Customer Plans
Customer plans contain settings for profile management.
- In Hosted Apps and Desktop (HAAD) and the Citrix services, these were user plan settings. They are now customer plan settings.
Profile Settings
Customer Plan configuration means that different plans can be created to target different desktop configurations on a customer by customer basis.
You'd typically want all users within a Customer to have their Users profiles to be created in the same place, but different customers may be placed on different servers.
How to Configure Terminal Services Profile Settings
You always want to start with "Where do you want the Users Profile and Home folders to be created"?
There are 2 properties that control this, and are referred to as Path Templates:
- Home Drive Path (wsTSHomeDrivePath)
- Profile Path (wsTSProfileTemplate)
These will typically look something like:
E:\ProfileFolders\{CustomersName}\Home\{UserName}
or E:\ProfileFolders\{CustomersName}\Profile\{UserName}
or something similar.
Now, these are physical paths on a specific server, and are no good for Terminal Services, therefore a UNC path should really be used that map to these physical paths. So a UNC Path may look like this:
\\ALP-FS01\E$\ProfileFolders\ABC\Home\HarryJ_abc
But this path, even though it points to the correct folder, is not how you will want users to access the path. Users are not Administrators, and cannot access the default Admin shares, nor do you want users to be able to access other customers or even other users' data.
A typical Users Profile or Home share will likely look more like:
\\ALP-FS01\ABC$\Home\HarryJ_abc or \\ALP-FS01\ABC$\Profile\HarryJ_abc
What makes up this path?
-
The FileShare Server
-
The Share Name (the Customer name or code)
-
Whether the Share is Hidden or not ($)
-
An optional offset to separate Home and Profile folders
-
The User Name
When configuring these values within the WorkSpace Service, some of these properties are actually configured together as a single value. So from a WorkSpace configuration perspective, the values will be:
Property Display Name | Internal Property Name | Value |
---|---|---|
File Server | wsTSFileServer | ALP-FS01 |
Home drive path | wsTSHomeDrivePath | \\{wsTSFileServer}\{CustomerShortName}$\Home\{Username} |
Profile path | wsTSProfileTemplate | \\{wsTSFileServer}\{CustomerShortName}$\Profile\{Username} |
Path to the home drive share | wsTSHomeSharePath | E:\ProfileFolders\{CustomerShortName} |
Path to share for the user profile | wsTSProfileSharePath | E:\ProfileFolders\{CustomerShortName} |
Name of the home drive share | wsTSHomeShareName | {CustomerShortName}$ |
Name of the profile share | wsTSProfileShareName | {CustomerShortName}$ |
Home drive letter | wsTSHomeDriveMapTo | Z: |
Note that the Name of the Home drive share and the Name of the profile share are simply the naming convention to use when creating the Share that the users will use to access their data. The dollar($) sign is optional and designates whether the share is hidden or not. Hidden is recommended as it will hide shares belonging to other customers. In a dedicated environment, you might want the share to be visible.
The Path to the Home or Profile shares are physical paths from the perspective of the server they reside on.
The rest of the settings, like Logon Script or whether to connect client drives at logon should be self-explanatory.
The Profile Settings are similar to the Terminal Service Profile Settings
Additional Settings to be aware of
In addition to configuring the appropriate values for creating the correct folders, there are a few settings that control whether these values are set or not. They are
-
Enable Profile Management (wsEnableProfileManagement) If this is set to True, then Profile settings will be configured for users. If set to False, then these settings will be ignored completely.
-
Clear User Profile Settings (wsRemoveProfileSettingsOnEmpty) This setting manages whether settings are deleted or not against the user when the property is blank. This is useful when some settings are managed by GPO, but other settings are managed through Atria. It will allow the setting of values that are populated, and will leave other settings as they are.