Changing UserProfile storage default location
At many customer place and even more often now RDS and XenApp servers are virtual I see C: drives (System drives) full without a tiny byte left… This is even more painful when roaming profiles need to be store on the same drive. This is the default behaviour for roaming and local profile creation, their location is “c:Users” or “c:Documents and Settings”
About User Profile Windows : [link]
Very often the virtual machine hard drive are calculated with the OS space need and few application added and many time the page file has already been moved to anther drive, but many admins forget to calculate user’s profile space needed regarding the number of user logged on per vbox…
So what I’m doing on almost all the deployment I do now a day when there are roaming or local profile involve, I just set the UserProfile location to another drive than the system drive, D: for example.
This can be done by changing a registry key and here is the location with default values :
Enter code herHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionProfileList
Value Name : ProfilesDirectory
Value Data : %SystemDrive%Users
Value Format : REG_EXPAND_SZe
By changing this value a folder will be automatically created with correct ACL.
I think this is a useful tip, just keep in mind it doesn’t change the default location of the public folders and the default profile :
Tested on Windows 2003, 2008 and 2008R2 with and without Citrix User Profile Management. And last words, TEST it before doing in on a production environment.
