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 fe ... Read More »

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 ... Read More »

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.

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.

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 ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Wednesday, July 09, 2008 1:15:18 PM

A client of mine has standardized on Virtual PC 2007 for desktop virtual machine needs (not for their VDI or Server VMs, but just simple desktop VM needs).  They recently created a transform for customizing the default install, but after deployment noticed that there was one major issue with the package.  The issue is that VPC picks a subfolder of "My Documents" named "My Virtual Machines" as it's default store location when creating a new virtual machine.  This would obviously be a very bad choice when using Group Policy enforced managed folder redirection (just imagine how slow the VMs would be if they were stored on the network!, not to mention issues around home drive quotas, etc).  Anyway, the packaging team couldn't find an option in the app, nor a registry setting anywhere to change the default folder location for this.  Also, since we're dealing with a network location, you can't get by with a subst command or junction point.&am ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, July 01, 2008 2:24:00 PM

I recently came across this blog entry posted on the App-V blog stating that Process Monitor was recently updated to support the new App-V Release Candidate that was just released last week.  You can get version 1.35 of Process Monitor here.   Also, did you know that you can launch the SysInternals tools directly from the web by visiting live.sysinternals.com  Check it out, it's pretty helpful.

By Shawn Bass on Wednesday, May 14, 2008 8:39:35 AM

Justin Zarb recently blogged about a video he found from a TechEd session where John Sheehan gave an overview of the new features in SoftGrid / MAV 4.5.  I'd love to give all sort of nice comments about the video, but I'm plagued by the Silverlight Download Error 4001 so I can't even watch the video.  Anyway, I'm passing it along in case you haven't seen Justin's blog entry about it.

By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, March 04, 2008 3:43:38 PM

I'm at a client side right now working on a large SoftGrid implementation project. I'm going through the motions sequencing applications when I came across one application from Reuters named StockVal. While I initially figured that this would be a slam dunk sequencing process, I discovered that it was anything but that. You see it's become apparent to me that application virtualization doesn't actually save you from your own stupidity. What do I mean by this? I mean that one of the biggest challenges with traditional software packaging is that packagers do stupid things. What kind of stupid things?  Well here's some that I've personally solved over the last year:

1) Packager snapshots MDAC 2.5 RTM version registry key (the Data Access version key) and distributes said package to over 3,000 desktops. Those desktops that attempt to install anything that requires MDAC 2.7+ fail as they are stating that the machine needs MDAC 2.7. Well XP doesn't come with MDAC ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Sunday, January 20, 2008 1:36:11 PM

Al has a very nice overview of Citrix XenServer 4.01 and areas that it compares/differs to VMWare ESX.  It's a great read.