Has anyone had a customer completely do away with profile management in their VMware Horizon environment? I am working with a customer and they are evaluating the need for profile management going forward.

Only if they were doing dedicated persistent machines.

They are using instant clone and persistent desktops. I know DEM is handling application customizations.

Over the years I've had a few customers that did non-persistent with absolutely no profile persistence (or user setting persistence). It was annoying, and bugged the hell out of me, but it worked. They just didn't want to deal with saving/storing profile/user data, and maintaining another solution. Despite their "success", I wouldn't recommend it.

I know there was an "original reason" for setting up DEM. I am now hearing there could be a change in direction.

Ah, the old "dream"... Mandatory profiles and "Flex Profiles" (VUEM)

That question is usually interchangeable with "Do I really hate my users or not?" or "How often do I want <user> contacting me about why the thing they setup just how they like it is completely gone the next day?"

Since one of the DEM shares sits in the cloud and it was running out of space they had no choice but to increase the storage size. This effort prompted the discussion of do we really need profiles going forward.

that's really more of a policy debate than a technical one though - and more importantly one that doesn't matter unless it comes from higher management.

It's coming from the architects over the environment. There was an original use case for DEM. Now it sounds like the use case has changed. I have zero influence one way or the other. I just wanted to pick the brain of my fellow engineers.

from a technical standpoint though, they should at least be taking closer looks as what they're saving to said profile shares - i've lost count of how many organizations have taken the "grab everything because it's easy" approach and then wondered why storage usage blew up .. "well bob, you probably don't need to be saving the entire chrome temp cache ..." architects aren't high enough to have that discussion really - especially not if their established user base is already used to things functioning and remembering preferences - but all you can really do is highlight the risks and let themselves dig their own hole

I don't disagree

yeah i might really encourage them to take a hard look at what is actually using up the space - DEM files really are not very big unless they're over-saving(see: cache) - not to mention keeping live backups of - but if they're also saving off/redirecting folders they could have a few datahoarders in their midst that would be better off saving their data off to more appropriate locations (yes, i DO need a copy of every linux iso out there, why do you ask?)

I would agree