in this video I'm gonna show you how to configure profiles in Azure Windows
virtual desktop
hello everyone this is Ciraltos I'm Travis and in this video
I'm gonna show you how to set up FS logics profile service with Azure
Windows virtual desktop before that please subscribe and hit that Bell icon
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okay first a little bit about FSlogix FSlogix is now part of Microsoft and
Microsoft is making the product available for profile management in
Windows virtual desktops this is a good thing per Microsoft documentation user
profile disks are being depreciated and does anyone use roaming profiles anymore
I hope not I'm gonna go over the basics of FSlogix installation using file
shares to hold profile containers this is the process outlined in Microsoft
documentation and I have to admit when I read it I was a little disappointed
here's why there's a stated requirement for file shares with readwrite access
for a group of Windows virtual desktop users this means there's a requirement
for domain join file servers Azure file services is not an option because that
does not support access based on AD group membership I'm using a small
server and my is your subnet for the test but in production this will require
HA file cluster with a minimum of two additional IaaS service to support the
environment that doesn't even take into account sizing and IOPs requirements
for larger environments but don't worry Microsoft has seem to recognize this
issue and is working on support for page blob storage with FS logics cloud cash
option I suspect Microsoft will have documented support for Azure storage
when this goes GA so there's no dependency on file services so this is
the plan I have a managed image with all my software and start menu
customizations just like we did in the last video I'm going to deploy that to a
new VM and configure FS logic that will then be turned into a managed image for
use in this deployment I feel compelled to come clean I had a pretty elaborate
plan in my last video how is gonna manage images with
unmanaged discs that didn't work and I ended up redoing the environment with
managed discs and managed images using the capture option in the usurer portal
lesson learned so with that here's what I'm going to
cover in the demo deploy a new VM from the template that I'm gonna add and
configure FSlogix I'm gonna convert that VM to a new template use that
template to deploy the Windows virtual desktop pool and test the profiles so
with that let's jump into demos okay buckle up everyone it's time for demos
in this demo I'm going to first create a new virtual machine based on the
template that I already created similar to the one in the last video only using
manage images in this case so the first thing I'm going to do is go to the
machine that I created I have the documentation here from Microsoft on how
to set up profiles and the first thing you can see it's asking you to deploy a
virtual machine that will act as a file share and also prepare the virtual
machine if we go over to another computer I have Azure you can see I
have a virtual machine I've shared out profile so that's all taken care of I
also have a group here called wvdprofile that's just all the users who
are going to be logging in and we want to have access to this profile share so
pretty simple there so that group has access to this profile share and they're
going to use that to write the containers of their profile so if we go
back to my server here we're going to prep let's see I deployed the server
based on our image that I already created with all of the software
customizations and you can see if you watch my last video you can see this all
looks pretty familiar so the next thing we're gonna do is actually install the
FSlogix profile software first thing we do is it tells you to first connect to
the virtual machine you're going to be using which we did and then it's got a
link I've got this over here where we can download the application so I'll
download this file and then once that's downloaded and confirmed I'm going to
extract it all right now it's ready
so once it's extracted the first thing I'm going to do is go into this license
key file and I'm gonna need this for the actual setup and honestly I think it's
the same key no matter what so I'm not even gonna hide that cuz you'll probably
have the same one I'm gonna go into the 64-bit release and here you can see
there's a couple applications but what I'm looking for is FSlogix app setup
so I'm gonna run that and I'll put the key and get rid of the trial key agree
and install and I'll close that once it's finished now if I go into this
computer C program files we can see FS logic is
there so it's been installed and we'll come back here now it's going to ask us
to set up some registry components so I'm just going to go into regedit and go
to H key local machine software FSlogix and it's going to ask me to
create a key called profiles
I like to copy and paste to make sure I don't fat finger something and then
within that key I'm going to create two entries the first is going to be D word
with the name enabled and that value is going to be one the next thing where
you're going to do is hop over and there's a option for VHDlocations and
that's a multi string value then I'm gonna go into it and here I'm gonna just
enter in the path to that share I'm just going to check one thing because that's
profile and I want to make sure that that's correct so we go here yep it's
profile I want to we've got profile and profiles so it's a
you have to redo the whole thing if you enter something wrong speaking of that
one thing that I did do is I missed the step of adding this profiles I just put
these two keys and FSlogix that cost me about three hours of troubleshooting
time and then another time I did this I put quotes around this string which that
caused about two hours of troubleshooting time so I do run into
errors on these on occasion here's another one that came up but this is
pretty benign it's just telling me that they contained an empty string so I
click OK and you'll notice it drops the cursor down here so I can click OK now
if I go back backspace out you'll give me the error
again so that's fine it just corrects it this will work no problem okay so now I
have the registry keys added the next step is to run sysprep to get this ready
for converting it to a managed image i'll just go to the sysprep directory
and i'm gonna run sysprep so what this is going to do it's going to strip out
all of the unique SSIDs all the unique values and get it ready to become an
image to deploy later on so we do want out of box experience we want
generalized and when it's done we want to shut down so I click OK and this will
just take a couple minutes to complete once it's done we'll get back to the
demo okay put a fork in it it is done the remote desktop session ended so that
must mean we're done here let's just take a look we'll give it a second to
switch to shutdown okay now it's showing stopped so let's create a managed image
we do that by going to capture and just a couple pieces of information that it
needs first is going to be the template name and I've got this I'm just gonna
use version 5 of the FSL test and then resource group I don't have the best
naming convention here for my resource group it just kind of grew organically
bad planning on my part but that's where I'm at
so I'm also gonna automatically delete the virtual machine because as it says
up here it's gonna destroy it so it's not gonna be any use to me afterwards so
once that's done I will hit create now it's going to go through a process of
stopping and converting this virtual machine into a template once that's done
then we can go and deploy it to a new host pool ok so that finished let's go
take a look at what we have here got a whole bunch of templates that I'm
holding on to but this is the last one I'm going to use the v5 so let's go
ahead and create a host pool so we're gonna do provision a host pool will do
crate and this is just like I've done before so we give it a name and I've got
a list of default users I'm gonna pull up here and I'm gonna create a new
resource group
there we go we're gonna keep it in central us and I'm gonna pick light-duty
will do 15 and we'll change the size to something a little bit cheaper although
it is interesting they don't show the prices here so we'll select that so if I
get if I have 15 users it's going to give me two of these standard B - MS VMs
and I do need to with - what I'm going to do is is check that if I make a
change on one that the profile is going to reflect that when I log in to the
other
ok so I'll click OK here I've got the prefix in I've got my VMs all set up now
here's where the magic happens I guess I need to get the image name and the image
resource group so I'll copy and paste the image name and I've also got the
resource group another window here so I can simply paste that in so I giving me
the image name and the image resource group I'm going to switch this to
standard disks I've got the domain join UPN domain join password I am going to
specify a domain and an OU and here I'll pick an existing network that has
connectivity to the domain controller that is important you don't want to
deploy a new V net because that will not by default have access to your domain
controller and this will fail and if you don't believe me it says so right there
okay now I'm gonna do the tenant group tenant name the UPN
and the password and that all looks good to me
let's let it finish running validation
okay and at this point we're going to create alright so I'm going to edit this
so you won't see all the waiting times but that whole process took about 25
minutes so I'm gonna stop here and come back once it's done here we are the
deployments finish let's take a look and build some profiles so the first thing
I'm going to do is come over to the domain controller that has a file share
you can see that's still empty because nobody's logged in the next thing I'm
going to do is go into code and we're going to get the host pool name so I'll
use the get RDS host pool command and I have the tenant information already
saved as a variable so there we have it that's exactly what we set up fsxtest
I'm going to assign that to a host pool variable now I can start running some of
these commands this is the get RDS session host and I just have it
formatted in a way that I like to read it so there they are we have both of
them if I get the get-rdusersessions will see methods returned because there
are no sessions so the first thing I'm going to do is come down to this command
this is the set RDS session host for virtual machine test fsx
test - 1 I'll just call it - 1 I'm going to set this to false so what that's
going to do is tell it not to allow any new connections and now if we look at
this again you can see allowed new sessions is set to false for or - 1 and
I'm doing that so I can get all 3 users to log in to this and then I'm going
then the login again to to the other one and we'll switch this up once they do
that we should see those profiles hold between the two so with that let's sign
in I've got three different browsers here with three different uses for each
so this is user one
and well that's loading its profile I'm gonna log into the other two okay so
here I've logged into three different sessions with three different web
browsers I guess this is a good way to test the functionality of different web
browsers so I'm going to go back into my domain controller here with that file
share and here you can see the three profiles have been created or containers
I guess so it is storing the profiles on that domain controller now what I'm
going to do is come over to each one so I'll start with one and I'm gonna change
the desktop I'm just going to make a couple random changes to make sure that
they hold between log in and log offs from different virtual machines so we'll
do that and I'll put it I'll put a new file on the desktop just a text document
call this user one I'm going to go over to the other one and we're going to
change that
and now I'll go over to three and I'll add another file on the desktop just
indicating this is user 3 I don't know that they need to get any more detailed
than that I think this should show pretty convincingly that the profiles
are holding between logins and different servers so now what I'm going to do is
go over to one and I'm gonna log off there we go then I'll log off from two
and three I'm not gonna log off so I want to try to crash that server or take
it unexpectedly offline and I want to see if that profile holds because with
roaming profiles that the computer crashed that he uses what was logged
into it never have a chance to update that profile so let's see what happens
the first thing I'm going to do is come back over here and I'm going to set this
sessions to true I'll run this command again to look at both of them and just
see that sessions are allowed and if we look at user sessions we can see we have
one user on 0 so I'm gonna come back here to the portal and I'm gonna go into
0 and I'm just gonna stop it so let's see what happens when that is no longer
available ok that's shut down now we can log into
each one again all right so we're all logged in you can see that the desktop
held so let's take a look at our session information so we look at sessions
they're all on fsx test-1 so they did a log into the
second server where as we made the changes to the profile on the first and
if we come in here we can see we have all those settings held there we go so I
think that does it that shows that the profiles are getting written to the
network share and they're persisting between logins and log-off's that's it
for the demo meet I hope you found this helpful or at least interesting please
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