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We are an small IT shop, with the most basic services(in this case, user management) "outsourced" to our parent company.

We have a bunch of Windows 2003 R2 Std servers on VMWare, which we designed with a System disk just enough to be comfortable for the OS (10 GB). The software goes into other disks.

The issue is that, in order to provide accurate logging, we discouraged our IT staff from using the local admin account and aked them to use their domain account (which we had enough given privileges to). This has been working for a while, but we are beginning to have problem because the "Document and Settings" folders has been increasing (more than 2GB in an instance).

Is there any way in which we can allow our IT staff to login with their domain users, yet without having them store their profiles in the servers? Maybe pointing them to the Administrator profile or something like that?

Thanks in advance

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up vote 2 down vote accepted

In addition to what Stephane suggested (set up roaming profiles and make Windows delete the locally cached copies of roaming profiles upon logoff) you could configure a different roaming profile which is used on servers only. To do that configure the following policy:

Machine -> System -> User Profiles -> Set roaming profile path for all users logging onto this computer

As an alternative just run my free profile deletion tool Delprof2 regularly to clean inactive profiles (after warning you users, of course).

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Your first part is more what I had in mind. Deleting unused profiles is not the solution because IT users do periodically log in, we do not have enough space for all of the profiles of the current IT staff. –  SJuan76 Dec 20 '11 at 8:27
Where can I find the "Set roaming profile path for all users logging onto this computer" in W 2003 R2? Google says it is a group policy, there is some way to set it up in our servers (which are not domain controllers but clients from the parent network)? –  SJuan76 Dec 20 '11 at 9:36
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You can setup roaming profiles on a different path and configure the server to delete the profile once the user logs off.

The downside is that the profile will have to be copied to the machine every time the user logs off: if one of your admins managed to grow his profile to 2 gigabytes, that's going to be one hell of a long logon time.

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Interesting, yet Helge's solution is better because it will avoid the server having to download the profile. Upvoted you anyway, thanks. –  SJuan76 Dec 20 '11 at 8:29
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