If you follow me via Twitter, you're probably aware that I've been working on a bug in the Microsoft App-V 4.5 Client for the last few weeks.  This particular bug has been occurring randomly at a client site of mine.  User's that have a particular App-V application will sporadically receive the following error message when trying to start the application:



The text of the error message is "This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect.  Reinstalling the application may fix the problem.  Error code: 4505CD-1F702639-000036B1"

At the same time as this launch failure, the following event log entry is logged in the System Event Log



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Hoff tipped me off to this great audio recording of Larry Ellison speaking on "What the hell is the cloud?". It's an enlightening bit of audio that reflects some of my thoughts on the hype surrounding cloud computing.  Definitely an entertaining listen.

There are two things that have slowed investigation of Windows 7 and 64-bit Terminal Services for many Enteprrises. Those two things are App-V not supporting Windows 7 (yes, I know Windows 7 isn't released yet) and the lack of support for 64-bit in App-V. Microsoft has released immediately (for MDOP customers) an App-V 4.5 CU1 release that works on Windows 7. In addition, they've announced that they'll be opening up the TAP for App-V 4.6 which will support 64-bit Windows (TS is the big use case here) in Q1 2009. I happen to have a customer that is running App-V 4.5 right now that is definitely looking forward to both of these things, so it's very exciting news.

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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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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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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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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