How to use ProfileUnity with Azure Virtual Desktop

What’s up, everyone!

Welcome to my second post in the mini-series about Liquidware ProfileUnity and FlexApp. In the first post we explored the world of ProfileUnity and how to set it up. In this post we will continue by looking at ways to configure ProfileUnity for Azure Virtual Desktop using shared host pools. If you want to follow along, make sure to have a demo environment.

The series:

Part 1: Introducing ProfileUnity by Liquidware
Part 2: How to use ProfileUnity with Azure Virtual Desktop
Part 3: How to use ProfileUnity with PCs and Windows 365 Cloud PCs
Part 4: Introducing FlexApp (ONE)
Part 5: Using FlexApp

I want to send a big thank you to my friends at Liquidware for allowing me to set up a demo environment!

Enjoy!

Getting started with ProfileUnity

ProfileUnity is suited for a wide variety of scenarios, like managing your profile for AVD in multi-session environments or store the user profiles to Azure Blob storage just to name a few.

Don’t worry! You do not need to configure every step manually because Liquidware has created something called a Guided Setup. Using the Guided Setup, you can easily check the Template Library for existing templates, or preconfigured steps for a specific scenario, and use it to configure ProfileUnity. All you need to do is open the ProfileUnity console and click the Configuration Management tile.

Currently we have the following templates available:

Scenario 1: Keep FSLogix and add DR

I already have a AVD demo environment configured which is using FSLogix. Let’s use the Microsoft FSLogix Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity template in this demo. You can find each step in the top-right corner of the screen. This template will take you through the following steps; template, variables, domain, finish.

Note that you will get more specific information about the template once it’s selected.

ProfileUnity will ask you to provide a location of the home drive. Like a true demo, my users don’t have it and don’t need it. So I created a separate share for ProfileUnity to store the data. Make sure to append the %username% variable at the end so each user get’s it’s own folder.

The domain steps guides you by creating the required GPOs at the correct location.

Since my environment uses domain joined session hosts, I can select the domain and OU where the session hosts live. Click the Run GPO integration button once you are happy with the settings. However there are other options to configure these settings depending on your environment.

View sample Did you notice the View sample links? Click them to get an idea of the content of the GPOs.

This will bring up a pop-up showing the progress. In my experience minutes is pretty exaggerated, it was more like seconds.

And sure enough, here is an example of the GPO assigned to the session hosts:

So that went OK! Click the close button and continue by clicking the Next button in the ProfileUnity console.

The deployment tools are already available since I took care of that during the installation process of the console. Make sure to deploy the configuration and click the Finish button. This will save your configuration. You can edit the configuration by clicking on the name. You can now start to configure each individual settings:

Of course you can create multiple configurations if you want to. These are saved in the location you selected before:

Let’s sign into our desktop and find out what the user experience looks like:

Let’s verify that the settings are saved on the location that we selected earlier. Keep in mind that the settings are saved when the users logs off from the session host.

There you go, all the portability settings are saved in user’s profile! You now have a backup option for the most important settings in case you ever need to delete/recreate the FSLogix container. These settings will be reapplied from the settings stored in ProfileUnity Portability.

Scenario 2: Use ProfileUnity to manage profiles without FSLogix

Yes, it is possible to manage user profiles for AVD environments with shared host pools without FSLogix. Let’s take a look at the process to configure this scenario.

From the ProfileUnity console, go to Configuration Management and select the Create button.

Same as before, you can choose Guided setup or a manual configuration. I will go for the guided setup.

Make sure to select the following template: Windows 10, 11, 2016, 2019 or 2022 as a Desktop Multi-Session ProfileDisk.

We need to configure a path where ProfileUnity will store the portability settings. For this demo I can simply reuse the previous share.

Next up to configure is the ProfileDisk settings. Fill in the required settings:

… and make sure to add the ProfileDisk assignment:

Once you click next, you will be asked to deploy the settings which is of course fine.

This will bring you to the domain settings.

Make sure to run the GPO integration to automatically create the GPOs.

But wait! Are the GPOs the same? Yes, they are indeed the same. I already compared them so you won't have too 🙂 In real world scenario you would probably reuse the existing GPO if you want to send to use the same configuration. However you can still use other locations in case you want to implement scenarios like DTAP, multi-tenancy or other platforms.

Back to the deployment process!

Finish up by deploying the configuration to the ProfileUnity deployment path:

We have now successfully added a second configuration!

Now it’s just a matter of signing into the desktop. I can see the ProfileUnity splash screen doing it’s thing. Let’s double check that FSLogix is not working and as you can see there are no disks attached:

Besides the Liquidware splash screen, there is another way to check if ProfileUnity is doing it’s thing and that is by checking if a license is assigned. From the ProfileUnity console, hover over the profile, select Licensing, in the top-right corner select Licensed Users and check the licenses:

We have already seen what the Portability settings look like in the first scenario so I will skip that part. More interesting now is that we should have a ProfileDisk:

Another way to check if the ProfileDisk is connected is by opening up Disk Management with elevated rights. You will see a disk attached to the session host:

ProfileDisk alert Make sure to check if the Windows 11 version is officially supported by Liquidware. Currently 24H2 is not supported, that will change in the upcoming R2 release. Keep an eye out on the official documentation.