OneDrive Roaming with FSLogix

The big announcement when FSLogix released their latest build of FSLogix Apps and the corresponding FSLogix Office 365 Container solution in version 2.7 was the support of Outlook Search on XenApp. But wait, there is more! For the first time the guys over at FSLogix managed to support OneDrive in non-persistent VDI deployments.

Until now there was no solution to persist synced data from consumer OneDrive or OneDrive for Business (the OneDrive part in Office 365). For this reason most admins decided to disable the OneDrive clients on non-persistent VDI. End users only could work with the online data accessed through their browser or Office Apps connected to the online OneDrive repository. In theory you could allow the users to sync the data with their OneDrive clients to the local virtual machines, but the synced data was lost on next reboot of the VM, in case of non-persistent VDI on every logoff, and had to be synced again over and over on every logon.

The latest OneDrive client comes to your Windows 10 installation through Windows Update. This Next Generation Sync Client supports consumer OneDrive and OneDrive for Business side by side in a single client, so you might want to get rid of your OneDrive for Business Client that comes with the Office installation.

There is also a direct download from https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=248256. You can run the downloaded OneDriveSetup.exe to install the OneDrive client into the users AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneDrive directroy. There are also ways to install this latest release of the client installation exe in your base image into the C:\Windows\SysWow64, but that’s something for another post…

With the latest release of FSLogix Apps 2.7.1438.2 the offline copies of the synchronized OneDrive data as well as the OneDrive client installation and configuration itself is redirected into the user specific virtual disk container and this way is persisted on logoff. When the user logs on, the container is mounted back into the user profile and OneDrive related data is available immediately in the same way as the FSLogix solution already can persist Outlook OST and Search Index data.

To make this happen the following configuration steps are crucial:

1. Exclude the OneDrive client installation path from your existing profile solution

   In Windows 10 the native OneDrive client is installed in Users\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneDrive. Make sure your existing profile solution does not capture this folder. In case of Citrix UPM exclude “!ctx_localappdata!\Microsoft\OneDrive” from your synced folders.

2. For consumer OneDrive exclude the OneDrive folder from your existing profile solution

   The OneDrive client syncs the data to the folder OneDrive in Users\OneDrive. This is a fixed folder name for the consumer OneDrive. In case of Citrix UPM exlude “OneDrive” from your synced folders.

3. For OneDrive for Business (the OneDrive that comes with your Office 365 subscription) exclude the OneDrive – [tenant name/description] folder from your existing profile solution

   The OneDrive client syncs the data to a folder named depending on your tenant name/description of your Office 365 subscription in User\, so it is not a fixed name. If you don’t know what this folder name is you can set HKLM\Software\FSLogix\Logging\LoggingEnabled  = 2 and log off and back on. Then look in c:\programdata\fslogix\logs\odfc\<find file with todays date>. In the log file search for “OneDrive folder is” and you will see which folder needs to be excluded. In case of Citrix UPM exclude “OneDrive – [tenant name/description]” from your synced folders.

With this exclusions in place you should be able to config your OneDrive client for offline sync and perform an initial full sync. After logoff the configuration, the client installation and the synced data is kept in the FSLogix container and immediately available on subsequent logons.