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By Shawn Bass on
Thursday, September 25, 2008 4:21:04 PM
Helge Klein from sepago put up a blog entry today discussing the memory overcommit feature of VMware's flagship ESX product and how it has a very favorable impact in the VDI space since you're running lots of copies of MS Windows with the same (or similar) applications on them, etc. (this is likely the result of large amounts of transparent page sharing) Helge also mentioned that Microsoft and Citrix both do not have this feature at this time and are downplaying the significance of it. Helge believes it's this way because Microsoft simply doesn't have this feature now. While I tend to agree that there probably is some level of wordplay to de-emphasize the competitors product that has a feature that your product doesn't have, but I also wonder if there isn't another reason...
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By Shawn Bass on
Wednesday, September 24, 2008 3:34:48 PM
I was playing catch up on a blog entries I had been meaning to get to over the last few weeks and I stumbled across this blog entry from Aaron Parker where he describes a ridiculous Oracle Forms error dialog that simply tells the user the please acknowledge the message by clicking Ok. There's no cancel dialog, there's no information passed to the user, just a stupid dialog box with no meaning. I lol'd for some period of time before remembering my own encounter with a really dumb dialog box recently. Here it is in all of it's condescending glory:
I mean what exactly did the software developer think was going to happen when a user saw this message? Don't all untrained users have the ability to damage an application (as in ANY application)? Heck, I've seen trained...
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By Shawn Bass on
Tuesday, September 23, 2008 7:32:59 PM
My good friend Jeroen van de Kamp of Login Consultants mentioned that they've recently released the 0.5 Beta of their platform independent performance benchmarking tool for TS/Citrix and VDI environments. What would a tool like VSI be used for? Let's say you want to compare how many VDI sessions you can get on VMware ESX vs Citrix XenServer, or how many Terminal Server sessions you can squeeze out by tweaking your LanMan Parameters or Virus Scanner settings, etc. This is the type of benchmarking that this tool was created for. The best part, Login gives it to us for free! That's free as in beer.
Some of the new features of the 0.5 release are:
True platform independence (both VDI & SBC) through a powerful custom command line option within the launcher, this includes the possibility to use a CSV file with advanced connection details for each individual session;
Randomization of user data within each user load loop, this is the most important new feature of this beta as now optimizers (either at a memory or network level) cannot optimize/cache/compress/de-duplicate in an unrealistic fashion;...
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By Shawn Bass on
Tuesday, September 23, 2008 1:06:27 PM
Courtesy of the MS App-V blog, I came across a blog post that directed me to an FAQ that Microsoft has posted on their website with frequently asked questions regarding the process for upgrading App-V Clients and Servers to the 4.5 code that was just released. The FAQ has some great items that describes the upgrade order as well as what compatibility there are for 4.1/4.2 packages moving to 4.5 clients/servers as well as what happens to the SGCache and User Preferences (usrvol*.pkg). It's a great read. The only thing I find a little strange is references to the 4.5 Terminal Server client, which seems to not be in the 4.5 code on MVLS. Strange...
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By Shawn Bass on
Monday, September 15, 2008 9:57:36 AM
This is just a quick update on my previous blog entry announcing that Microsoft had reached the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) milestone on App-V 4.5. Two new things that I've learned are:
1) Microsoft has posted the App-V 4.5 bits on the Volume Licensing website per this Softgridguru forum posting. Unfortunately, I still don't see anything up on MSDN :(
2) Microsoft is working on a SPLA (Service Provider Licensing Agreement) for App-V 4.5 per this MDOP blog news. This is great news for those organizations that offer up hosted Citrix / VDI environments.
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By Shawn Bass on
Wednesday, September 03, 2008 12:38:13 PM
Microsoft official released to manufacturing App-V (fka Softgrid) v4.5 today. You can read all the details in the announcement.
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By Shawn Bass on
Wednesday, September 03, 2008 12:21:38 PM
I recently had the need to leverage a Softgrid pre-launch script to copy an INI file into a subfolder of the user's Application Data folder. Softgrid has two methods of pre-launch scripting:
HREF
SCRIPTBODY
There's a full description of the difference between HREF and SCRIPTBODY by Sean Donahue over here on the App-V Team blog. But as a quick reference point, HREF tags do not allow commands like mkdir/md, etc. In my case, I need to create a directory if it doesn't exist and then copy the INI file up to it. While I certainly could create a BAT/CMD script and reference it from an HREF tag, I wanted to embed the entire script within a scriptbody tag so it's self documenting and maintainable outside of hard coded references to a network location or some CMD/BAT within the virtual environment.
Let's start with what my pre-launch script needed to do:
1) Check to see if the app's ini file...
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