Windows 2008 Partitioning Alignment

The partitioning alignment “bug” in Windows 2003 and earlier has been fixed in Windows 2008.

You no longer have to use diskpart.exe to align new partitions in Windows 2008.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb738145.aspx

http://theessentialexchange.com/blogs/michael/archive/2008/03/07/Exchange-2007-Disk-Performance-Partition-Alignment-.aspx

User Profiles Best Practices White Paper

Check out my updated User Profiles Best Practices White Paper.

http://www.varrow.com/index.php?id=98

Mandatory User Profiles in Windows 2008 Terminal Server and XenApp 5

Some of you may have already known about the mandatory profile change in Windows 2008 but I had no idea. I recently did my first Citrix XenApp 5 – Windows 2008 project and had a hard time getting the mandatory profile working.

After some searching I found that the mandatory profile folder name has to have a “.v2” appended to the end of the folder name. The reason Microsoft made this change is because the user profile sturcture in Vista and Windows 2008 is a lot different than in previous versions of Windows. By forcing you to append .v2 to the end of the folder prevents Windows 2008 from trying to load a profile from a previous version of Windows.

It was a little tricky configuring Group Policy to point to the mandatory profile with a .v2 on the folder name. When I first configured the “Set path for TS Roaming User Profile” setting I set it to %logonserver%\netlogon\xenapp-prof.v2. This didn’t work, I had to set the profile path to %logonserver%\netlogon\xenapp-prof and then Windows 2008 automatically appends .v2 to the end when looking for the path.

So to recap,

1. I created a mandatory profile with the folder name “xenapp-prof.v2”.
2. I configured my profile path to point to “%logonserver%\netlogon\xenapp-prof”. If you configure the profile path with a .v2 it will not work.