XenApp on vSphere – Citrix User Profiles not removed at Logoff
January 17, 2013 5 Comments
Ran into an interesting scenario with Citrix Profile Manager running on XenApp 6.5 and vSphere, where user profiles were not deleted at log off. Below is how I was able to resolve this particular issue.
Environment:
- Windows 2008 R2
- XenApp 6.5
- UPM 4.1
- vSphere 4.0
Issue:
An additional profile is created on the local system for each user who logs in. The problem occurs when the Citrix User Profile Manager is installed with the FULL installation of VMware Tools. There is a conflict with the Shared Folder component of VMware tools that prevents the user profile from being deleted at logoff, this can lead to multiple user profiles on a server, sometimes even resulting in temp profile usage and rarely in profile corruption.
Notes:
I noticed this was affecting a user where the XenApp server was creating a temp profile and would write the following event, as well as an additional profile was being created on the local system for each user who logged in. What the heck?
Cause:
VMware shared folders is locking a folder during logoff.
Solution:
- Log off of the server sorting the profiles.
- From Control Panel, go to Add or Remove Programs.
- Select VMWARE tools and select Modify.
- Set Shared Folders to Not installed.
- Restart and log on as Administrator.
- Navigate to My Computer > Properties > Advanced > User Profiles and delete any remnants of unwanted local profiles.
More info:
* In PVS environments running in Standard mode (read only) vDisks, this issue is less apparent as the profiles are not accumulated through a reboot – Thank you Mr. Soriano (Full Sori) for confirming.
More information:
- Citrix Support Article : http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX122501
- VMware KB Article : http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1317
Daniel Ruiz - Blog 
Thank you for this. I noticed many of the profiles we had were not being deleted. I thought it was an issue with the UPM GPO or the roaming profile GPO. It is hard to keep up with all these bugs. Glad there are people out there like you that help other folks out there. Thank you Daniel!
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Do you know if this applies to vSphere 5.0 also?
MasterXen, Based on VMware KB article 1317, this also affects vSphere 5 since it is based on how VMware Tools shared folders feature works.
Hope this helps you out.
Cheers!
this is also affecting our standard-mode-‘PVSed’ servers as we use persistent disk for profile cahce.