Windows virtual desktop is continually evolving, and now the time has come to dig deep and further configure it to optimize costs and improve performance. A previous article (here) discussed using FSLogix to segregate user profiles to make them non-persistent for the WVD environments. From this post, let's further discuss how we can separate office content from the user profiles and what benefits we can expect from it.

Profile Container vs. Office Container

It's essential to understand the differences between Profile Container and Office Container for the proper use and maximum benefit.

Profile Container

Profile Container is used to redirect the full user profile, including MyDocument, Desktop, Pictures, etc. Profile Container is used in non-persistent, virtual environments, such as Virtual Desktops. When using Profile Container, the entire user’s profile, except for data that is excluded using the redirections.xml, is included in the profile container. For Windows virtual desktop, we are using FSLogix with Azure files or Azure NetApp files. Refer (here)

Office Container

Office Container is generally implemented with another profile solution such as FSLogix User profiles, and it is designed to improve the performance of Microsoft Office in non-persistent environments. As opposed to Profile Container, Office Container redirects only the local user files for Microsoft Office. When configuring Office Container, each Office component is independently included based on the GPO's selected settings or the registry.

What is the benefit of separating Office Contents from User Profile?

There are few benefits of separating the Office profile; these are what I see as the main advantages for the WVD environment.

It saves IOPS.

Office content such as Email, Outlook, OneDrive, Teams requires more IOPS since they are the main working tools these days. How often you save a file on a desktop, open a file from it, or delete a large number of files. All these actions are normal profile activities, and they are separated from the Office profile, so you do not need to worry about IOPS on a standard profile.

No backup, DR or HA

All these office data are just cache data that you maintain locally; you can always refer to the original were in Office 365. So, why do you need to back up those? Also, there is no need to have redundancy or high availability. In the event of a loss, you can always set a new office profile, and it will get synced from Office 365 cloud.

Optimize the cost

While considering saving IOPS, you can change your user profile to stay on standard file storage and consider implementing Office profile on Azure Premium files with high IOPS. This will have a significant save when you have a large number of WVD users.  Also, you can exclude Office profile from Azure backup or your snapshots, which will eventually save unnecessary cost to your organization.

Use of FSLogix

FSLogix is a set of solutions that enhance, enable, and simplify non-persistent Windows computing environments. FSLogix solutions are appropriate for Virtual environments in both public and private clouds. FSLogix solutions include:

• Profile Container
• Office Container
• Application Masking
• Java Version Control

Also, FSLogix is free to use when you have a license to use Windows Virtual Desktop.

Prerequisites for Office Container in WVD

From this article I’m only discussing the configurations which are required to enable office container in WVD environments, before proceeding you should have below environment ready, please visit my previous blog articles for configuring WVD and Configuring User profiles – (here)

You should have

• Healthy WVD environment
• Domain joined storage account
• User Profiles configured with FSLogix
• Permissions configured via Azure portal and NTFS
• FSLogix agent installed on the WVD Host
• FSLogix Group policy template configured in Active directory

for Office Container, we will be using the same Domain Joined Storage Account and Azure Files you already configured with User Profiles.

Configuring Office Container with FSLogix

1. Before configuring, as I mentioned in the prerequisites, you should have domain-joined, or Azure AD Domain services joined Storage account. Also, it would be best if you had created the shares, and NTFS and role base access should be configured like below.
   
   
   
   
2. Same NTFS share permissions should be given to the Office profile, same as you configured User Profile share.
3. You can configure Office profile settings from Group Policy or Registry. I prefer GPO.
   Create new GPO for Office Container, edit the configurations of Computer Configurations -> Policies -> Administrative Templates -> FSLogix -> Office 365 Containers
   
   
4. You can add the below settings according to your need.
   1. VHD Location - Specifies the network location where the VHD(X) files are stored.
   2. Size in MB - Specify the size for auto-created VHD(X) files. Default is 30,000 (30 GBs).
   3. Enabled - Controls whether or not the Profiles feature is active.
   4. Outlook folder path - Specifies the path to the user's Outlook data folder. Default is '%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook'.
   5. Include Outlook data in the container - When Enabled is checked, the Outlook data files will be included in the Office 365 Container. (OST)
   6. Sync OST to VHD - Sync existing local OST file (if any) to VHD when new VHD is created.
   7. The store search database in Office 365 container - Used to control the FSLogix Search Roaming feature and store search data in the Office 365 container.
   8. Include Teams data in the container - When Enabled is checked, the Teams data files will be included in the Office 365 Container.
      
      
      
      
5. You can also configure these settings from the registry, apply them to the WVD golden image.
   
   
   

Refer - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/fslogix/configure-office-container-tutorial

User Experience

After configuring Office Container, you can see two VHD’s attached to the VM when you logged in. One for the user profile and the other for the Office Profile. All the Office data you specified using GPO will be redirected to the Office profile except anything you specified in redirections.xml.

Configuring exclusions

When you configured the Office profile, you can exclude some data copied to the VHD and maintain it in the local profile. One of the best use cases for this is the use of Teams in WVD. Teams have a large cache of around 4.5GB of data, and you do not want this in the office profile. Offloading this from cloud data saves you storage costs and optimizes the profile load as well.

In this scenario, you can use redirections.xml with configured teams cache location in it.

Redirection.xml for excluding Teams

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<FrxProfileFolderRedirection ExcludeCommonFolders="0">
<Excludes>
<Exclude Copy="0">AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Teams\Service Worker\CasheStorage</Exclude>
<Exclude>… another exclude folders… </Exclude>
</Excludes>
<Includes/>
</FrxProfileFolderRedirection>

Save this in the same location where your FSlogix Profile resides (AzureFiles) and specify the path in the Group policy which you created for the Office Container configurations as below:

I hope this is useful.

Asitha De Silva