Teams in your Multi-user environment done right!

Posted in : Citrix, FSLogix, Microsoft, Other, Teams, Virtual Apps and Desktops By Jonas Agblad Translate with Google ⟶

5 years ago

Microsoft Teams is on the rise, more and more businesses is seeing the potential of Teams and want a piece of the action.
Unfortunately Microsoft Teams is not ideally designed to work on a Multi-user environment like Citrix Xenapp or Microsoft Remote Desktop services. It is entirely installed in the users profile, and its quite big. A clean installation of teams is roughly 600 MB and will quickly grow, and you know what that means… You guessed it: Super long logon time, since logging on to the Multi-user environment often means the profile would be downloaded to Session Host before you are properly logged on, the users will not be happy! And on top of that, the latest recommendation in size per Teams installation is 3 GB…
There is however some rumors indicating there will be releasing a business version soon addressing this very issue! But if you are anything like me, and cant simply wait, there is a solution if you are willing to pay a small price, and you will at the same time have access to tons of other great stuff.

FSLogix Profile Container

FSLogix Profile Container is a great product that basically removes the profile size entirely, is an little agent you install on your Session Hosts and configure with an ADMX, you also need a file share with enough space for some big profiles. FSLogix is in the business of so called filter-drivers, what it does is simply put, lying to Windows. For example, when you install a 32-bit application to your 64-bit Windows System, Windows will use its own filter-driver to get it to work, its the same technology, its efficient and simple. In FSLogix case it is lying to the windows about the profiles, Windows thinks its a local profile, it does not know that in fact, the entire profile is contained in a vhd-file, mounted to the server. Because its a virtual disk that attaches to the server, there is only one SMB handle. It will therefor not be a huge load on the network, which you often sees when you for example roam your profiles.

Install Teams

When you have FSLogix Profile Container in place you can now install teams on your environment.  In early October Microsoft released a new version of Teams with some new features when deploying Teams to all the users in an organization, we are going to use parts of that to install Teams on to our environment!

1. Download the latest version of Teams MSI-file (x64) file here!
2. If you like to disable Auto-start of Teams use the following install string (otherwise just install without the option):

   msiexec /i Teams_windows.msi OPTIONS="noAutoStart=true"

   This will put an Install file under ”C:\Program Files”, and when a user logon it will automatically install Teams to this user.

3. You do not need to update the MSI to the latest version, Teams will automatically download and install pending updates on the next logon of the user.

There you go, now your users can benefit from the full experience of Teams in your Multi-user environment, with one exception: if you are using Citrix, you have ”Skype for Business Optimization Pack” to utilize local client resources for best quality of Skype meetings and calls. There is no support for Teams as of for now. It will soon be available though. With that said, I wouldn’t uninstall Skype for business just yet.

Other Great stuff

As mentioned above, there is a lot of benefits using FSLogix Profile Container. For a great period of time, Citrix User Profile Manager has been the best way to reduce the size of the profiles while still have the most important settings saved in your profile. But this is still just a trade-off, you trade off your caches and settings that impact your profile logon, but at the same time still trying to get the best experience for the user, this will sometimes collide and you have to choose between longer logon time or full functionality of a certain application.
With FSLogix Profile Container you no longer need to worry about large profiles, you don´t need to trade off! There are a lot of applications that saves a ton of settings and files in your profile that you now can install without impacting the user experience, this opens up a great deal of opportunities. You can for example install OneNote with it´s (potentially)  gigantic cache, CAD applications with thousands of files in the user profile and so much more.

If you find this interesting and would like a trial of FSLogix Profile Container to see if this fits your organizations needs, please contact us. It is easily installed and does not require additional servers or infrastructure!

Tags : Citrix, FSLogix, FSLogix Profile Containers, Microsoft, Profiles, RDS, Roaming, Teams