Independent App-V Blog

Yesterday Microsoft announced the public availability of App-V 5.0 Beta. You can download it from Microsoft Connect and start playing with it.

Normally I wouldn’t push people to really start testing as soon as possible, but in this case I really urge you to do so.  

Why should I test?

Well pretty much each component of App-V has been changed/rewritten from scratch.

Since the old SoftGrid days up untill App-V 4.6, everything was build on top of the old base this is why upgrading was quite easy as none of the components changes but where upgraded. I still have some Sequences that I have made with SoftGrid 2.0, which still work on App-V.

This is the first release where major changes have been made to the code, in such a way that a lot of the issues customers encounter should be solved by handling things completely different.

What’s different?

As mentioned, a lot. But here are the highlights in short which are most interesting for you:

• The management/streaming server is still there!
• RTSP is gone. SMB and HTTP(s) streaming only. Which is fine by me. I liked HTTP streaming more anyway.
• New management console for management server, no longer MMC snap-in. Now purely based on Silverlight.
• No more “Q:” drive, you will be able to just see the files on disk from the outside.
• Completely revamped client (Metro style), programmable using PowerShell.
• The Sequencer is pretty much the same as 4.6 SP1
• And last but not least the package format SFT is gone, and so are the OSD and ICO files. Everything will be stored in a new .APPV file format.

The .APPV file is actually a much more open format then the “old” .SFT file. If you rename it to .ZIP, you will see I’m not saying it’s a ZIP file BTW.

Update 23-04-2012: Changing the .APPV extension to .ZIP and editing the file through Windows Explorer is not supported by Microsoft. Also if the file is not readable by Windows Explorer after renaming it to .ZIP, this does not mean the App-V package is invalid.

The most important thing to realise is that you existing packages will not simply work on App-V 5.0, they will all have to be converted to a completely new format and they will run in a different/changed type of virtualization as you have seen so far with previous versions of App-V. App-V 5.0 already provides package converting tools, so my advise would actually be to focus most of your testing on your existing sequences!

Screenshot of new App-V 5.0 Client UI:

Have fun!

Today Immidio releases Flex Profiles 7.5, a User State Virtualization solution. Where App-V is all about decoupling and segmenting the application from the underlying OS, Flex Profiles provides these capabilities for the Windows User Profile. So these two solutions fit pretty well together.

The main new features of version 7.5 are:

DirectFlex: Which can manage any application’s settings on the fly, regardless how the application is launched. For any DirectFlex-enabled application, settings are read at application launch and stored at exit, making logon and logoff times even shorter.

Predefined Settings: Easily pre-populate the user environment, like placing a desktop shortcut, creating an application configuration file or setting a registry value. For more advanced scenarios it is possible to use placeholders to insert dynamic information from user and computer variables.

Advanced process criteria: This feature allows more granular control over which Flex configuration files are processed and how they are processed, based on diverse user and computer attributes. Depending on the result of the check, you can control what Flex Profiles action is performed.

As always you can download a trial version from the Immidio website: http://www.immidio.com

Come meet myself (Rodney Medina), Ment van der Plas and 6 other App-V MVP’s at the European App-V User Group, held on the 18th of november in The Netherlands. The event is FREE and will provide you with a lot of valuable information concerning App-V. This event is the ideal opportunity to learn, share knowledge with other App-V enthusiasts, and ask any question to the App-V MVP’s.

Goto http://www.appvug.com for agenda details and registration.

Hope to meet you there,

Rodney & Ment

Having a healthy application virtualization infrastructure platform involves configuring the App-V client with the appropriate settings. Today there are two main ways of configuring the client, either during the initial client installation process or afterwards.

Benefit of configuring the client during installation is that the client is fully operational in the shortest amount of time and can be used directly after the installation. Configuration can be done through one of the many command line parameters. If command line configuration is not preferred, settings can also be captured in a Microsoft Transform file (MST) and applied to the original installation.

The downside however to applying your setting at installation time is that is does not cover changing any of the configuration items after initial deployment. Configuration changes like additional user permissions, a different client log level or advanced communication configuration are very likely to change during the life cycle of the App-V client.

Login Consultants has delivered additional configuration methods since the early days of SoftGrid and continued to do so through means of Group Policy ADM add-on when Microsoft officially released an ADM template for App-V 4.5 because that template didn’t cover all settings. App-V Group Policy ADM templates allow administrators to centrally manage settings of the App-V client through Group Policy Objects. If you want an overview on which settings can be managed by which template be sure to check out this great article by Login Consultants’ Falko Graefe.

Although ADM templates bring great benefits to administrating the client configuration, they have been replaced (or upgraded if you will) by ADMX and ADML templates since Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Since we see most of our customers are (at least) running these operating system versions, shouldn’t we be using the administrative tooling that come with those versions?

That’s what Ruben Koene thought, which is why he created the first App-V Client ADMX template which is available from the Login Consultants website today.

Ruben was very familiar with the settings that can be managed through the ADM template because he was the creator of the current add-on ADM template. Since ADMX files are structured in a very different way, he had to migrate the original template to the new structure setting by setting.

So I decided to sit down with Ruben and talk to him about the new release.

Why did you decide to create an ADMX template?

Koene: I work a lot at App-V customers. Usually they are running at least Windows Server 2008 in their domain, but still are using the ADM templates to manage their App-V clients, while ADMX and ADML templates have some great benefits over the older templates. Since Microsoft isn’t officially offering an ADMX template for the App-V client, I decided to create one of my own.

What’s the difference between the ADM and the ADMX templates?

Koene: ADM templates come in a proprietary format, while ADMX files are XML bases. It took me a little while to figure out the format but then I was able to migrate the App-V client settings one by one.

What are the benefits of using ADMX files?

Koene: When you use ADM templates, the ADM file itself (which can be several MB’s) is placed up inside the GPO. Because GPO’s are placed on each Domain Controller you end up using a lot of storage on the DC’s and consuming unnecessary bandwidth during replication. This does not only apply to the App-V template but also to ADM templates from other vendors, including the ones from Microsoft in the operating system. When the ADM file is not available the GPO can’t be edited. Organizations who have a lot of GPO’s run into a scenario which is known as a “SYSVOL bloat”. ADMX files don’t cause SYSVOL bloats because they are stored centrally and not in the GPO itself. The ADMX template remains centrally stored also when the GPO is edited.

Besides technical, are there any other benefits?

Koene: Yes. I work a lot with international customers and in some countries more than other administrators appreciate localized versions of their software, including their administrative tools. ADMX file have the benefit that specific languages are stored in a separate language (ADML) file. We are releasing with the default English (en-US) language file, but will be releasing German and French soon after because we have many customers in German and French speaking countries. We might rely on the community for additional languages.

Will this be an add-on as well?

Koene: No, it will not. Since Microsoft hasn’t released an ADMX template and we haven’t received any news that they will, we decided to merge the two templates back together. Settings from both templates can now be managed through a single file.

How should customers install the ADMX template?

Koene: The template installation process is very straightforward and comes with a Windows Installer installation method. There are two flavors in the installation process: complete and custom. Complete, which is the default installation, installs everything into C:\Windows\PolicyDefinitions making local Group Policy Editing possible through GPEDIT.msc. The custom installation allows you to install into a different path, like your central store. Make sure you enable the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) on your machine if you want to be able to manage Domain policies through GPMC.msc). It also allows you to select either one of the available template files.

So there are again two template files?

Koene: Yes, but not for different settings. Because the location of the App-V client settings in the registry depends on the platform you are running on (32bit or 64bit) we made sure we created an ADMX template for both platforms. Don’t worry, you can still manage them from a single console and install them through a single installer.

Last and most important question: what’s the price?

Koene: Login Consultants has a reputation in the market for delivering the best and finest free tooling in this market space, therefore the ADMX client will also be freely available from our website www.loginconsultants.com/download (registration is required).

Finally everyone can get their hands on Server App-V and start to learn how to leverage this new technology of decoupling server-side applications. You can find some guidance in the Microsoft Server Application Virtualization Beta documentation.

The binaries are actually available after you have installed System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Beta evaluation.

Today Immidio released AppScriber 3 in two editions, Express and Enterprise. Immidio AppScriber 3 is an Enterprise app store for corporate environments and is an excellent add-on for App-V.

The Express edition is free to use with unlimited amount of users!

The following main features are new to Immidio AppScriber 3 Enterprise:

• Custom Item Types - Allows the creating of other resources besides applications, like Printers, shares, etc…
• Multilanguage user interface - English, German and Dutch
• Optional 2-level workflow - Introduces a mid teer Reviewer. Configurable on a per application base
• UI customization - To optionally create company look and feel

See Immidio AppScriber 3 Enterprise in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF7e5cc71mA

For more information and download please visit: http://immidio.com/appscriber

About 12 months after the initial release of App-V 4.6, Microsoft released the first Service Pack of version 4.6 of its Application Virtualization product. App-V 4.6 SP1 covers many exciting new features and the most interesting part of it is that practically all of them are around the sequencer! As far as I know this is the first time in the history of App-V that so much effort and improvement is done only in the tool to transform traditional applications into virtual ones. In this post I will address one of the features I like the most and have been asking for and talking about for years: internal diagnostics.

Most organizations turn to App-V because they want to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of their IT infrastructure. For App-V this cost efficiency lies in the fact that the process of creating virtual applications is simplified compared to traditional applications. Traditional applications are more difficult to create because they make assumptions about their execution environment and make changes to the target system, which could potentially decrease the stability of the system or cause other applications to malfunction. Virtual applications however never make changes to the system and their dependencies can be either virtualized together with the main application or suited as a separate virtual application.

But as with any piece of technology, App-V also has its limitations. Some applications, or parts of an application, may not work correctly when they have been virtualized. Applications that are tightly integrated with the operating system or for example use COM+ or kernel-level drivers, contain components that are not supported with App-V. The issue with all previous versions of the sequencer is that to know that an application has such components, you’d have to virtualize and test it on a target machine. This means that you’ve already went through the entire virtualization process.

Service Pack 1 of App-V has been altered just for this scenario. When the sequencer notices that the applications uses unsupported components it will bring this to your attention during the sequencing process. This way you don’t have to go through the process of testing and troubleshooting the application only to find out it can’t be virtualized. The following possible issues are detected by the sequencer:

• Drivers
• COM+
• SxS Conflicts
• Shell Extensions

Picture 1: 7zip uses shell extensions which were reported by the sequencer.

Another great addition to the sequencer’s intelligence is that it also gives you an extensive report of files and registry keys that were excluded from the package. With earlier versions you could spend a lot of time figuring out why the application was running on your sequencer machines and wasn’t running on your target machines. This information is not only presented during the sequencing process but it’s also saved as report.xml in your project directory for later reference.

Picture 2: Google Chrome installs its main executable in an excluded directory, which was reported by the sequencer.

When you are updating an application and the sequencer notices that the machine you are currently running on does not have the same baseline as the one you created your sequence on, it will give you information about these differences. System differences might influence the way the application is behaving, which is not preferred. If you think the application might have issues with these differences, you can change the system accordingly. The sequencer looks in your Add/Remove Programs control panel applet to find installation differences.

Picture 3: The .NET Framework was updated compared to the version that was installed on the machines where the sequence was created on.

Improving the success rate of virtual applications can also be done before the sequencing process. Microsoft has summarized many best practices in the whitepaper [Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.6 Sequencing Guide; http://bit.ly/SeqWp46Sp1]. However more than once, inexperienced people are not familiar with these best-practices and run into trouble during the rest of the process. The App-V 4.6 SP1 sequencer checks most of the common best-practices prior to starting the sequencing process.

It will warn you when certain services are running that can negatively influence your virtual application because they can lock certain files (like Windows Defender or Windows Search) or because they may update your system in the background (like Windows Update or the Configuration Manager client). If these changes accidently end up in your sequence it may become unnecessary large, slow or even unusable. But also pending reboots, non-reverted virtual machines or other running applications are reported.

Picture 4: Pending reboots, Windows Defender, Windows Search, Clean Machine, Disk Defragmenter, Configuration Manager Client; all were detected by the sequencer prior to starting the virtualization process.

Like I said in my introduction, I’m very excited by these new features because it will improve the predictability and success rate of App-V virtual applications. It definitely saves a tremendous amount of time troubleshooting applications because of malfunctioning.

Yesterday I received some very good news: my presentation proposal for the Microsoft Management Summit 2011 in Las Vegas NV was accepted!

From my submissions the session about App-V was selected (what else ). My session abstract is already in the session catalog and can be found here.

BC34 - Application Virtualization Best Practices: Notes From the Field

Would you like to gain additional insight to the various best practices that other Application Virtualization customers are doing? This session will provide you with an opportunity to obtain insight from Application Virtualization MVPs with over 10 years of experience in the field. The objective of the session is to expose you to the numerous best practices, challenges and solutions that have been witnessed in the field in Application Virtualization.

About Microsoft Management Summit

If you are unfamiliar with MMS: it’s an event held by Microsoft in the US, which is all about the latest solutions for Desktop, Datacenter, Device and Cloud management. This year it will be held from 21-25 March in the Mandalay Bay hotel.

About 4-5000 IT professionals, from all over the world, come to this event which is focused around the Microsoft’s management products of the System Center family.

Top attending countries other than the US are normally Canada, Denmark, UK, Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands.

It offers a week-long community-focused networking opportunity—with face-to-face access to Microsoft and industry IT management experts; from Birds-of-a-Feather sessions to Focus Groups, Speaker Q&A and invaluable peer-to-peer interaction.

The MMS 2011 Expo, featuring the Microsoft Experts pavilion, will host more than 60 sponsors and exhibitors showcasing their latest products, services and solutions.

If you are planning to visit MMS 2010 or you have good suggestions for my session, feel free to drop me a line.

If you haven’t registered for MMS 2010 you can visit the website: http://www.mms-2011.com

Maybe see you there!

Immidio just released this new tool for download which adds yet even more functionality to Immidio Flex Profiles. This just shows we are continuing our efforts in creating the ultimate User State Virtualization solution based on the input we get from our customers which we work with very closely. 

From a support perspective it was already possible to reset or restore settings for specific applications that are managed by Immidio Flex Profiles. This, however, was manual work for a system administrator or support personnel. By providing Immidio Flex Profiles Self-Support to your users, they are capable to do this themselves without intervention of the IT department. 

Using the Immidio Flex Profiles Self-Support functionality within your organization decreases overhead for the IT department and makes users depend less on the support department. Immidio Flex Profiles Self-Support is a free component which can only be used in conjunction with Immidio Flex Profiles 7. The user interface is available in English, German and Dutch.