It is really a painful task for Citrix admins to deal with users with huge Citrix profiles. When using Citrix UPM or WEM, it creates UPM_Profile folder. All the files/folders in user’s profile are stored in this folder. We can redirect user’s Desktop, Downloads, Documents to a share path but still we might end up in users having huge Citrix profiles. When you create a visual studio project, source folder is created in your UPM_Profile folder. There are lot of other softwares that save projects/code to your profile by default. If users do not save this data to Desktop/Downloads/Documents, their profiles become huge within a very short span of time.

Issue:

When user’s profile is huge, they cant login to their VDI. While logging in, they get a black screen and desktop viewer disappears after a short time. Same issue happens no matter how many times they reboot their VDI.

Temporary Solution:

As admin, you have to move all the data under your \\storage_path\folder1\folder2\Username\UPM_Profile to user’s desktop or documents or downloads (Assuming they are redirected to a network share). Then user can login successfully to the VDI.

After few days user’s profile grows again, and Admins have to perform the same task. We may still end up in tickets from users when this temporary solution is followed.

Permanent Solution:

Create a folder (Ex ApplicationData) in user’s upm folder like \\storage_path\folder1\folder2\Username\ApplicationData. Map this path in user’s session with GPO (Ex: with letter N). User has to save all the application data in N drive. With this way, all the user’s application data like visual studio source folders, or git repositories etc, are saved outside user’s UPM_Profile folder, resulting in very less UPM_profile folder size. So, Users can login without any issues.

Note1: It is much easier if we can automate to save the application-specific data to N drive. If not, other way is to send emails to users randomly so that they remember it and save their application data in N drive.

Note2: They can also save their application data in Desktops/Documents/Downloads folders as they are redirected to network share, but generally speaking, these folders are meant for user’s data like files/folders. It would be clumsy if all the user’s data like files/folders, application data etc are saved at single place. It would be nice to separate them. Moreover we are creating this ApplicationData folder under user’s data path, \\storage_path\folder1\folder2\Username. This wont consume any additional space.