Today, I want to talk about ProfileDisk and its benefits using FlexDisk or VHD.  ProfileDisk is a new major feature scheduled for ProfileUnity 6.5,  targeted for release in Q1 of 2015.

Before I talk about ProfileDisk, let’s level set about ProfileUnity itself and how it deals with the user profile. Today, ProfileUnity uses its portability engine to backup and restore users’ profiles. This engine is highly optimized to make backup and restore of a user’s profile as fast as possible. This engine archives the profile into smaller parts that also include a checksum so that the solution can sort through what does and does NOT need to be save or restored. Out of the box, ProfileUnity comes with templates that cover 85% of the user profile, Windows settings, application settings, etc. ProfileUnity’s portability engine backups up and restores profile on login, logoff or on triggers for example on PCoIP or ICA disconnect  the users profile can be saved. This approach gives you great control over how much or how little of the profile you want to make portable. But this approach also sometimes requires you to create a portability rule for paths that are not captured out-of-the-box. Customers have told us they want a fully persistent desktop, leveraging non persistent VDI but without having to configure many portability rules.    Essentially, they want a feature that would act as an “easy button” or “catch all” for users’ profiles. Continue reading →