Manage User Profiles for Remote Desktop Services

A user profile describes the configuration for a specific user, including the user’s environment and preference settings. Unless you carefully plan and manage user profiles in an RD Session Host server environment, user profiles can become large in size and can cause problems, such as slow logon times, when a user connects to an RD Session Host server. User profile management is also important when users connect to several different RD Session Host servers or connect to RD Session Host servers in remote locations.

You can specify a Remote Desktop Services-specific profile path and home folder for a user connecting to an RD Session Host server. This profile and home folder will only be used for Remote Desktop Services sessions. You should assign a separate profile for Remote Desktop Services sessions because many of the common options that are stored in profiles, such as screen savers and animated menu affects, are not desirable when using Remote Desktop Services.

You can manually configure these settings on the Remote Desktop Services Profile tab on the Properties sheet of a user account in the Local Users and Groups snap-in or the Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in.

You can also use the following Group Policy settings to configure these settings:

• Set RD User Home Directory
  
  
• Set path for RD Roaming User Profile
  
  
• Use mandatory profiles on the RD Session Host server
  
  

The Group Policy settings can be found in Computer Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Remote Desktop Services\Remote Desktop Session Host\Profiles and can be configured by using either Local Group Policy Editor or the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC).

	Note
	The Group Policy setting will take precedence over the setting configured in Remote Desktop Session Host Configuration or on the Remote tab.

For more information about RD Session Host, see the Remote Desktop Services page on the Windows Server 2008 R2 TechCenter (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=140438).

For more information about Group Policy settings for Remote Desktop Services, see the Remote Desktop Services Technical Reference (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=138134).