The SECRET to FSLogix | Windows Virtual Desktop

[Music] did you know that there are secrets to running fs logics and making things better in your wvd environments let's take a look i'm dean sefola and this is the azure academy fslogix is a collection of tools and these involve four areas your user profiles office profiles application masking and your java version controls now we are not going to get into java or app masking in this video if you're interested in that comment down below and let me know so our two key areas are our profiles now in the context of windows virtual desktop the office profile really doesn't need to be involved the office profile was meant as a cache for disconnected or high latency connected environments in the case of windows virtual desktop we're in the cloud so this is not a concern so there's your first big secret you don't need an office profile when it comes to windows virtual desktop so the secrets to running fs logics and getting the most out of your virtual desktop environment are three key areas performance persistence and protection now how do we configure all of this stuff azure is set up in multiple regions around the world so the big secret here is that performance is tied to your latency so if your vms are running in uk south then you would not want to have your fs logic storage in east us and this is because of how fs logic basically works it's a virtual hard drive connected from a smb file share that attaches to the virtual machine so if the vm's over here and the storage is over there you're going to have terrible performance so you want these things as close together as possible which brings me to the three ways you can implement fslogix and that is with azure files azure netapp files or a windows file server now if you're using a file server i would be highly skeptical just because it doesn't have the scalability that something like a paz service does let's put that aside for a second but the basic question comes down to how much performance do you really need everyone in vdi knows about the logon storm so your average user when you go through the log on process is going to be at 50 iops during that logon process and then after that you've reached steady state and that would take 10 iops per user profile so if you have 100 users then your steady state would be 1 000 iops from a single file share and 5 000 iops during the logon process so which one is right for you well putting this guy aside like we did a few moments ago in fslogix you should have one fs logic share per host pool that you have configured now this is a general best practice because the host pool is a particular type of workload and so is then the user profile and they should be connected together so that other workloads don't interfere with them now this may increase the amount of shares that you need and management may become more of a concern which is why you can also choose to use something like netapp files and have just one uber large file share and so you don't really have to worry about it and you connect all your different host pools to that one share either way whatever works for you and i'd be interested in hearing how you want it configured so comment down below let me know but i think that there's a secret here that you're missing so with azure premium files or netapp files you can scale your storage up and down in order to meet the needs of your performance when you need it so now that you've picked your storage platform now we need to decide how we're going to implement fslogix because we have some options there as well so the default way to do it is using what's called vhd locations now what that means is that when you write in your user profiles you're actually writing directly to the file share this is completely different from how cloud cache works cloud cache is actually going to write the data on the local c drive it's going to create its own little hidden disk to do all of the profile rights once it finishes the write locally it will replicate those rights out to the file share and that's done asynchronously and there's also more options there we'll get into in just a moment if you want to master the azure cloud you can start right now by clicking the subscribe button and the notification bell so you don't miss anything so we'll show this installation in two different ways the manual and of course the scripted way because everything in the cloud should be automated so we've gone out to the fslogix webpage and here is the download link which will be linked in the video description and you just click on that downloads our package and here it is on our new virtual machine that we'll be setting up in wvd so we're going to unzip the contents and then go into the x64 folder then go into release and then do the fslogix app setup and this installation could not possibly get any easier you just check that box right there that you agree to the terms and then click install and that's going to set up everything now let's take a jump over to the registry because there's two different ways that you can configure it so on the registry we'll go to hkey local machine and then go to software and under that you'll find a folder for fslogix and then in there we need to create a new key for profiles and within profiles there are two keys that are required as the minimum for the setup and that is a d word for enabled equals one and vhd locations which is the default configuration pointing to your smb file share now if you feel like implementing all of your hundreds and thousands of virtual machines by going into the registry editor more power to you however i think automation is always the best way and for that we need to look at group policy so if we look back at the files that we've just extracted from our zip you can see in the root here that there is an adml and a admx file along with a readme and if you open that readme it will tell you where on your domain controllers you need to drop those two files so that we can use group policy in order to set up fslogix at scale so here's our gpmc and i've opened it to the settings on fslogix so when you're going through the settings the ones that are recommended is first to set your volume type and that is recommended to be a vhd x file okay this gives us more capabilities and it gives us more maintenance options with powershell down the road because the one thing that happens if your user profile fills up all the way just like a normal c drive you cannot make any further writes and the disc may not even mount and that would certainly be a terrible thing so to also avoid that we can set the size in megabytes that your profile should be the default in a user profile only configuration is 30 gigabytes now you might think man that is way too big and if i have 100 users 30 gigabytes man you know how many terabytes i'm going to be looking oh no okay hold on don't freak out because there is another setting and that is to use dynamic disks so then when we provision our disk no matter what the ultimate size is going to be that disk will be very tiny in physical size even though the logical size will look like 30 gigabytes another one here that's called flip flop directory name now the point of this is when fslogix by default is set up it will have a user sid just like this big long one and then at the end it throws the username and that makes it kind of hard to find what you're looking for so this setting will flip it around and now you've got the username first before the sid now this next one is recommended but i want to give you a word of caution so you know what you're doing delete local profile when the bhd should apply so fslogix is a profile management tool if it finds on the system when john q user goes to log login that he already has a profile on that vm if you turn on this feature when it finds john's profile on the system it's going to delete it and replace it with the fslogix profile which may already exist out on storage so just be aware if this is in an existing environment if it's a brand new environment i would definitely use that feature as well now when it comes to cloud cache there's many options for this as well but you really don't need most of them in fact the only one we need to do is enable cloud cache itself and disable vhd locations so in our group policy if we go up to the cloud cache folder inside there you'll find cloud cache locations and then we need to put in a string that's going to tell it where our storage is located so let me open this in notepad so our string needs to be type equals smb comma connection string equals and then the smb share path now if you want to have more than one path which is good for dr purposes talk more about that in a minute just add a semicolon and add another string right after it and that's really the only thing that you need to do except we need to disable vhd locations so we'll go into the profile containers folder find vhdlocations and set that to be disabled so the final secret to talk about in the area of persistence are exclusions one of the big ones are the antivirus exclusions you want to be scanning them for sure but you want to do that separately you don't want to do it when it's being mounted to a local system because that's going to cause the local systems anti-virus cpu etc to have to kick up and do all the scanning we can do that through a bunch of settings here that can be excluded through your anti-virus software and if you're using windows defender this can also be implemented through group policy and now the third secret section talking about the protection of your fslogix profiles protection comes down to three basic areas and this is backup ha and dr in azure files this is pretty easy we can integrate it with azure backup directly and then protect that file share and we've covered that in a previous video linked right over there in netapp files it's a little bit different there isn't a inherent backup feature to netapp files however there is a new feature on netapp replication where you can replicate your data from one netapp appliance to another and if you're interested in a video on this comment down below let me know and i'd be happy to create that which is a great segue into high availability and disaster recovery on the high availability front one of the things you can configure in fslogix either vhd or cloud cache is the ability to have multiple file shares i've got my session host over here and i've got my user profile disk in the vhd scenario i'm going to mount that disk from the file share over to a particular session host the fslogix agent on that system is going to do all of the rights out to the file share i can set up a secondary share the rights would happen over here and other rights would happen over there and this can function kind of like an aha setup if i happen to lose my azure file share the netapp share is still working with all the data the way cloud cache is implemented the rights on the session host happen locally on that hidden profile disk and then replicated to azure files and i can set up another write to go to netapp files particularly in cloud cache this can function like a disaster recovery mechanism because the rights happen locally on the session host in vhd locations the writes happen in azure file storage so what if i lose azure file storage then i can't write to my profiles and we're going to have problems in cloud cache it doesn't matter if you lose connectivity to azure file storage because the rights are local when connectivity is restored the rights will be replicated so this sounds awesome right why would i even bother with vhd locations well there's one little caveat and that is that cloud cache being more robust as it is also takes longer for each user to log on add approximately another four seconds for cloud cache in this type of configuration because no matter how much we try we still can't change the laws of physics here's our bonus secret if you have reached those kind of problem situations where your profile discs are running out of space the secret here is that your fslogix profiles scale up but it will never scale down so if you had a vhd that got mounted to a system and you happened to load up several video files and that took up let's say 10 gigs on that local profile the disk is now expanded by those 10 gigabytes and you need to take a manual intervention in order to make it shrink this link out to github is in the video description below you can run this against your profile share and then it will mount each disk clear out all of that white space shrink all the disks as much as possible and then unmount them leaving them in the file share for use you definitely want to do this during some kind of maintenance cycle when your users are offline and if you have a secret that i missed go ahead and give me that comment down below i'd love to hear from you and while you're down there maybe click on that subscribe button if you haven't done so already and give me a thumbs up if you like this video and if you want to keep on learning more about azure i suggest this video right over there that's our latest video and the one right down at the bottom that's one that those lovely youtube machine overlords have recommended and i'm sure that you'll enjoy it whatever it is thanks for joining us again this week and we will see you next time happy learning

Channel: Azure Academy

Views: 15,622

Keywords: Secret to FSLogix, FSLogix, Real Secret to FSLogix, fslogix windows virtual desktop, fslogix, fslogix setup, fslogix step by step, WVD FSLogix, Wvd fslogix, Windows Virtual Desktop FSLogix, fslogix install and configure, The Azure Academy, Wvd, fslogix profile container, Azure Academy, Azure academy, windows virtual desktop azure, WVD, Windows Virtual Desktop, Azure, windows virtual desktop, Azure Virtual Desktop

Id: ffZZGVTYHFk

Length: 14min 18sec (858 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 08 2020