Quest TEC Conference: 2012

I am enjoying the day in San Diego and working with some of the good people from Microsoft at the Quest TEC Conference.

Yes, today is early (very early) Monday and it's the Microsoft Enlighten day at the TEC 2012 Conference  - the first day of this conference and I will be helping out with the Windows Migration track and the Virtualization working groups.

Here is a brief synopsis of the Microsoft technologies day;

The new Quest Workspace Management sessions will focus on Windows 7 Migration, Application Compatibility, Application Virtualization, VDI, Session Virtualization and topics related to delivery and management of the User Workspace – from applications and data to settings and operating systems.  

Plus, since most enterprise customers leverage solutions from Microsoft partners to extend the functionality of foundational Microsoft technologies, TEC will also feature expert content on managing in cross-platform environments.

TEC is for the experts by the experts and, as such, the sessions are highly technical (300-400 level) and include both instruction and demonstration led by some of the world’s top technologists. Join us for TEC for Virtualization & Workspace Management! Nothing’s lost, as you’ll find plenty of cloud-related content in the 125+ sessions hosted across the 10 conference tracks.

You can read more about the Experts day here: http://www.theexpertsconference.com/us/2012/virtualization-cloud/

Looking forward to meeting up with Brian Madden, Justin Zarb as well as some of the leading lights from Quest such as Patrick Rouse.

Updated Microsoft App-V File Specification

Another quick post, as I am travelling. Currently in San Diego helping with the Quest TEC Conference.

I was sent a link today from my colleague at Quest via a Twitter link (thanks Patrick). I guess that I am a bit old school but, even though I tweet my blog posts to my friends/family/fools and I don't seem to be able to make time to tune into many other twitter feeds.

That said, this link was helpful as it led me to the updated App-V ("V Next) file description. 

You may not be aware of the "troubled" history of this kind of documentation. In the earl days of App-V, the App-V or SFT file format was important to understand and completely opaque. In addition, in those early days (2007/2008) there were very limited tools for editing and viewing. In fact, initially the Microsoft App-V SFT files were a black box. You couldn't view the contents and instead of editing files (like MSI Installer packages) you had to start all over again to make any changes to an App-V package.

As a group (ChangeBASE at the time) we were pretty keen to understand the format and paid a number of consultants to help us with the documentation and understand the file format. This effort turned out to be quite useful as it eventually led to the ChangeBASE AOK product to be able natively load App-V packages and then more recently to automatically convert MSI Installer packages automatically into Microsoft App-V applications.

Now, it's so easy - you can just download the documentation from the MS website… Makes me kinda nostalgic for the good ole days..

You can read the whole document here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29681&ocid=aff-n-we-loc--ITPRO40886&WT.mc_id=aff-n-we-loc--ITPRO40886

Mobilism: Learn about browser compatibility

If you are in Amsterdam in May, you and you are interested in application compatibility and browser compatibility, you may want to checkout the Mobilism conference in Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

One of the leaders in browser based compatibility research, Peter-Paul Koch has done some great work with ChangeBASE in the past and has been a key figure in determine what technical issues may cause a web-based application to fail to work or appear correctly.

Peter-Paul (Or more commonly known as PPK) is presenting on the 1st day, May 10th ( at 10:20). You should check his presentation out!

Here is a brief synopsis of his presentation;

 "PPK will attempt to bring some order in the chaos by discussing about seven of the most important actors, their relations, and their long-term plans. After this talk you can amaze your friends by explaining why Windows Phone will never amount to much, why Android fragmentation will become only worse, in which way Apple has stolen a march on its competitors, and what Nokia is doing."

You can find out about the conference here: http://mobilism.nl/2012

And hey, Amsterdam in the spring is beautiful - why not spend time there AND find out about browser compatibility

More about PPK here: http://mobilism.nl/2012/programme#peter-paul-koch

And more important, his browser compatibility site and blog: http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/

Windows 8 gets BYOC

As a subscriber and avid "consumer" of Steven Sinofsky's blog postings on "Building Windows 8" I have posted a number of blog entries on the ChangeBASE application compatibility blog, most notably commenting on the Windows 8 on ARM platform with "Windows 8 on Arm (WoA): A birth of a new ecosystem".

Now that I have "moved up a level" to working with the Quest User Workspace Management team, I was delighted to see another great post from Steven's team on an area on which I will have to focus on over the next little while. Namely, managing applications in a BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) environment.

Strictly speaking Quest uses the term BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) which intends to cover a slightly greater problem area with the inclusion of mobile devices and other peripherals. 

You can read more about the ideas behind Quest's UWM here:  http://www.quest.com/user-workspace-management/

Or even better, watch the introductory video from Shayne here: http://www.quest.com/tv/1496733762001/Quest-Software---User-Workspace-Management/Video/

Back to Steven's posting on managing applications on the forthcoming Windows 8 platform, which you can read here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/04/19/managing-quot-byo-quot-pcs-in-the-enterprise-including-woa.aspx

One of the challenges that I have been considering over the past little while was how Microsoft was going to manage internally developed applications. Specifically, how was Windows 8 going to install/update and retire Metro style applications when the client (company) did not want to publish their Line-of-Business (LOB) application on the publicly available Windows 8 Application store. There are obvious reasons for not publishing your internal applications on the Windows 8 store, not least the security concerns and most likely the overhead of publishing to Windows 8 store. 

Previously, we were told that for Windows 8 Metro applications, 

 “consumers obtain all software... through the Windows Store and Microsoft Update or Windows Update.” 

Now, with the addition of the WOA management client, Microsoft has added a fourth trusted source of software for the WOA platform. The Metro style self-service portal application, or SSP, is now the primary interface for the corporate user to access their management infrastructure.

Quoting from the post, there appear to be four types of applications that are supported by the Microsoft SSP including;

• Internally-developed Metro style apps that are not published in the Windows Store
• Apps produced by independent software vendors that are licensed to the organization for internal distribution
• Web links that launch websites and web-based apps directly in the browser
• Links to app listings in the Windows Store. This is a convenient way for IT to make users aware of useful business apps that are publicly available.

Here is a sample of the corporate application portal or SSP for the Microsoft example site Woodgrove;

As you will note, the styling and layout are consistent (the same??) as the Windows 8 store and should offer reduced training and support overheads for managing your internal Metro styled applications.

I guess the next question is how does a developer perform a manual  "test" install on a new machine without publishing to the SSP? 

You can find out the command line required to install and un-install a Metro style application here:  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh852635.aspx

VDI Assessment Tools

I quite often talk about virtualization as part of the ongoing application migration story and I thought (since I now work for Quest) I should talk a little bit more about virtualization tools. There are quite a few about, but I thought that I should highlight the following technologies.

Quest VDI Assessment 

Quest VDI Assessment analyzes user behavior and desktop performance over time to build up a complete picture of application usage and resource consumption across the organization. Basically, it's installed in your pre-VDI desktop environment, then it watches what the users do, determines which applications are being used, monitors the intensity (or lack thereof) of each user workload, watches for peripheral usage, and more. After collecting that data for 30 days or longer, it builds a nice report that identifies the best virtualization candidates for different virtualization technologies and uses the results to help build out an ROI model that is unique to the organization. 

The Quest VDI Assessment tool is;

• Available as an ESX or Hyper-V appliance
• Identifies which of your users are a best fit for hosted or local (offline) VDI, Terminal Server/RD Session Host or Application Virtualization
• Analyzes and reports on your current network, user and application usage
• Assesses the viability of a Windows 7 deployment
• Calculates improvement in VM density from leveraging Hyper-V Dynamic Memory
• Pre-determines desktop, network, data center and storage needs to help you build a successful plan to migrate and manage your users with virtual desktops and applications

You can find out more here: Quest VDI Assessment

VDI Flash Calculator
You should  give Andre Leibovici's online VDI Flash Calculator a try. Remember, properly sizing your VDI environment is one of the most important aspects of creating a VDI infrastructure design. Without knowing and understanding the workloads and the types of users in your environment, you could be setting yourself up for failure.

If you want to know more about the VDI calculator options and features read the Manual at http://myvirtualcloud.net/?p=1927 or check out the VMware View Calculator Video Training at http://myvirtualcloud.net/?p=2551.

Login VSI
I have always been a fan of Login Consultants (many reasons, and for many years) and part of any good VDI management strategy is being able to determine the optimal hardware configuration required to support the required number of users and applications in your environment. Login VSI is a  virtualization specific benchmarking tool to measure the performance and scalability of centralized desktop environments such as SBC and VDI.

Login VSI helps with benchmarking, change impact analysis, load-testing and capacity planning

To find out more, read here: http://www.loginvsi.com/

Quest vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer

This free tool benefits from years of real world experience of desktop "optimizing knowledge," which is then exposed as a list of 40 various optimization settings that can be enabled or disabled using either a GUI interface or using the command line. This simple application allows you to make file and registry tweaks quickly and easily, and it provides the ability to store the details of the changes made for audit purposes. Although the tool is written for Quest vWorkspace environments, it works just as well with either Citrix XenDesktop or VMware View.

As with Quest's assessment tool, you can find support for this free optimization tool on the Quest community [16].

SolarWinds Storage Response Time Monitor
You've heard all about the storage I/O performance demands of VDI, so how do you keep track of storage response times and latency issues within your environment? That's where the free SolarWinds Storage Response Time Monitor  tool comes into play.

Find out more about SolarWinds here: http://www.solarwinds.com/register/registration.aspx?program=1645&c=70150000000PEMx