 185)

What I have configured and why:

Machines:
Windows 2008 X86 Domain Controller (Windows 2008 domain)
Windows 2008 X64 Terminal Server, running RES PowerFuse 2010 SR1
Windows 2003 X86 Terminal Server, running RES PowerFuse 2010 SR1

Profiles
I used mandatory profiles, distributed these with custom resources and configured Zero Profile Technology to take care of my user settings.

NOTE: There are known limitations in mandatory profiles:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/264732
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;243850&sd=tech
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb742463.aspx
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309408#5

Creating a V2 profile
In order to be able to work with Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 in one environment, you need to create 2 mandatory profiles to work with.

Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000 author version 1 profiles. Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 2008 author version 2 profiles (.v2). These version 2 profiles should be stored in a folder with the first part of the folder name matching the name of the mandatory profile, followed by “.v2″. This profile will be automatically used when logging on to the Windows 2008 server.

I created both profiles following Microsoft best practices.

Distribute the mandatory profile
After creating both profiles, I’ve used Custom Resources in RES PowerFuse to distribute these mandatory profiles over my Terminal Servers. For those who are not familiar with the feature: Custom Resources can be files and folders which are locally cached on all computers running RES PowerFuse. This way I’m not dependent of a file share and network speed. The mandatory profiles are always locally available:

In the console:

On every machine with RES PowerFuse installed:

‘

I also provided Authenticated Users with Modify access to the %programfiles%\RES PowerFuse folder. It’s not really a security breach, as RES PowerFuse Security Management will prevent access to these folders, if enabled or running in learning mode.

You might choose to use a file share for the profiles, as you might find that easier to accomplish. Of course I prefer using the RES Products to take care of this :)

Assign the profile to the users
The mandatory profiles will be cached in the RES PowerFuse programs folder. Remember I am working with a x86 and a x64 server. This means that on a x86 server the path to the profile is c:\progra~1\respow~1\data\dbcache\resources\custom_resources\TSMandatory and on a x64 the path is c:\progra~2\respow~1\data\dbcache\resources\custom_resources\TSMandatory.

It’s possible to use variables but I used GPO’s with different computer OU’s for x86 and x64 and choose for 2 different GPO’s:

And that’s it for the profile setup. If you are building a scenario like this, make sure that you are receiving your mandatory profile when logging on the windows and that the profile is removed at logoff. It’s best to test this without using RES PowerFuse to keep things simple. The only thing RES PowerFuse is responsible for in this scenario is distributing the profiles to all RES PowerFuse Agents.

User Settings
The RES PowerFuse 2010 Administration Guide provides you with a lot of information about User Settings and the Zero Profile modes. If you are not ready familiar with Zero Profile Technology and the User Settings feature, I recommend that you read this first. You can start on page 185, chapter 5.4.2.

Wordwrap
I started quite basic, trying to save the Wordwrap option in Notepad. So here’s what I’ve configured in the Notepad application:

With these settings RES PowerFuse will automatically preserves changes made by notepad.exe. And the settings will be applied in a possible second RES PowerFuse session.

This means that your users are able to travel between different locations/sessions and RES PowerFuse Zero Profile Technology will bring their settings along. Without logging off the session.

Imagine you are using roaming profiles and your users are used to have multiple sessions:
- A user has 2 sessions open and changes some personal settings in session 1.
- User switches to session 2, the first annoyance is that the personal settings are not yet applied in this session.
- Second: When session 1 is logged of first, Session 2 (without the changed settings) will overwrite the roaming profile at log off.

Zero Profile Technology solves these 2 problems because settings are immediately applied in all running sessions.

Here’s a quick demo with Wordwrap:

Same goes for i.e. Microsoft Office Word 2007:

And this is just a start of what you can accomplish with Zero Profile Technology.

Stuff to read:

RES PowerFuse 2010 Administration Guide
I can not emphasize enough how useful the Admin Guide for RES PowerFuse 2010 is.

Architecture of RES PowerFuse 2008/2010

Streamlining User Settings in a Windows Environment
Meant for RES PowerFuse 2008. However starting from chapter 8, page 16, creating a mandatory profile on Windows 2003 is explained. Also using Custom Resources to distribute the profiles.

Microsoft: Managing Roaming User Data Deployment Guide
Starting at page 29, explaining version 1 and 2 profiles. Continue on page 30, creating a mandatory profile.