FSLogix Cloud Cache has been out for some time but most of the articles written about it discuss using Azure Files for profile storage. In my experience, there are still a lot of organizations with on premise non persistent VDI workloads using on local file server for profiles. In the past there weren’t great solutions to replicate profiles across multiple servers, short of setting up robocopy or something of that nature.
Early on I heard there were a lot of problems with FSLogix Cloud Cache. Release 2210 Hotfix 2 contains a bunch of cloud cache fixes so I decided it was time to give it a try.
If you already have an FSLogix implementation in place you can use the same file shares and it will use the existing user profile files.
How to Set Up FSLogix Cloud Cache and On Premise Storage
- Install FSlogix 2210 Hotfix 2 on your VDI master image.
- Prepare your file shares if they don’t already exist.
- Create or modify a GPO enabling cloud cache and instead of the VHDLocations setting you will use the CCD Locations setting.
- For onprem file shares your entries will be type=smb.
- The name is whatever you want to call it and has nothing to do with the actual name of the share.
- You can have up to 4 locations specified
- Put the primary location closest to the user’s machine first in the following format:
type=smb,name=""Share1"",connectionString=\\server1\share1\%username%,type=smb,name=""Share2"",connectionString=\\server2\share2\%username%
4. Ideally, apply this GPO to a test OU containing test VDI computer accounts
first to make sure things are working the way you want them to.
What you should see when the user logs into the virtual desktop is that FSLogix will mount the existing profile from whichever SMB share it finds it in. It will look in the order you specified in the GPO. Writes will be cached locally on the Citrix desktop at c:\programdata\fslogix\cache and will be written back to all the locations specified in the GPO.
So far I’ve not run into any problems with this configuration. I’d love to hear what others experience is.
UPDATE 11/26/23 – Well I’ve run into some critical performance issues with FSLogix Cloud Cache and folks that use OneDrive heavily and store a lot of stuff on their redirected desktop. It seems the caching of the profile to the local C: drive of the virtual desktop is problematic in this scenario and users are reporting a 5 minute wait for their desktop icons to become available. Also, the log off can take over a minute with larger profiles as FSLogix seems to wait for log off to flush the write cache back to the storage locations. While I was expecting a longer log off time this is problematic if a user experiences a problem and decides to log off and quickly log back in (happens more than I thought it would). A third issue is that I’ve seen more profile corruptions than which the single vhdlocations setting. I have not been able to find fixes for these issues so unfortunately I’ve had to revert back to FSLogix with vhdlocations for now, which is unfortunate.
UPDATE 11/27/23 – I somehow missed this post from James: https://jkindon.com/fslogix-synchronous-processing/ which might explain some of the weirdness with OneDrive GPO settings not applying. Digging into it further.