Introduction

The User Profile Redirection (UPM) function separates the user profile that needs to be retained from the system disk and saves it to the user’s private disk. Therefore, the user’s personalized configuration will not be lost when restarting a virtual desktop in nonpersistent mode or updating the template for a virtual desktop in persistent mode, thus improving the user experience.

Prerequisites

Virtual desktops must provide one of the three storages: personal drive, UPM virtual drive (provided by VDC virtual storage server), or third-party drive (NAS).

Precautions

1. You cannot use this feature simultaneously with other user profile management features, such as Windows user roaming profiles.

2. Users’ software configurations can be preserved upon system restoration or template update for virtual desktops in nonpersistent mode or floating pool. For virtual desktops in persistent mode, users’ software configurations can be preserved only upon a template update, and users are not allowed to install software by themselves.

3. It is recommended that you specify the UPM path to the data directory of an app to avoid redirection failures due to insufficient permissions.

4. The default data size for redirection is 5 GB, and the maximum data size is 50 GB.

5. Other system users cannot use redirected data.

6. The UPM feature is not recommended for scenarios with frequent changes to redirection paths.

7. Only registry data in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE can be redirected.

8. Redirection is supported for registry keys only, but not specific values.

9. Data in C:\Program Files (x86)\Sangfor and its subdirectories, C:\Program Files\Sangfor and its subdirectories, C:\Windows\system32 and its subdirectories, and C:\Windows\Syswow64 and its subdirectories cannot be redirected.

10. If you have enabled the UPM feature and need to start more than 50 VMs for the first time, it is recommended to power on the VMs in several batches.

Procedure

1. Log in to the VDC console, go to Policies > Policy Sets, and click Edit on the corresponding policy set. On the Edit Policy Set page, navigate to Virtual & Local Desktop Policy > Profile Redirection > User Profile Redirection. Select User Profile.

2. Click Add in the Redirection Paths section, select the Path Type, and configure the paths for redirection as required. The following describes how to configure the paths by type:

a) Common Path

Common paths include the configuration file paths of commonly used browsers, IMEs, and users’ data paths. Select the desired paths and click OK.

b) Custom Path

The type of custom path can be a Folder, File, or Registry. Select a path type and add custom paths as required.

i. Folder (The following describes the path configuration for redirecting user data from the Chrome browser.)

    1) Set Path Type to Custom path and Type to Folder.

    2) Enter the user data path of the Chrome browser in the Path text box and click OK.

ii. File (The following describes the path configuration for redirecting a text file.)

    1) Set Path Type to Custom path and Type to File.

    2) Enter the file storage path (including the filename) in the Path text box and click OK.

iii. Registry

    1) Set Path Type to Custom path and Type to Registry.

    2) Enter the registry path and click OK.

c) Redirection Result

i. After folder and file redirection, the hidden directory, sangforupm, is generated in the private disk, as shown in the following figure.

ii. After registry redirection, HKEY_USERS\SF-UPM is generated, as shown in the following figure.

3. Click Add in the Excluded Paths section. In the Add New Path window, specify subdirectories or files to be excluded from redirection for directories that have been configured for redirection as required. In the current version, an excluded path can only be of the Folder or File type, not the Registry type.

a) Folder

i. Set Type to Folder.

ii. Enter the path to the folder that needs to be excluded from redirection in the Path text box and click OK.

b) File

i. Set Type to File.

ii. Enter the path to the file that needs to be excluded from redirection in the Path text box and click OK.

4. After the data configuration is complete, you need to define the storage path. You can choose Personal Drive, Third–Party Virtual Drive, or UPM Virtual Drive.

• Personal Drive: The virtual machine must enable the Personal Drive.

• Third-Party Virtual Drive: The customer provides a third-party NAS storage path, which applies to the scenario where the customer utilizes the old NAS and has a domain-controlled unified identity system.

• UPM Virtual Drive: The UPM Drive must be added to the VDC file server.

Note:

• Excluded paths have a higher priority than redirection paths.
• You can use environment variables to specify configuration files with variable paths for both redirection and excluded paths. For example, the user data path for the Chrome browser is C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome. However, in a domain scenario, different domain users have different usernames; therefore, the username in the path varies. To ensure universality, you can use an environment variable to specify the path as %HOMEPATH%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome.
• Neither redirection paths nor excluded paths support nested environment variables. For example, if the redirectionpath is %mydev%\test, the environment variable mydev will be resolved to another environment variable. In this case, the agent will fail to obtain the correct path because it results in an environment variable only once, leading to a redirection failure.