Since a couple of weeks there are some improvements made to Azure RemoteApp regarding the management of the User Profile Disks. Management of the User Profile disks was not possible for the users of Azure RemoteApp. If a copy of the User Profile disk was needed you had to contact Azure Support and they could provide you the link to the User Profile Disk. Also removing a corrupted User Profile disk was also only possible through contacting Azure Support. With the release of the following 2 PowerShell cmdlets the user can now execute these actions themselves: Copy-AzureRemoteAppUserDisk and Remove-AzureRemoteAppUserDisk. Both cmdlets are available from Azure Module version 1.5.0.

Let’s first take a look at both cmdlets. First the Copy-AzureRemoteAppUserDisk. This cmdlet copies a User Profile Disk of a user from one Azure RemoteApp collection to another. To run this cmdlet, the following parameters, need to send with this command:

• SourceCollectionName; This is the name of the Azure RemoteApp Source collection of the user;
• DestinationCollectionName; This is the name of the Azure RemoteApp destination collection of the user;
• UserUPN; This is the UPN of the user for which you want to copy the User Profile disk;
• OverWriteExistingUserDisk; with this setting you can control if you want to overwrite any User Profile disk in the destination collection.

So for this test I’ve created a sample Word document in my UPD profile on my hybrid based collection:

The next steps is to copy this User Profile disk to my cloud based collection:

Now let’s login with this user in the cloudbased collection and look if the document/profile is successfully copied:

The same document is available in this first session on my new collection, so the copy is successful.

Now let’s take a look at the second new cmdlet which is introduced: Remove-AzureRemoteAppUserDisk. This cmdlet removes a user profile disk of a user from a Microsoft Azure RemoteApp collection. To run this cmdlet, the following parameters, need to send with this command:

• CollectionName; This is the name of the Azure RemoteApp collection of the user;
• UserUPN; This is the UPN of the user for which you want to copy the User Profile disk;

So let’s test this cmdlet in the current ‘active’ collection which I’ve used in the above test:

The above command executes successfully even with a logged on user, this will result in an error! So caution with this command, as already blogged by Freek Berson. The last step I want to test if this cmdlet can be used to clean user profile disks in collection where the user is not assigned anymore. So in my case I want to delete the user profile disk from the collection to which I previously was assigned:

So my conclusion is that with the new cmdlets Copy-AzureRemoteAppUserDisk and Remove-AzureRemoteAppUserDisk we can do better User Profile disk management. The only missing functionality is downloading a User Profile disk as a backup. Maybe this will be added in the future, but for now some great functionality has been added.