Opinion on .OST Files in your VDI or RDS Farm

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KapsZ28

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Just wanted to get some opinions about having .OST files in VDI or RDS Farms. In my particular case I think it is only hurting performance of the RDS Farm. Due to cost concerns the customer opted for Office 365 rather than having Exchange running in the same cloud infrastructure as the rest of the servers. Since Office 365 is Internet based, running Outlook in online mode is very slow as I am sure most people know that have used it. So the only real option is to used cached mode which requires having .OST files stored locally on the RDS Session Host servers. This farm has 7 session host servers and about 150 users. Throughout most of the week they stay logged into the same server, so the largest download is on Monday. They use profile redirection for everything except the .OST file. So each RDS server has nearly 400 GB of .OST files.

Anyone else have to deal with this and see performance issues when using a SAN?
 
Are you using Server 2012/R2 for your RDS? You could just setup profile disks, this will save each users profile to the disk. Much like roaming profiles.
 
Not sure how that helps anything. The profiles are already redirected to a file server. .OST files are supposed to be local, not over the network, and moving them to the profile would make the performance even worse.
 
But the OST files are not redirected. And having them local on each server means that you have 1,050(7x150) OST files on your RDS farm.

The way Profile disks works is, you create a share, and point the profiles disks to the share. When a user logs in, a VHDX is created, and mounted. This contains all of the users profiles. Since its a mounted drive, its is not a network share.

Now what you can do is setup a Volume on the SAN or fileserver and created dedicated storage for the user profiles. If you do run into performance issues, it will only impact the user profiles, OST, and Documents, rather than the entire RDS farm.

You will also greatly decrease the amount of HDD space needed for the OST files, since each server a user logs into has an OST file for that user. And then since the users are always accessing the same OST file on monday morning, it should decrease the catch up syncs, from the last time the user was on that server.

You can read more about how it works at this link.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2012/11/13/easier-user-data-management-with-user-profile-disks-in-windows-server-2012.aspx
 
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