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

Profile size after the tests is 115 MB and contains the following folders

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

The profile size after the tests is 166 MB and contains the following folders

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

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 folders

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