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.

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 2.5, so you begin to realize that the packager...

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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.

A few weeks ago I set out to get a test rig running for lab VMs running under Citrix Xen and Server 2008's Hyper-V.  However, my lab (READ: basement) already has 4 rack servers, a Citrix Access Gateway, several routers, a 1.5TB NAS, and a 3000kva UPS.  I was a bit concerned that bringing another rack server that sounds like a jet turbine into the basement might be a bit too much for the boss (READ: wife)

Since I wanted this rig to be used only for lab VM (my prod VMs run on the redundant rack servers), I decided that a simple white box system with a good proc and sufficient RAM should do the trick perfectly.  The biggest concern that I had was I knew that both Citrix Xen and Server 2008 Hyper-V require that you use 64-bit CPUs (not a big deal today) and a BIOS that supports setting Intel-VT or AMD Pacifica to enabled (this is the setting that will often leave you with a whitebox system that won't...

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From the SoftGrid Team Blog I learned that Microsoft recently published a guide that provides information on how to setup Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 (formerly SoftGrid) and how to implement the different modes of Streaming/Virtualization that are available in 4.5.  The guide can be found here.

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.