MMicrosoft FSLogix, as a profile management solution, is becoming increasingly popular, but unfortunately, problems are on the rise. There are also pitfalls that should be avoided from the outset.
Group Policy
There are two Group Policy settings that need to be configured correctly.
To redirect Internet and temporary files, the user must have permission to redirect personal profile folders. Located at:
User Configuration | Administrative Templates | Desktop | Prevent users from manually redirecting profile folders
However, this GPO must disabled to set the value to zero. However, I noticed that this policy doesn't set the value correctly (at least for me). So I set the value for the user via REG GPO.
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer DisablePersonalDirChange REG_DWORD = 0x00000000
Companies often find it popular that „Start Run“from the Start menu. However, this also suppresses the user’s UNC calls. With FSLogix, however, the Redirection.xml file is copied to the local system via a UNC path. Naturally, this does not work, and as a result, the exceptions in the Redirection.xml file are not taken into account.
User Configuration | Administrative Templates | Start Menu and Taskbar | Remove the „Run“ menu item from the Start menu
Windows Search and Sign Out
Windows Search (if enabled) may have access to files in the user's profile. This prevents the virtual disk from being unmounted, which can cause problems during subsequent logins.
The only solution here is to run a task during logout that restarts the search service. This has no impact on other users, unless they happen to be searching at that exact moment. However, the restart takes just under a second.
The following command will restart the system:Powershell.exe -NoLogo -NoProfile -NonInteractive Restart-Service WSearch
System access
Under certain conditions, the system maintains access to the user password store (a file in the profile), which in turn prevents the virtual disk from being completely deleted or unmounted. The undocumented value Clean Up Invalid Sessions under HKLM\Software\fslogix\apps The current version of FSLogix (2.9.7802.10873) should resolve the issue. If not, the only solution is to restart the server!
Format of the redirections.xml file
It is important, that the redirections.xml file does not contain any formatting or syntax errors. If the file is corrupted, it can lead to a wide variety of issues. The best indication of this is an error message in the FSLogix event log that begins with „“error.cpp(13)" and for me, this has become a warning sign. In this case, the vDisk often isn't unloaded from the server!
Under no circumstances should you exclude the following: AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Caches
This can then cause problems with the Start menu!
Hopefully, Microsoft will get that under control in the future.
