Application Virtualization 4.5 SP2 is Now Available

Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 Service Pack 2 (App-V 4.5 SP2) provides the latest updates to Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 SP1 server      

• Enhanced failover protection or disaster recovery: App-V 4.5 SP2 server provides enhanced failover protection for virtual applications. With SQL mirroring support App-V data-store will always be available, allowing administrators to quickly recover from disasters and/or recycle servers for maintenance.       
• Support for highly available application virtualization infrastructure: App-V 4.5 SP2 based server infrastructure will enable support for high availability scenarios for line of business applications; with automatic failover protection not available with the previous versions of App-V. Data-store mirroring is now possible across geography: this enables organizations to recover from site wide failures faster.         
• Support for Office 2010: App-V 4.5 SP2 now supports Office 2010 deployment kit for App-V that enables integration of Office 2010 features. Office 2010 32-bit will run on windows x86 platforms with 4.5 SP2. For X64 platforms you need to migrate to App-V 4.6

Visit the following for more information:

• App-V 4.5 SP2 release notes  
• App-V 4.5 SP2 FAQ
• www.microsoft.com/appv

Source : 

http://blogs.technet.com/b/fabricem_blogs/archive/2010/06/02/application-virtualization-4-5-sp2-is-now-available.aspx

App-V forum de discussion (Guide de séquencement)

Un forum a vu le jour concernant le séquençage des applications.

Tout le monde peut proposer sa procédure/guide de séquencement.

Forum tout nouveau, qui on l'espère, grandira vite et bien.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/prescriptiveguidance

The premium App-V package editor and administrator's companion

http://www.gridmetric.com/products/ave.html

Building on the success of hugely popular SFT Explorer - trusted by thousands of App-V professionals around the world - Application Virtualization Explorer (AVE) introduces a new era in App-V package editors and viewers. AVE adds several new exiting features into already familiar and easy to use and understandable interface. AVE is not SFT only viewer anymore, but full-blown App-V package editor which targets all use cases for App-V packages, be it SCCM integrated use, traditional App-V infrastructure or custom delivery method with App-V package MSIs.

Review App-V packages

Whether your App-V packaged virtual application comes from the Microsoft Sequencer or especially from any automatic conversion tool or process, you will want to review the package with certainty that you are going to see all there is to the package. That is, there's no hidden settings (such as logically deleted registry entries or VFS mappings) your packaging tool did not reveal or took onboard accidently. This with easiness that you have grown to expect from professional packaging tools.

AVE will show and gives access to all important bits and pieces there truly is to the App-V package and its inner composition. This gives the possibility to be certain no unexpected side-effects will pop up when deploying the package to actual clients.

AVE's unique Virtualized System View™ will simulate the way package would be seen on the local machine if run inside App-V's Virtual Environment (VE), all without needing to have App-V Client locally present or package importent into it.

For enabling understanding of complex Dynamic Suiting scenarios, AVE is able to perform App-V style dynamic suite composition action on the package by loading additional SFT files into same view as the main package. This shows how the data will be merged when the suiting kicks in at the client, something that cannot be simulated or compensated by original Sequencing tool. As truly one of a kind feature, AVE can do full merger of two or more SFT files, resulting one single logical and physical package that no longer needs suiting to work as a combinatorial virtual environment, but can be deployed as standalone unified package without requirements for DSC at run-time.

Edit App-V packages

While other App-V related editors in the market currently are limited to making changes to plain-text files (OSD, SPRJ and XML manifest file) in the full suite of App-V package files, AVE is the only product to handle not only changes both to plain-text stored data, but also for contents of the the binary package file (SFT file). Building on the years of in-depth experience of App-V file-format, AVE enables stand-alone and integrated full-package editing capabilities. This makes AVE a one-stop shop for all common package editing needs, without having to resort into going back to Sequencer environment, which can be saved for those situations really needing installation monitoring workflow.

AVE supports all past and present App-V and SoftGrid formats, 32-bit or 64-bit (App-V 4.6 only), in both reading and writing capability. With AVE, encoding parameters for saved and modified package can be affected to the finest detail, a feature simply not available through any other means. For instance, package can be modified but retained in the same internal version level (version numbering, GUIDs and "sequencing" history) as the original package was, making it indistinguishable from the original from App-V's perspective.

With AVE, there is no need for reverting back to clean environment or setting up secondary partitions in order to open and edit internal files, nor is it necessary to extract the whole internal directory of files back to disk. Just open the package, edit and save back as an updated package. To complete the changes in fullest, AVE will take care of updating manifest file to reflect updated OSD files and also making MSI file up-to-date - or generating completely new MSI for older packages without one in the source. Edits to a App-V package could not be any easier!

Examine App-V Client data

As industry's first and only tool, AVE is able to open up and display the contents of App-V Client cached settings - or delta - files (also known as PKG files based on their file extension). While so far App-V administrators has been limited to only guess what the running packages have cached on the client - per user or per machine - now you actually can see it! No more blind repairing App-V packages on the client on the hope that problem will go away.

With AVE, you will be able to examine and analyze the root cause since having the full visibility on the client, and then make necessary adjustments to your packages (with AVE, of course!) for good, with no place left for guessing.

Create a Virtual Application Using the App-V Sequencer

The Application Virtualization (App-V) Sequencer is a powerful, easy-to-use tool that enables IT professionals to create a new virtual application. This video will walk you through the different files that make up a virtual application package and teach you how to:

Run the App-V 4.6 Sequencer to sequence an application.

Create file type associations and shortcuts.

Configure a custom application package.

Length: 7 minutes

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ff420327.aspx

Citrix et Microsoft veulent accélérer la virtualisation du poste de travail à coup de HDX et de RemoteFX

Un petit aparté du coté de la virtualisation des postes de travail m'amène à vous faire part de la news suivante :


Dans le prolongement de leur accord, Citrix et Microsoft s'entendent pour délivrer les puissances de calcul 3D avec HDX aux clients légers virtualisés sous RemoteFX.

Citrix et Microsoft prolonge leur accord d'interopérabilité signé en 2008. Dans ce cadre, Citrix vient d'annoncer qu'il supportera Microsoft RemoteFX. Cette future plate-forme permettra à tous les postes de travail virtuels hébergés sur un même serveur, Hyper-V ou Windows Server, de partager les ressources matérielles d’accélération graphique intégrées au serveur et aux périphériques des clients. RemoteFX débarquera avec Windows Server 2008 R2 service pack 1 (SP1).


Dans les détails, XenDesktop pourra, grâce à HDX, détecter les serveurs et périphériques disposant de capacités RemoteFX et de profiter de leurs dispositions d’accélération matérielle pour assurer les traitements 3D et autres besoins de ressources de calculs élevés. HDX pourra également exploiter RemoteFX au-delà du réseau local de l'entreprise. Citrtix rappelle que sa technologie HDX intègre une large gamme de technologies HDX (HDX RealTime, HDX MediaStream, HDX Broadcast et HDX Plug-n-Play) qui s'étendent des périphériques de l'utilisateur aux data centers. Viendra donc s'y ajouter HDX RichGraphics with RemoteFX destiné aux postes virtuels pour les clients disposant de serveurs ou de périphériques RemoteFX.Les utilisateurs bénéficieront ainsi des mêmes capacités de traitement audio, vidéo et multimédia qu'avec des postes autonomes tandis que l'entreprise profitera des économies rendues possibles par le coût des clients légers et leur administration centralisée dans les environnements virtualisés. « En s’associant dans ce domaine, Citrix et Microsoft pourront proposer à leurs clients des solutions intégrées de postes virtuels garantes d’une flexibilité, d’une expérience et d’un retour sur investissement bien meilleurs que ceux offerts par n’importe quelle autre solution concurrente », affirme le communiqué.

Autant de technologies qui visent à accélérer l'adoption de la virtualisation du poste de travail. Laquelle constitue un moyen relativement simple et efficace pour les entreprises d'optimiser leurs coûts de fonctionnement. Et, accessoirement, de tenter de prendre des parts de marchés à VMware.

http://www.silicon.fr/fr/news/2010/03/19/citrix_et_microsoft_veulent_accelerer_la_virtualisation_du_poste_de_travail_a_coup_de_hdx_et_de_remotefx

Compatibilité des applications Windows 7

Un excellent article vient d'être publié sur le blog de Justin Zard (ingénieur App-v chez Microsoft)  nous expliquant la position d'App-v sur la compatibilité des applications 

Making Applications Compatible with Windows 7 in a Virtualized Environment

I must visit and meet 1000’s of different customers over the course of a calendar year. I spend alot of that time discussing App-V and in these discussions around app-v i have a number of discussions around moving/migrating operating systems. On top of these discussions I end up talking about the Microsoft application compatibility toolkit and shims plus why app-v and the appcompat toolkit are such complimentary products.

Luckily as i was scanning over technet i came around this brilliant chris jackson article around the use of the appcompat toolkit and app-v. Chris wrote this for the March 2010 Technet and you can read this and many more articles here.

Its funny as I always meant to blog around this topic, and as many of my customers know (as we use the below approach or very similar) its a great way to get your apps working including some of your app-v apps sequenced on a legacy platform and moved up to a newer OS.

I thought the below article was very apt around the appcompat discussion and app-v and I hope it helps people take notice of the great tool sets that are released that can be user to help move your applications over to windows 7 easier.

Now over to Mr App Compat Chris Jackson to bring this discussion to the masses!

...

Pour lire la suite : http://blogs.technet.com/virtualworld/archive/2010/03/21/making-applications-compatible-with-windows-7-in-a-virtualized-environment.aspx?CommentPosted=true#commentmessage

Séquencer Lotus Notes 8.5.1

Cela faisait un petit moment que je tentais de virtualiser la nouvelle version du client lotus notes 8.5.1  

Lors du séquençage, et plus précisément au lancement de l'application sur le séquenceur, le message d'erreur suivant apparaissait lorsque je tentais d'ajouter un ID utilisateur : Erreur inconnue reçue d'ICC

Pour résoudre ce problème, il faut créer la variable d'environnement utilisateur PATH. avec les données suivantes: C:\IBM\ContentCollector\bin;C:\IBM\ContentCollector\lib;C:\IBM\ContentCollector\ctms.

Et donc installer le client lotus notes sous C:\IBM et non sous Q:\

Si vous avez des fenêtres DOS qui s'ouvrent lors du lancement du package sur le poste client, il faut modifier le fichier OSD et ajouter les lignes en gras suivantes :