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Outlook OST and Search vhdx not unmounting after log off


Clinton Dunn1709152451

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Hi,

 

Currently running Xendesktop 1808 with the outlook OST and Search index as VHDx files in UPM. I have noticed that at 1st logon all works smoothly and outlook caches correctly to the outlookOST.vhdx and searchb caches correctly to its vhdx. Upon logoff i can see the vhdx files are held open on the profile server by the conputer account.  When logging on to either the same server or another server the vhdx is unable to mount as the file is still open on the profile server.

 

If i log out and clear the open file (vhdx) off the profile server then at the next logon all works fine again with thr vhdx's mounting. Logout and the problems repeats.

 

I have turned off cache files on the profile share. I have made sure domain computers is added under the users VHD folder on the UPM.

 

I have a call open with Citrix and we have gone up to escalations now as a sev2. Traces have been sent. I thought i would mention this issue as when i get a resolution from Citrix i will post here. 

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We now have this working.

 

In order to use Outlook caching and search the following had to be done.

 

1)Upgrade the VDA from 1808 to 1811. This is due to all outlook search fixes rolled into the new VDA. Without these fixes search does not index correctly. You will also see in the event viewer to contact citrix for a private hotfix for search if on 1808.

 

2)rename the profile path, the UPM path and any path shares to lowercase. For example if you have \\fileServer\Profiles$\Users\%Username% change it to lowercase. \\fileserver\profiles\users\%username%

 

You will need to do this inside the UPM policies or the UPM in WEM. Also fo not forget to rename the share if you have made one to lowercase.

 

this is needed due to a citrix bug not able to read upper and lowercase to mount and unmount the vhdx. This information was provided by the Citrix escalation engineer looking at the traces we sent. A case has been sent to engineering to fix the upper.case and lowercase.

 

I hope this helps someone. The outlook cache and search vhdx by Citrix is good and using O365 with it is making my users happier.

 

 

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With the above in place our users found Outlook quick and usable, however on emails with a lot of users copied in Outlook would freeze for 5 to 10 seconds.  Narrowed the cause down to the OAB (Outlook Address book) not downloading. The email would freeze whilst Outlook went back to the server to work out the address book list.

 

The following resolved this:

 

1) Enable the BITS service (Background intelligence Transfer service) - Outlook needs this service to download the OAB.

 

2)Check the following registry key is in the user registry, in our case this key was missing. HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Cached Mode and create a DWORD "DownloadOAB" with value set to 1 in the Cached Mode key.

 

3) Close Outlook and open Outlook and check the offline address book downloads. If not, click on send/receive, Send/Receive Groups and download the address book. Once downloaded you should see an improvement in email speed.

 

Thanks

 

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We have now spoken with Citrix over the last few weeks and this will not be fixed in a hurry. Speaking to Citrix this issue is occurring because Microsoft has changed its design to block 3rd party hooking, in its Windows search service.

 

In short if you upgrade to Windows 10, 1809 or Windows 2019 the search service using the Citrix VHDX will no longer work.

 

You are now pretty much left with using FSLogix if you want a working search service option in Outlook. FSLogix is now free from Microsoft if you have a RDS CAL, or Windows 10 Enterprise license.

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Hi @Clinton Dunn1709152451,

 

Your solution helped me, thanks for that.

But I do have another problem, do you have a solution for this?

 

I reconfigured our policies to switch from Online- to Offline-Outlook-Profiles. Enabled Windows Search and a Windows Policy for indexing Outlook.

But the search tools are still greyed out and I see the message: "Something didn't work and your search could not be completed."

 

Do you have similar problems?

Our environment: Windows Server 2016 VDA 1811

 

Thanks,

Tim

 

image.thumb.png.a2807b513de1ca8f596316e6db0d6d4d.pngimage.thumb.png.443867bfff50f427c2a8c8e689ce14bd.png

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11 hours ago, Clinton Dunn1709152451 said:

With the above in place our users found Outlook quick and usable, however on emails with a lot of users copied in Outlook would freeze for 5 to 10 seconds.  Narrowed the cause down to the OAB (Outlook Address book) not downloading. The email would freeze whilst Outlook went back to the server to work out the address book list.

 

The following resolved this:

 

1) Enable the BITS service (Background intelligence Transfer service) - Outlook needs this service to download the OAB.

 

2)Check the following registry key is in the user registry, in our case this key was missing. HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Cached Mode and create a DWORD "DownloadOAB" with value set to 1 in the Cached Mode key.

 

3) Close Outlook and open Outlook and check the offline address book downloads. If not, click on send/receive, Send/Receive Groups and download the address book. Once downloaded you should see an improvement in email speed.

 

Thanks

 

Thanks for sharing. That will help other people who may encounter the same problem.

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Hi,

 

An update on the above.

 

Do not update from Windows 1803 to Windows 1809, if you using windows 10. The search service will stop working. We have logged a case with Citrix as we found a known issues error of upm-1403 on the Citrix known issues list.

 

Speaking to Citrix this issue is occurring because Microsoft has changed its design to block 3rd party hooking, in its Windows search service.

 

This issue will also occur if you use windows 2019.

 

I was informed that Microsoft and Citrix are working on this together to get it resolved. I will have a further update next Wednesday I am told.

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After reading this, I spent days trying to get FSLogix to work with the Search Indexing on Windows Server 2019 (1809) and never got it working.  The only way I have managed to get search indexing running is to remove FSLogix and let Windows deal with searching on it's own without any other profile management doing anything to the search index files located %appdata%\Microsoft\Search\Data.  I have now switched back to Citrix UPM and I am trying to get it working on this, but leaving the Search file alone.  Only problem I have currently is that it cannot delete the local profile after log off because the search file are in use. Hopefully once that is sort it will work, however it's not ideal as I will have large profiles to drag around.  Fortunately, my environment is desktop sharing of the server, so only one log on per user, per day generally.

 

Note to others, the Indexing Options from Control Panel or Outlook Search Options screen will always show '0 items indexed. Indexing Complete' even when it is working for the user, don't be fooled by this, it is a red herring.  To check the indexing is working, look at the Indexing status in search tools inside Outlook and the data files in %appdata%\Microsoft\Search\Data to see if they are growing.  Also, totally ignore the files in C:\ProgramData\Microsoft, this is another red herring, as the search index data file are not here, they are in %appdata%\Microsoft\Search\Data.  With all that being said, if the Indexing Options from Control Panel or Outlook Search Options screen says 'Waiting to receive indexing status...' that is in my experience a guaranteed sign that your user search isn't going to work.

 

Really hope all this gets sorted out soon as this has been a nightmare for me.

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I give up.  Windows Server 2019 simply does not work with Search Index in a RDS environment.  I look forward to when they fix it but for now I give up.  I'm going to roll out Windows Server 1803 before they screwed up searching with the 1809 update (upm-1403).

 

For those interested in what happened, whilst I can get the Search Index running, it will only work on the first launch of the user profile where no %appdata%\Microsoft\Search\Data exists.  It will then build an index, though I had to reload Outlook to get it going.  However, when you log off, the system holds open files in %appdata%\Microsoft\Search\Data and doesn't let go so the local profile will not delete and worse, it cannot copy to the profile store.  If you try to log back on, it will set up a new profile (ro.XXXXX001) and the search index does not work.  You can force it to let go by restarting the Windows Search, but that isn't practical.  The whole thing is a total mess!

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On 1/8/2019 at 3:14 AM, Clinton Dunn1709152451 said:

With the above in place our users found Outlook quick and usable, however on emails with a lot of users copied in Outlook would freeze for 5 to 10 seconds.  Narrowed the cause down to the OAB (Outlook Address book) not downloading. The email would freeze whilst Outlook went back to the server to work out the address book list.

 

The following resolved this:

 

1) Enable the BITS service (Background intelligence Transfer service) - Outlook needs this service to download the OAB.

 

2)Check the following registry key is in the user registry, in our case this key was missing. HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Cached Mode and create a DWORD "DownloadOAB" with value set to 1 in the Cached Mode key.

 

3) Close Outlook and open Outlook and check the offline address book downloads. If not, click on send/receive, Send/Receive Groups and download the address book. Once downloaded you should see an improvement in email speed.

 

Thanks

 

I'm curious how your narrowed your issue down to the OAB download issue.  we are having a somewhat similar issue but not with profile management but using cached mode.  very randomly but i'm told when user let their session sit idle for a while , when they come back to unlock their session and try and reply to an email it locks up then (seems to be since we turned cached mode on).  wondering if maybe this could be part of our issue

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On 6/13/2019 at 11:06 AM, Richard Ockwell said:

I give up.  Windows Server 2019 simply does not work with Search Index in a RDS environment.  I look forward to when they fix it but for now I give up.  I'm going to roll out Windows Server 1803 before they screwed up searching with the 1809 update (upm-1403).

 

For those interested in what happened, whilst I can get the Search Index running, it will only work on the first launch of the user profile where no %appdata%\Microsoft\Search\Data exists.  It will then build an index, though I had to reload Outlook to get it going.  However, when you log off, the system holds open files in %appdata%\Microsoft\Search\Data and doesn't let go so the local profile will not delete and worse, it cannot copy to the profile store.  If you try to log back on, it will set up a new profile (ro.XXXXX001) and the search index does not work.  You can force it to let go by restarting the Windows Search, but that isn't practical.  The whole thing is a total mess!

Hey - are you still experiencing this? i am, just wanted to see if anything had changed since you posted this. I see it with both FSlogix and Citrix PM roaming indexing? 

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6 minutes ago, Richard Ockwell said:

I do now use Server 2019 with FSLogix, however I have completely disabled search indexing, which now works like a charm. With Exchange 365 fast search, the users don’t miss the search index at all. I just use FSLogix full containers without any profile management. Hope that helps, Richard

Do you mean, just have the service service stopped/disabled? Yeah, it seems to work pretty well. The only minor thing is that with Outlook, the Search options up top are greyed out, even though you can type criteria into the search box. It doesn't seem like file/document search ever worked search via the start menu either with RDSH installed. Thanks for the reply!

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On 12/18/2018 at 7:17 PM, Clinton Dunn1709152451 said:

2)rename the profile path, the UPM path and any path shares to lowercase. For example if you have \\fileServer\Profiles$\Users\%Username% change it to lowercase. \\fileserver\profiles\users\%username%

 

After hours of troubleshooting, this was exactly my problem.

Though(!) I did not expect it, because in my policy,  my UPM folder was lowercase.

 

In my specific environment I used DFS-N for all my fileshares, and somehow Windows decided that the fileserver name should be all uppercase... *sigh*

This I found by 'disconnecting' (but not go through with it) and looking to the filepath on one of the hanging vhdx's in Disk Management on one of the VAD ( XenApp lol ) servers.

 

I hope it saves someone the trouble as well!

 

Citrix: this bug is on your software for years now!

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