Technical Overview
RTO Virtual Profiles™ provides a more productive, consistent user desktop experience, while reducing IT infrastructure cost, and maintaining user data integrity.
Up until now existing technology has limited user configurations, and the amounts and location of their data. Enhancing user access and data flexibility up to now has been a labor and technology-intensive experience
Virtual Profiles was developed with the following design goals:
- Create a “commercial grade” alternative to roaming profiles. The focus here has been to reduce logon times and IT infrastructure consumption while maintaining the benefits of a roaming/Flex™ profile configuration.
- Eliminate the need for logon/logoff (profile management) scripts or complicated configurations, while maintaining user data integrity and real-time updates.
How does RTO VP do this, and what do we mean by a “commercial grade” alternative?
Virtual Profiles does this by implementing both a kernel-mode service (driver) and user-mode service to meet the efficiency and security requirements that Fortune 500 enterprises expect. “Resource kit” and software development kit (SDK) approaches don’t have the robustness or security provisions required for enterprise Active Directory, or file and registry interfaces. This technical approach is necessary to qualify as “commercial grade”.
“Just-In-Time” (JIT) Resource Delivery At Logon
Virtual Profiles utilizes user/kernel-mode services to achieve our design goals. Virtual Profiles employees a Just-In-Time (JIT) file system driver, enabling profile files to only be copied from the server when opened by the user. This “on-demand” approach eliminates copying all user files down each time the user logs on. In addition to reducing network traffic, using this approach eliminates the need for folder redirection if performance was the only reason folders were redirected. This speeds up runtime performance and improves the user experience since they are effectively working on “local files” – especially important for “chatty” applications that do a lot of reads and writes.
“Copy-On-Close” Maintains Data Integrity
Virtual Profile’s file system driver design also provides a “copy on close” technology which benefits data integrity. When files are closed, Virtual Profiles automatically sync’s files up with the profile server instantly, maintaining data integrity across user sessions in real-time, and speeding up logoffs since this activity is handled asynchronously (from logoff) in the background. This is a critical improvement over roaming profiles! VP both saves profile changes in real-time, preserving user configuration integrity; and also propagates those changes to any other concurrent user sessions that may exist, maintaining data integrity across session.
Virtual Profiles also uses its’ kernel-mode service to monitor all registry updates in real-time. As with file changes, profile registry changes are automatically sync’d with the stored profile on the server. Since only what has been written to the registry locally is copied back, hive corruption is prevented.
Virtual Profiles Enables “Roaming” Of Local Profiles
Virtual Profiles now enables “roaming” of local settings as well. This means you can “roam” local machine profile and registry settings for applications like the Google Toolbar to other devices in your enterprise. This is important for Windows Terminal Server, but the real value is in Virtual Desktop Initiative and Citrix Ardence Desktop deployments. Typically these are installations that converted desktop users who had local admin rights previously. These rights are typically taken away, lest the user mangle the image for all other users. Virtual Profiles restores end user flexibility and portability of local configuration data.
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