The blog..

As a friend of mine mentioned the other day, it seems many terminal services and Citrix administrators have great issues when they have Citrix/TS farms spread over large geographical areas. Often the WAN links are not 100mbit og 1gbit or the latency is considerable, so roaming profiles from the users physical location might be a slow task performing a test of end user patience, which is something we all want to avoid i think.

The best way to do this in my oppinion is to use the “The Active Directory Group Policy”-Approach:

What you need to do is to create seperate OU’s in your AD to contain servers in the different geographical locations, lets say TS-DK, TS-US for the sake of demonstration.

On both OU’s you link your standard Lockdown policies, logon-scripts and what have we and make an additional GPO call it, lets say ProfilePath.

Then we edit the GPO for TS-DK and go to Computer Administration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Terminal Services and edit the entry called ‘Set path for TS Roaming Profiles’

Enable the policy and set the path for \\DK-fileserver\profilepath do not specify a placeholder for username, Terminal Services adds the username itself.

Then we create and edit the GPO for TS-US make the same change but specify \\US-Fileserver\profilepath

this will make sure that when users log on to a server in DK they will fetch their profile from the DK-fileserver and when logging on to a server in the US OU they will fetch their profile from the US-fileserver.

Another solution to this problem would be to place profiles on a DFS-share being \\Domain\dfs\profileshare for example. This would allow to add several servers to the dfs-root and thereby getting both fault tolerance, shared workload and users accessing the most local copy.

/LamerSmurf