Tuesday 14 September 2010

Profile Management 3.2 – bug fixes and a name change!

image The marketing department of Citrix have struck again and renamed “User Profile Manager” to “Profile Management”.  Why?  Honestly I don’t know why they bother.  Apparently this has been the case for some time, its such a pointless change I only just noticed.

Profile Management (for those not using it) is a much more intelligent way of handling user logons than either Mandatory (which is a bit harsh) and Roaming profiles (which tend to bloat and corrupt more than is good).  There are plenty of third party alternatives, but this is included in your Citrix license and is a lot better than nothing.  It allows you to specifically exclude HKCU registry settings and files from the user profile at logoff, have your Citrix profiles all in one place (if you want – or in the users’ home folders) and cope well with multiple logons and logoffs at the same time without profile corruption.  A good recent feature has been “Active write back”, which when enabled will only pull some of the profile over to the server at logon and write files back to the profile store as and when they are created rather than all at logoff.  This improves logon and logoff time but just as importantly helps protect your data against a server crash.

Profile Management 3.2 is available to download through My Citrix.  Documentation for it is here.

It can be installed on Windows 2003 Server, but requires these hotfixes or the installation will fail and rollback:

Anyway, the bug fixes in the new version (replacing v3.1.1) of what I will continue to call UPM for at least one major version after this sound nice to have.  Note that for at least one of them to take effect you need to import a new ADM into your Group Policy. 

Issues fixed in Profile Management 3.2

  • If profile streaming and active profile write back are used, Profile management might unnecessarily copy unchanged files from monitored directories to the roaming profile store.

    [#229893]

  • If a folder name is specified in the Folders to mirror policy that does not exist verbatim in the user's profile (for example, if the folder name is misspelled), the user session can wind up locked unexpectedly. The issue occurs because the service continues to attempt to locate the non-existent folder during logoff and eventually becomes unresponsive. The service starts again after a certain winlogon time-out period but then the user session is locked by winlogon.

    [#235033]

  • When a user logs on to a computer running Version 3.1 of profile management and then to a computer running an earlier version, such as 3.0, an entry should be logged on the computer running the later version, stating that a server with an earlier version pf Profile Management exists on another server and specify that server name. Instead, the log entry states: "An older version of Profile management is running on server <Unknown>."

    [#235323]

  • Applications can become unresponsive without logging any error messages when the cachefill mechanism conflicts with anti-virus software settings. This enhancement adds an Event Viewer message indicating the problem.

    [#235486]

  • When Profile management is installed on the terminal servers, Wbemtest.exe reports new user objects. However, when users log off, the report is not updated and user objects remain on the root\rsop\user namespace. With this fix, Wbemtest does not show a namespace for the user after logoff if Delete local profile during logoff is enabled.

    [#235532]

  • When the usn journal is deleted and the Profile management service restarted, a "CJIncreaseSizeIfNecessary" error is written to the Event Log. With this fix, the error is replaced by a warning as Profile management enables journaling.

    [#235781]

  • Two or more Profile management 3.x sessions running concurrently can break backward compatibility with earlier versions of Profile management.

    [#236670]

  • In scenarios with Profile management Version 3.1, the Delete locally cached profiles on logoff (Citrix User Profile Management GPO) setting enabled, and the Application Data folder redirection (Microsoft GPO) setting enabled, an error occurs when a new user makes the second attempt at launching the same Microsoft Office application. To resolve the issue, enable the Delete Redirected Folders setting available after importing the new .adm template.

    [#236686]

http://support.citrix.com/article/ctx126527

2 comments:

bbertelli said...

Hi, nice post! I always visit your blog. Would you please do a post about UPM deployment?

Regards,

Bruno

Juraj´s Profil said...

Very good post, ya

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