VMware has recently released version 3.5 of their Virtual Infrastructure suite.  This release proves yet again that VMware is king in the virtualization space.  I'm not going to go into details of all of the new features as it's already been well covered on other sites.  Here are two great overviews of the new features from VMblog and Virtualization.info.

Aaron Parker posted a follow up article to his initial work in trying to get Adobe Acrobat 8 as a virtualized package under SoftGrid.  It seems as though Aaron has decided that it's just not going to be practical to deploy Acrobat via SoftGrid as there are a lot of technical issues that involve separation of the app and it's not practical for real world deployment.  What's interesting about this is that Aaron was able to get Acrobat 8 working in Altiris SVS.

Brian Kelly has posted a two part series titled "SoftGrid Operations Guide" on the SoftGrid Team Blog.  This two part guide covers some topics that would be useful to any SoftGrid admin such as moving a Softgrid datastore, publishing apps in Citrix, how to preload applications, etc.  Check out Part 1 and Part 2.

Aaron Parker has a great blog entry on trying to get Adobe Acrobat 8 sequenced via Softgrid.  He's solved the issue of separating out the print driver install and also figured out the SxS/manifest issues.  However, the bad news is that there are several thing that are not working properly with the app. 

Let's hope he makes some more progress as I'm sure there are lots of people interested in getting that app to work virtualized.

As indicated by Justin Zarb, the SoftGrid ooops Microsoft Application Virtualization Team has posted some good details about how dynamic suite composition (similar to contexting or inter-isolation communication or whatever you want to call one virtual environment that's able to talk to another virtual environment) works.  Read the TechNet forum post over here for more details.

Al has put together a decent review of VDI technology and compares the current offerings from VMware vs that of Citrix.  It's a nice read.

Justin Zarb has posted a blog entry with some sample examples of scriptbody blocks for OSD files.  Nothing earth shattering there, but additional examples are always nice to have.

Thinstall has announced the release of v3.3 of their virtualization platform.  In this release are the addition of MSI Autogeneration support (technically this came in 3.2).  Specifics of MSI auto generation are:

Support for machine-wide wide (All Users), and per-user “installs”   Per-user installs do not require Administrator rights MSI deployments instantly integrate with existing management and deployment systems, inventory scanning, and usage monitoring systems Support for automatically attaching pre-determined file types to virtual associations Support for creating user accessible Desktop shortcuts No application data or registry settings are written to PC during MSI registration, thereby eliminating any need to perform cross-application regression testing. Read the full press release here.

Also at the same time, Thinstall has announced an integrated partnership with Macrovision to...

Read More »

Michael Burke has released a set of Visio stencils for SoftGrid.  Get them here.

Michael Burke has a nice whitepaper that he co-authored for Kingston and VMware on memory allocation and optimization.  Read the full item here.