Share Migration and Windows Network Drive Mappings
Recently one of our customers migrated their Windows network shares to Isilon. Upon doing so, they encountered an issue with slow client logins. This environment has a Group Policy in place to automatically connect users to network drive mappings as part of the login process.
It's worth noting that Microsoft DFS is also in play here. Clients are mapped to DFS namespace paths, with the folder targets pointing to the Isilon shares.
During the login process, users were stuck on the “Applying Folder Redirection Policy” and “Applying Group Policy Drive Maps policy”status for as long as 10-15 minutes. After some discovery and research, we identified that the Action setting of "Replace" within the group policy was likely contributing to the login delays, since the GPO is constantly deleting and recreating the mappings during the login process.
Changing the drive map policy from “Replace” to “Update” made a huge difference in improving login times. It's also best practice to ensure there are no invalid locations being referenced by DFS folder targets, as this can also contribute to delayed login times. The customer did identify and remove several folder targets that referenced obsolete paths.