So as it turns out, RTO Virtual Profiles does its magic a lot differently than the popular Flex Profiles. For those of you unfamiliar with Flex Profiles, here's a quick rundown of how Flex Profiles works.

• You set up a mandatory profile
• You set up flex to export certain registry keys and certain files and user logoff
• You run the same process the other way around to import these exported registry keys and files at user logon.

Installation

When I spoke to Kevin Goodman (CEO of RTO Software) he mentioned that one of the design goals of RTO Virtual Profiles was that it should significantly speed up logons (and logoffs) and be easy to implement and not require any modifications to back infrastructures and such. When you take a look at the installation and operation of RTO Virtual Profiles you see that this design goal was achieved. The installation is very straight forward and only leaves you the choice to select the installation directory. The installation (that requires no reboot) yields a new service:

RTO Virtual Profiles only has one simple interface which gives you a hint as to how the Virtual Profiles works:

 
The most important (and probably) only piece of configuration you need to do is to configure Virtual Profiles to tell it where your roaming profiles are stored. After that you’re done. This is all you will ever have to configure on RTO Virtual Profiles.

The inner workings

After you have configured RTO Virtual Profiles you’ll notice that your roaming profiles logons will be much faster. It’s actually quite hard to find out what made this speed improvement come about. When viewing the logs files you will find out what RTO Virtual Profiles actually does. I think it is best described as “streaming”. It streams the roaming profile to the local server/workstation. So as soon as you hit enter after entering your user name and password and your profile gets loaded, RTO Virtual Profiles kicks in. What basically happens is that RTO Virtual Profiles tricks Windows into thinking that the profile is loaded but the loading of the actual profile never really happens. It only streams down the bits that are needed. Since RTO Virtual Profiles installs a file system driver they intercept all calls made to profile. RTO Virtual Profiles checks to see if that file has already been streamed down and if not if will be streamed down immediately.

The streaming of the profiles is real-time and works both ways. So if an application that you are using saves a piece of data into the Application Data folder, this gets streamed back to the share that holds your roaming profile immediately.

This concept of “streaming profiles” really has the potential to speed up logon and logoffs significantly. Depending on the age of the profile, you can say that about 80% of a roaming profile is static information that never changes or gets accessed.

The streaming of profiles isn’t the only thing that RTO Virtual Profiles does. They’ve also added an additional feature that speeds up logons. RTO Virtual Profiles adds a feature that runs logon scripts and other selected “session initialization tasks” (such as the Appsetup) in a separate thread. So all these tasks run parallel instead of in sequence. This also tends to speed up logons especially with the popularity of multicore CPUs.

RTO Virtual Profiles is very easy to setup and is very non-intrusive to the profile. Since the actual profile is never altered by RTO Virtual Profiles, the same profile can be used across servers that have RTO Virtual Profiles and those that have not. For clarity’s sake, in a typical Terminal Server / Citrix deployment you would install RTO Virtual Profiles on a Terminal Server, not the file server. You install RTO Virtual Profiles that gets the profile loaded.

The fire-and-forget mentality of RTO Virtual Profiles might also be one of it’s weaknesses. RTO Profiles does not do any form of profile management. With or without RTO Virtual Profiles, profiles can continue to become bloated up to the point that creating a new profile is the only solution. RTO Virtual Profiles does however decrease the likelihood of a corrupt profile because all changes to the profile are made in real-time and not at logoff.

Pricing

I asked RTO about the pricing of Virtual Profiles. They were kind enough to provide an estimate. Keep in mind that the product hasn’t been released officially yet, so these prices might change. Pricing is at $999 per (Terminal) Server and $50 in a VDI scenario Windows XP (/Vista). If I’m not mistaking, the Vista product isn’t available yet.