A client of mine recently rolled out their upgrade from McAfee 8.0 Enterprise to 8.7 Enterprise.  On the Citrix server environment we had two major application failures that were the result of the McAfee upgrade uninstalling the MS XML 4.0 Parser on the servers.  There were two applications on the production Citrix environment that required the MS XML 4.0 Parser and they both stopped working following the upgrade.  Unfortunately, the issue was not caught in Lab/UAT testing and was only found after McAfee went out to production.  To make matters worse, something went wrong with the deployment mechanism and the McAfee upgrade went to all servers in one blast whereas the server team usually pushes in 2-3 separate sets of server groups.  All of that combined = FAIL

So McAfee is responsible for the outage, right?  WRONG!

What the Mcafee installer was doing was proper behavior.  It had incremented the shared component registry entry for MSXML4.dll when it was installed on the servers.  The shared DLL component...

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I was recently running some Windows Update patches on one of my client's Server 2003 boxes (they aren't using a patch management solution) when I ran into a strange error that stated the Windows Update site could not be accessed and the error message listed was 0x80070020.  This message did not appear while trying to install the updates, it appeared right after the selection for Express vs Custom.  I chose Custom and it's supposed to query the available patches for the server, but instead I was greeted with error 0x80070020.  In doing some reason on this error I found that it's related to a file locking issue.  Some people on various forums reported issues with BitDefender AntiVirus on Windows XP and Vista as the source of the issue.  While they're not running BitDefender on their server (they run eTrust), it was worth looking into.  I also found KB883825 which also lists Anti-Virus as a potential source of issues for Windows Update.  So I temporarily...

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I was recently installing VMWare Server 2.0 (the freely available VMware virtualization platform) and I found that after the installation initialized it threw this error message:



In doing a quick bit of research, I discovered that this is some type of an issue with Windows Installer engine with large MSIs.  Essentially Windows Installer is unable to allocate the necessary virtual memory to verify the integrity of the MSI.  The strange part about this issue for me is that this server has 6 GB of RAM and there's absolutely nothing else running on it....Strange eh?

Anyway, MS has a hotfix for this issue.  Download and install KB925336 and you'll be good to go.

 

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Ok, so it sounds like it would be something digusting or obscene, but it's not.

I'm currently in the middle of troubleshooting some MSI / MSP installation issues on a Citrix server and I've come across a very common MSI info message that always makes me chuckle.  Here it is:

MSI (s) (04:30) [11:09:24:439]: Found shell folder  by spelunking through the registry.

According to Wikipedia, spelunking is the recreational activity of exploring caves.  While exploring caves has nothing to do with traversing registry hives/keys, it does remind me that even those developers at Microsoft (that everyone loves to hate) have a sense of humor.

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.