Profile management – Part 3

Hi all,

In this part, I will test the three different solutions I covered in the first two parts of the blog series. The tests will be performance tests, but I will also cover what the profiles contain of information. I will also show you the configuration I have used for each solution so you can do your own tests if you want to. Before I get into the details I want to thank FSLogix and LoginVSI for their help and support with these tests and ControlUp for their free tool called App Profiler.

I will be doing two tests on each solution, one test with a single user on the server and one where I use LoginVSI to simulate a user load on the XenApp server. LoginVSI will use the knowledge worker 1 cpu profile and load 5 users onto the XenApp server. The tests will be showing login times for a user that is using Outlook 2016 connected to Office365, it will also show the application launch time by using ControlUp App Profiler. I will be doing 10 logins per test and use the average time in the comparison. For all solutions, the first login will be both creating of the profile and start of Outlook will be with configuration of the account. I will let Outlook sync the mails it needs to at the first start of Outlook. For MS Roaming and Citrix UPM I have set the sync interval for 1 month of mail whereas FSLogix will contain the entire mailbox.

My XenApp server is running on XenServer and it has 4 vCPU and 8GB RAM. The image for all three solutions is from PVS and it is the same image booting all three XenApp servers. If you would like more details on my test setup please let me know.

Results

MS Roaming Profiles

The table below is for MS Roaming profiles. The settings used are shown below the table.

Run Single user Multi user
Login time Outlook startup time Login time Outlook startup time
1st run  16,46 sec  1,638 sec 19,25 sec  8,923 sec
2nd run  20,01 sec  9,649 sec 23,00 sec  10,131 sec
3rd run  24,68 sec  7,44 sec 21,98 sec  8,724 sec
4th run  23,01 sec  7,771 sec  17,20 sec  11,474 sec
5th run  18,87 sec  6,114 sec  17,03 sec  8,414 sec
6th run  19,74 sec  8,748 sec  22,94 sec  9,583 sec
7th run  23,05 sec  12,239 sec  18,90 sec  8,979 sec
8th run  20,18 sec  8,227 sec  19,03 sec  10,212 sec
9th run  18,12 sec  7,883 sec  18,45 sec  12,729 sec
10th run  19,46 sec  6,646 sec  19,31 sec  11,892 sec
Average  20,36 sec  7,6355 sec  19,76 sec  10,1061 sec

MS Roaming settings.png

Profile size after the tests is 115 MB and contains the following foldersScreenshot_62.png

Citrix UPM

The table below is for Citrix UPM profiles. The settings used are shown below the table.

Run Single user Multi user
Login time Outlook startup time Login time Outlook startup time
1st run  14,26 sec 3,689 sec  13,24 sec  16,534 sec
2nd run  9,53 sec  11,704 sec  12,70 sec  14,413 sec
3rd run  9,30 sec  13,031 sec  21,69 sec  13,868 sec
4th run  10,59 sec  10,335 sec  13,54 sec  15,774 sec
5th run  9,98 sec  9,182 sec  11,93 sec  17,808 sec
6th run  11,07 sec  10,322 sec  11,76 sec  19,055 sec
7th run  9,62 sec  11,01 sec  15,42 sec  16,536 sec
8th run  9,86 sec  11,886 sec  23,36 sec  15,96 sec
9th run  9,64 sec  12,845 sec  11,65 sec  17,592 sec
10th run  9,65 sec  12,049 sec  16,78 sec  18,236 sec
Average  10,35 sec  10,605 sec  15,21 sec  16,5776 sec

Citrix UPM Settings.png

The profile size after the tests is 166 MB and contains the following foldersScreenshot_63.png

FSLogix Profile Container

The table below is for FSLogix profile container including Office365 containers. The settings used are shown below the table.

Run Single user Multi user
Login time Outlook startup time Login time Outlook startup time
1st run  13,05 sec  2,292 sec  11,63 sec  7,572 sec
2nd run  4,19 sec  7,462 sec  7,32 sec  4,808 sec
3rd run  4,29 sec  6,273 sec  7,38 sec  9,357 sec
4th run  4,25 sec  4,621 sec  5,57 sec  5,623 sec
5th run  3,97 sec  4,294 sec  6,71 sec  7,064 sec
6th run  4,53 sec  5,217 sec  5,84 sec  6,174 sec
7th run  3,88 sec  5,124 sec  6,57 sec  5,396 sec
8th run  4,03 sec  5,03 sec  5,14 sec  8,032 sec
9th run  3,99 sec  4,81 sec  4,83 sec  8,271 sec
10th run  4,05 sec  4,623 sec  4,90 sec  7,44 sec
Average  5,02 sec  4,9746 sec  6,59 sec  6,9737 sec

FSLogix settings.png

The profile size after the tests is 1,37 GB and contains the all the normal folders from a profile but saved into a VHDX file. The VHDX contains these foldersScreenshot_64.png

Conclusion of the results gathered

Based on the test results listed above I can conclude that even though FSLogix has the largest profile by far, it is as expected the fastest option when using Office 365. Not only is it the fastest solution but also the only solution that will let the users have a great experience with search in Outlook, a OneDrive for Business that will work on XenApp and a global address list for Skype for Business that will roam. The Skype for Business part of FSLogix might not be a big deal for everyone, but enterprise customers with a large user base will feel the difference with and without FSLogix. If you are not using Office 365, FSLogix will still provide a fast user login and provide the users will a profile very similar to the one they know from their laptop or desktop. If you are not using Office 365 Citrix UPM provides you with a very flexible solution to save user settings and it allows the administrators to pick and choose what goes into the profile and what doesn’t. When your Citrix XenApp environment doesn’t have much demands to customizing your profiles you can use MS Roaming profile solution. The MS Roaming solution is very well tested and if you can settle with the shortcomings in customization it is very easy to setup and use.

If we dig into the results I got from my tests I can see that MS Roaming profile load isn’t much different with and without load, that kind of surprise me since it needs to load a big chuck on files. In fact, if we look at the average of the profile load we can see that it is slightly faster when loading while running on a server with a user load. The Outlook startup time is also near the same, though around 2,5 seconds slower when the server has a user load.

When we look at the Citrix UPM solution the average login times are 10,35 without user load and 15,21 with a user load, this is about 33 percent increase which is quite high I think. The Outlook startup time behaves the same as the login times and goes from 10,605 seconds to 16,5776 seconds again around 33 percent increase.

The FSLogix tests has the best scores both with and without user load where it goes from 5,02 seconds login time to 6,59 seconds and the Outlook startup time goes from 4,97 seconds to 6,97 seconds. The results here are for me surprisingly good and the increase is on a level where a user probably won’t notice anything.

There are definitely a lot more tests that I could do to compare these profile types and products, and I might pick that up at a later time where also other vendors might get into the testing. I hope that these tests and results can be useful for you and if there is something that I really need to get tested let me know and I will do that.

If you are interested in knowing more about setting up FSLogix Profile Containers have a look at this great article from Aaron Parker:

http://blog.fslogix.com/fslogix-profile-containers-and-office-365-containers-deployment-guide 

5 thoughts on “Profile management – Part 3”

  1. I was curious if you ever thought of changing the structure of your blog?
    Its very well written; I love what youve got to say.
    But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so people could connect with it better.
    Youve got an awful lot of text for only having 1
    or two images. Maybe you could space it out better?

  2. Hi terrific blog! Does running a blog like this take a lot of work?
    I have absolutely no knowledge of programming but I was
    hoping to start my own blog in the near future. Anyhow, should
    you have any suggestions or tips for new
    blog owners please share. I understand this is off subject nevertheless I simply had to ask.
    Cheers!

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