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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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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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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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...

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.

Microsoft official released to manufacturing App-V (fka Softgrid) v4.5 today.  You can read all the details in the announcement.

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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IMHO, Reflector is probably the single most important .NET software development tool next to Visual Studio itself.  Don't believe me?  See Scott Hanselman's "The Big 10 Life and Work-Changing Utilities" list from 2007.  I use it constantly when trying to decompile someone's existing .NET code to fix a bug or rewrite it, etc.

So today I got an email in my inbox today from Lutz Roeder mentioning that he was ceasing development and that the tool was being taken over by Red Gate Software.  Before I make any comments, I'd like to first express my gratitude to Lutz for 8 long years of development on a tool that he shared with everyone for free.  The tool has been indispensible to me over the years.

Now on to my thoughts:

First I think that something like Reflector might be best served by being opened up to the open source community rather than existing within the realm of a commercial entity.  That being said, Red Gate software has already agreed to continue making a community edition of Reflector (and plugins) available for free from it's website.  While I always question the motivation of a commercial entity behind free versions of software, I also have a lot of respect for Red Gate software as they make some really cool tools.  My personal hopes are that they do continue development of Reflector and continue to increase the features in the community version that they make available for free.  I just hope they don't require people to purchase in order to get new features.

...

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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.  While I didn't know the answer myself, I figured Google might.  After a quick...

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Daniel Feller from the Citrix Worldwide Consulting Solutions group has posted a nice set of Visio Stencils for the new Citrix Delivery Center components.  This includes visio shapes for all the new XenApp branded components as well as XenDesktop, XenServer, Password Manager, Netscaler, WANscaler, Branch Repeater, etc.  I definitely recommend picking up a copy if you frequently do Visio diagrams of Citrix infrastructure components.  And thanks to Daniel for sharing this with the community.