If you're available on Tuesday March 2, 2010 please join me and five vendors of virtual desktop technology (Citrix, Microsoft, Quest, Symantec, and VMware) for a webinar that's sure to please VDI fans and opponents.  The webinar will be held at 1:00 pm EST and will go until 2:30 pm EST.  We're planning on having about 60 minutes of panel discussion where I will ask all five vendors questions that I've created based upon real world challenges people are having with VDI.  Then we'll be opening the discussion up to audience questions for the remaining 30 minutes.  If there's something you want to know about VDI, this is the time to get your questions answered.  For more information and to register for this great session please visit Laura Whalen's blog entry that has all the details here.

Microsoft posted on their MDOP blog that App-V 4.6 RTM'd on Friday.  Oh and there was something or other posted about Med-V.  So back to App-V ;)   4.6 RTM includes support for 64-bit Windows platforms which means you can get a functional deployment of Windows 7 64-bit and more importantly you can begin your projects to rollout 2008 R2 with a supported 64-bit App-V client.  Now all we need is a supported release of Citrix XenApp for 2008 R2 and we're golden.  Read more about the App-V 4.6 RTM here.

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.