Hello all, I'm doing some research in attempt to identify how other medium to large organizations have architected their roaming profile environments. Here's a brief synopsis of our current environment:
- Windows 2003 AD Domain - Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 - Single Farm, two Sites (Site A and Site B), Several Application Silos - Roughly 90 Citrix Servers - 2000 Users - Mix of XP SP2 PCs and XPEmbedded Thin Clients - EMC CX700 at both sites providing storage to Home Directory/Terminal Service Roaming Profile servers. We have SAN Copy and SnapView installed, but not MirrorView. McData Eclipse 1600 iFCP Routers facilitate data replication between the CX700s. Home Directories and Terminal Service Roaming Profiles are stored on Windows 2003 R2 SP2 file servers which are members of a DFS Namespace and participate in DFS Replication. (Site A = Server 1, Server 2) (Site B = Server 1, Server 2). We architected the DFS environment, using specific profile paths pointing to folder targets within Site A and Site B respectively, and used DFS referral ordering to lock down which servers users connect to in their respective site. Microsoft originally 'blessed' this design but ultimately still had concerns about hosting roaming profiles in a DFS environment. After several months of troubleshooting various profile related issues, Microsoft has ultimately stated they can no longer provide support because our configuration is technically 'unsupported'. While we're well aware the majority of our profile issues are a direct result of our Citrix environment, specifically the different application silos causing profile contention during logoff, it has been decided we do not want to maintain an unsupported environment. Our primary goal is to provide a highly available and fault tolerant profile environment. We're willing to look at host based replication software, SAN Based replication, etc. We're currently researching DoubleTake's capabilities. I'm looking for some feedback on how others have architected roaming profiles in similar environments. - Sean ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
