Has anyone redirected virtual vault cache to a network location?
An issue we have been up against:
We have a handfull of citrix servers, serving up desktops and apps (outlook among them). Users want access to their vault and vault cache, so we have the EV outlook add-in, installed on Outlook. Our virtual vault cache is set at 1gb.
With hundreds of remote users, on a single server this isnt TOO bad, but when you add HA to the mix, and you have multiple published desktops, then a user will have multiple copies of their virtual vault cache (one on each server hosting an instance of Outlook).
We are seeing 2 issues:
- VV cache is quickly consuming large amounts of disk space across the business as a whole
and - VV cache is taking an excessive amount of time for first synchronization. Some users are seeing times of up to 45 minutes to do an initial synchronization. I am not sure where the bottlenecks from this are, but it seems to be happening lately and had not had an issue with it before.
THis made us think maybe we could use folder redirection and keep a single copy of their vault cache on a file server. Has anyone experimented with anything like this? Any comments/suggestions on it? Other ideas on tackling this issue?
Thank you
Nate
The way i've seen other companies do it is the following
1. Set their home drive in Active Directory for each user, like
H:\ --- \\fileServer01\Users\myUser\2. Create a new Desktop Policy that puts the cache in H:\Enterprise Vault\
3. The Desktop Policy is set to be Contentless Cache, so it only builds the MDC file
4. Create a new Provisioning Group that provisions the users who have virtual desktops to use the new Desktop Policy
That way its all on a network share, it doesn't grow too big because its only the MDC
they can still create folders, delete folders and items, move items about etc, but they just have to double click messages they want to open etc.
You will also sacrifice the ability to use Windows Desktop Search, so you can either use Outlook Instant Search which will index the contents of the MDC (250 chars of data, sender, recipient, sent date and attachment names, but no contents of attachments or anything beyond 250 characters)
It's really the only viable option, as long as the connection is good between the citrix servers and the home drives, you won't see any real issues in latency, but you will need the drive to be mapped as you cannot specify a network share to place the MDC