Tim Mangan

Mulligan: Did Citrix CTO Martin Duursma signal a change at Citrix Synergy Barcelona?

Tim Mangan — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 05:01:00 GMT

I have been trying to get my head wrapped around the CTO Supersession at Synergy Barcelona last week. I wrote my initial impressions of the session in an article here right after the session. Later on, Benny Tritsch, who sat beside me at the presentation, wrote his views as "impressive and confusing" in his blog here. But given a little time to think about it, I wonder if Martin perhaps was signaling a strategy change within Citrix. I want a mulligan on my take of the session.

Citrix has become a big company in the last ten years that I have been watching them. No longer a "one trick pony", the company has grown through acquisitions and expansion of the product line into entirely new areas.

When the CTPs gathered in Fort Lauderdale a year ago to meet, we had a great session with then CTO Harry Labana. One of the comments from the CTPs at that meeting struck home - that Citrix has grown so wide that they now compete with everybody. Microsoft on the remote protocols and terminal servers (see Shawn Bass take on Citrix vs Microsoft here), VMware (and Microsoft) on the Hypervisor, Cisco and others on the WAN edge devices, and a slew of folks like WebEx on the collaboration front.

Even the CTO office was a diverse bunch. Where many companies have one CTO, Citrix had a (virtual) office of them. This was part of Citrix growing up also. Enabling multiple, highly skilled professionals, to lead the company in sometimes seemingly conflicting directions. At Synergy in SanFrancisco this spring, we had a great opportunity to hear from the CTOs together on stage. Normally the large keynote-like sessions are dominated by Mark Templeton, but for a change the company gave these guys a chance to talk about what they are doing and why.

In the year since our meeting last fall, some of the prominent CTOs have moved on. Harry is now at AppSense , while CTO Simon Crosby and CTO Ian Pratt both departed to start Bromium. Citrix is retooling at the CTO office. I'm not even sure who all of the CTOs are right now. For sure, I know of three of them.

Martin Duursma, who heads up Citrix Labs
Bert Christiansen, from the Citrix OnLine division
Sheng Liang, CTO for the Cloud Division

I know Martin has been around for years driving Citrix to be innovative. I think Bert joined when Citrix bought the company Expertcity (known for their GoToMyPC and GoToAssist products) in 2003, but the OnLine division has always been off to the side so we rarely hear much from them at the big meetings. Sheng came with the Cloud.Com acquisition this summer so he is brand new.

So when Citrix decided to give the second day keynote completely to the three CTOs for the first time, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that the result wasn't a Mark Templeton style orchestrated event. After the blizzard of announcements in the day 1 keynote that was choreographed by Templeton, we expected to hear how these new things all fit together and how we might use them. Instead, we had three seemingly independent presentations from the CTOs in three different divisions. But while disappointed that I didn't hear what I expected, it was a worthwhile glimpse into the inner workings at Citrix, or at least a tool to speculate at it.

Bert's presentation, on the surface, was about how the recently announced ShareFile acquisition fits into the OnLine division. In announcing GoToMeeting Workspaces, Citrix might be bringing the OnLine division more into the fold. No longer are they only that one-off thing people do at an enterprise for external communication. Workspaces is a play to get into the middle of every day activity as part of the desktop (little 'd') landscape. Perhaps this division is becoming a little more integrated?

Sheng's portion of the presentation was on the surface more of an introduction. But more than an introduction, his message was more like "we do cloud for the big boys, but you can easily use it to build a private cloud and gain the benefits".

But it was Martin's presentation that needed a mulligan. In his presentation, we spent a while talking about how companies need to go vertical. He used some good examples of successful companies got that way by a focus on combining a vertical solution for their customers. Unfortunately, he also used some examples that were questionable on their face (Google/Motorola?). But he failed to connect that meaning of going vertical to the rest of the presentation for the audience.

In looking back at the event, perhaps I've now made that connection. Martin might be addressing that concern that Citrix is so wide, that it is time for some vertical thinking within Citrix to balance that out. In the realm of his focus, Citrix wants to own the remote desktop space. The AppDNA purchase helps to fill a hole in that space -- helping their customers with their existing app migration. Another demo in his presentation also is aimed at filling that hole. The XenApp SDK is aimed at helping developers modify their apps to run centrally yet leverage the power of the local client device. [By the way, don't be fooled by the name, you know it is bound to work on XenDesktop apps too.] The reference design for HDX silicon also fits into this vertical thinking. While these are simple steps right now, some vertical thinking might be just what Citrix needs right now. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds.

Citrix Synergy Barcelona Day 2 Keynote (aka "Super Session")

Tim Mangan — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 10:43:00 GMT

Citrix "Super Session", Synergy Barcelona Oct 27, 2011

Tim Mangan reports on the second day "Super Session".

Otherwise called a Keynote, this morning's session focused on three topics: Collaboration, Cloud, and Mobility. While Wednesday's session was about announcements, this morning was about explaining the message. Mark T left the work to his minions (not sure if he was sleeping in or off somewhere). Can't believe I am saying this, but I missed him (but only a little). Lots of people slept off the party so the audience was a little light this morning!

Kicked off by Citrix Online CTO Bert Christiansen, the first session on Collaboration was really about positioning the technologies that Citrix is involved with as being about changing the way work is done. There must have been something subliminal in the messaging yesterday, because that was exactly what I was thinking about over breakfast this morning.

I am convinced that we are in the throws of a serious change in how business gets done. Unfortunately, the "solutions" being sold are to today's and yesterday's problems. We think about enterprise employees as "task" or "knowledge" workers today, and part of what we need to do is change that thinking. Task worker jobs are jobs that either need to be replaced by automation, or fundamentally rethought of. We should be thinking about workers in categories of those that do their job by implementing processes and those that do their job by collaborating with others. For example, Call Center workers do the former. Today we treat them in a way that leads directly to customer dis-satisfaction. Rather than provide closed minded tools and encourage call volume handling to move the business forward, we should be enabling them to have better interaction with the customer to truly solve the callers problems. But how does the change being sold do this? No clue.

But the last 40 years have shown that businesses will need to use new technology to change the ways in which they get work done or they become less efficient and die. The keys, which were part of the messaging this morning are about transforming the infrastructure to get the work done. Each of the CTOs in essence talked about this, each in their own focused way.

CTO Bert used GoToMeeting, especially GTM HD Faces and the new Workspaces as a model to redefine how collaboration happens in the enterprise. More and more, getting work done involves working with people who may not be sitting right next to you. Structuring that work around tools to enable collaboration is nothing new, but kudos to Citrix for having a good one. Unfortunately, along the way, there was a very lame demo involving LinkedIn that looked to me like a perfect example of "because it can be done doesn't mean it should".

The demo involved Bert getting a request in Facebook for a video meeting, which he could launch right from Facebook. Really? Who spends all of their time in LinkedIn that I should receive the message there? Just send me via email, please, or else you won't be there when I get around to noticing the request in a few weeks.

Second up was Sheng Liang, CTO of Citrix's Cloud division, formerly from Cloud.com. I had a great opportunity to meet Sheng and part of his team earlier this week at the CTP summit, and I was quite impressed. Again, theme was change, which of course is a necessary theme to sell cloud.

But Sheng's message wasn't that you need to go to the public cloud. One stat that came out of his session was the 2010 hardware shipments worldwide. 8.8M servers, 350.9M PCs. Desktops matter folks! Sheng's message was more about using the lessons of the large public cloud to transform how you privately provide desktops. Not just hosting, but planning for disaster.

A XenDesktop deployment, managed via a private cloud using Cloud Portal was shown. It looked no harder than any other XenDesktop deployment in a demo (in other works: much easier than reality).

Although Sheng described it as "Desktop bursting into the cloud", a great term to use with your CTO to get buy-in, I'm thinking of this more in terms of the initial part of this morning's presentation. Creation of temporary work spaces (desktops) for a project. As you dynamically create a team for a project, create specially crafted desktops to enable them to do that job. Accessed from their permanent desktop, the user gets everything they need.

Third up was Martin Duursma, head of Citrix Labs and Chair of the office of the CTOs at Citrix. Martin's theme was the importance of enabling Mobility. I still get a creepy feeling when the CTOs tell me that the iPhone and iPad require us to reinvent the workplace, but that doesn't mean we can ignore the things.

Martin went into a segment about "vertical stacks" which was lost on me. Maybe it was just me, but I felt that it was either a poorly communicated message or the wrong audience for the message. I'm not even sure that the vertical stack concept is even a good one at a strategy (a good tactic for some yes, but not all).

Fortunately he moved on and we got our first announcement of the day. Martin brought Adam Jaques on stage and they made a XenApp announcement. Yes, the product was actually mentioned on stage for more than 5 seconds!

XenApp 6.5 Mobility Pack was announced. This is an SDK that developers can use to transform boring apps into ones that can use the rich local resources at the other end of receiver. Think things like display form factors and GPS and the like. In a likely first for Synergy, Visual Studio was shown and an app was transformed to work with the phone. It wasn't anything as easy as shown to transform that app, but the concept was cool. Project GoldenGate was also shown (as a simple screen shot).

Martin also brought Ryan McCune, from Citrix partner Avanade on stage to demo using the SDK. In another likely first for a Citrix keynote, this wasn't a live demo but a pre-recorded video of a demo. Something must have gone horribly wrong for this to happen at a Citrix keynote, but it was a demo of what the partner did and not a demo of a Citrix product directly.

It isn't clear what Citrix Customers were suppose to take away from the keynote this morning. As my friend Dr. Benny suggested to me afterwards, there were no actions for the customers. Perhaps this was a result of Mark T not driving the show this morning, perhaps because Citrix hasn't had enough time to absorb the new acquisitions, or perhaps Citrix themselves aren't sure where customers should be going.

Change, yes. But change to what?

How to describe layering: the "blob," cake, or 3D Tetris?

Tim Mangan — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 04:00:00 GMT

While we're in the process of figuring out the new “desktop” (small “d”), we have a lot of different ideas and models for how to layer and manage our stuff. None of the models seems quite right to me, and over the past few months I've been struggling for a way to describe why. I think I finally have some ideas down that I think I’m ready to share:

The traditional PC: The "Blob" Model

The traditional PC can be described as “The Blob”. In “The Blob”, there is no real separation between the operating system, applications, and the other stuff which for simplicity I will call “Application Related Data” (or ARD). There are files all over the place in the file system and crud all over the registry. Not organized and certainly not a pretty sight. When we want to do unnatural acts, such as to replace out the hardware or operating system, or more bizarre things like allow the user to roam to different operating systems, or even to be logged into multiple operating systems at the same time, I think we can all agree that the model of “The Blob” is butt ugly.

To some extent, we have not had to worry too much about the blob in the enterprise. Vista was widely ignored and the major concern was when a user got new hardware. Sometimes that meant just copying over the partition image, but when not we could build an OS and App image that matched and then use tools to migrate the user data. This apples-to-apples copy works reasonably because it is simple.

In a session I did at BriForum in Darmstadt a number of years back, I attempted to frame the problem. I broke the “ARD” category into eight different sub-categories of stuff that might need to be treated differently if we could only do the categorization properly. This proved way too complicated for people to deal comprehend easily, and certainly well beyond the ability for anyone to act upon after the blob is already created. In fact I concluded in that session that we really need the app developers to help us out of the problem, and that we really need Microsoft to lead them to start making new applications with organized data into these sub-categories. This isn't happening and isn't about to. Oh if I could be Bill Gates, just for one day...

The “Layer Cake” Model

Today people are busy migrating from the Windows XP blobs they have to Windows 7. Most are at least playing with VDI, and hoping that they can make it work with a shared OS image. The model that we typically see is referred to as “The Layer Cake”. By separating all of the stuff that is in The Blob into three different layers we, in theory, could have a simple model to deal with that would allow portability and flexibility in deployment. The claim is made that it is as simple as swapping out the OS layer to perform an upgrade.

When you see this model, you first need to recognize that we are talking about only a new deployment. You don’t really transform The Blob, but lay out an image in this format from the start. There are migration tools and vendors to help bring things over, but fundamentally you want to think of this as a fresh deployment. But I don’t like Layer Cake as a model at all. Unfortunately, it is too simplistic to work well enough in complex application environments in the long run. I’ll explain that statement in a long-winded way.

“The AppVirt” Model

Another trend I see happening as companies move to Windows 7 is that they are adopting application virtualization in a widespread way. They know that they have lots of application issues, and the major one is conflict between applications. AppVirt has proven itself as the best solution to this problem. [Side note: It is ironic that it took so long for mass adoption of AppVirt. While we still have significant application conflict issues, much of the worst applications are being or have been retired. But I guess you only need one business critical app to be the problem!] But containerizing and isolating applications is also a smart move to enable flexibility and portability, both today and in the future. But the AppVirt model looks like the drawing on the left.

We have been successfully using this model for ten years now. AppVirt allows us to deliver and maintain OS, App (Application components and base configuration), and User-based-ARD separately from each other, with proven ability to roam between machines and operating systems and considerable ability to upgrade the application without losing the user’s ARD. Unfortunately AppVirt isn’t perfect either. Not every app can be put into a container. The list of applications not supported by AppVirt grows smaller each year, but it is still significant enough that AppVirt by itself is not a 100% solution.

The “Pillar Cake” Model

So what do people do, combine these models? They are trying to. I don’t see vendors show the model drawing I have below, but they certainly feel that combing “User Environment” products with AppVirt solves all of you problems. I see customers struggle with implementing this, and probably mostly because nobody wants to understand the application details enough. The first attempt typically looks like this:

A nice simple picture that combines the best of both worlds, right? No. Application conflict, it turns out is about more than conflict of the App later, but also often conflict at the ARD layer as well. We see this all the time when two versions of an app are needed by the same user, maybe Office 2010 for general use but Word 2003 needed for another app. If you take out the ARD separation, you have a problem. So what do you do?

The “Chinese Menu” Model

Here in the US when I was younger you might go to a “Chinese” Restaurant and rather than the combination plates you see on the menu today, they had columns with the different types of food. To order, you picked the items you wanted from each column. For those unfamiliar, we refer to this as a Chinese Menu. To combine AppVirt with User Environment you need to use the “Chinese Menu” Model.

In reality it becomes more complicated than the drawing above; with any given application there may be need for some ARD to stay in the AppVirt layer and some to be in the user layer. But there are still more complications. First, let’s look at the latest complications in AppVirt.

The “AppVirt DSC” Model

Applications sometimes integrate with each other, so full separation isn’t always a good thing. Often, the integration is just on a file basis and this isn’t a problem. Other times, we just build an application suite container with all of the inter-dependent applications and it acts as a single application for the purpose of our models. But some applications are more like application platforms with lots of tentacles. Microsoft Office is a prime example. The single package approach quickly turns into a nightmare there. So instead we create application suites. App-V uses the term “Dynamic Suite Composition” (DSC) and so I’ll use DSC here as a generic term. Depending on how DSC is done, you might end up with a model that looks like either of the drawings below:

The “Tetris 3D” Model

When I start thinking about combining all of this into a single model my mind currently turns to an old video game, Tetris3D (I can’t find the original DOS game, but here is a clone called 3dTetris ). Tetris3D was a game where you had all sorts of odd shaped blocks that dropped into box and you had to rotate them in three dimentions into position while dropping to get them all to fit. When you filled a layer it was removed from the game to make room for more blocks. In the PC image model game, we don’t get layers removed when a layer gets filled, but right now that is my working model. Maybe one of those wooden puzzles where you have to put all of the pieces in the right order could be the model also, but I think what we have is more complex: more parts, more than one “right” answer, and I like the never ending aspect of Tetris3D (there is always another app to add to the mix). It may not be the best model, since it took all of the above to explain it, but it is the best I have right now.

Conclusion

My belief is that we don’t have good enough solutions for handling applications and related data today. I conclude this because, in part, we do not know what the right model to frame the problem is. By no means do I claim that the Tetris3D model the right model; I’m simply using it as a way to convey how messed up our other models are.

The ultimate model and solutions must be simple, like the layer cake, to just catch everything automatically, but must also involve the deep understanding of App/ARD separation to make everything work. Separation into manageable categories is required for the flexibilities we desire. Otherwise, I just VM the problem away (leaving it to the user to figure out where there stuff is) or re-write everything as a cloud app.

Author: Tim Mangan is a Microsoft MVP for App-V, a Citrix CTP (I know, redundancy) and holds the position of Kahuna at TMurgent Technologies. He has spoken at every BriForum and at many other venues. Read more at his home blog or website, or follow him on Twitter as @TimothyMangan.

System Performance: It's (still) time to change the timers!

Tim Mangan — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 04:10:00 GMT

While working on my presentation for BriForum on Perceived Performance, I was reminded of another performance related white paper that I wrote seven years ago titled It's Time to Change the Timers, which was about the need to change the basic system clock interrupt provided by the Hardware Abstraction Layer (or HAL) that sets timer granularity in the OS. With Microsoft working on Windows 8, maybe it is finally time to look again at this issue. During those seven years, the examples I gave have only been amplified by even faster technology, both in processors and peripherals, and the simplification of the windows HAL to assume multiple processors. Our systems could perform better.

The crux of the issue

At the heart of the Windows Operating System is the windows timer. My first PC, a Compaq clone called Deskpro, used a 55ms timer back in the good old DOS days. I think it was around 1984 and yeah, it booted off of floppy drives. The CPU ran at 4mhz (7mhz if you pushed the "turbo" button). In the 1990s, Microsoft introduced Windows NT. I ran it on single CPU machines with a 333mhz processor. The basic clock provided 10ms granularity. If you put it on a dual processor machine, this jumped to 15ms. Microsoft used two different HAL packages, one for single processor and another for multi-processor. The clock is dictated by that HAL.

The timer plays several important roles in the system. An obvious one is that if some software wants to sleep for a period of time, then wake up, it sets a timer to do this. The system timer dictates the granularity, and importantly the minimum wait period. So if the software wants to wait 3ms, it is going to wait for the full timer length. This timer also affects things like thread scheduling, the effective quantum time (how long a thread can chew up a processor before being thrown out), and even how often certain other kernel activities can happen.

What's in your PC?

Chances are you are reading this using a computer with multiple processors (in this audience I'd guess 4 logical processors present), probably running in the ballpark of 3Ghz. The clock you get is set to 15ms (rather than 10ms) because Microsoft got rid of the two HAL images and always use the multi-processor one, even if you had only a single processor.

In one time interval my Compaq Deskpro with the turbo on could execute potentially 440 thousand instructions (Note: the reality is that instructions take more than one machine cycle but let's just ignore that complication in the math - it washes out). Using that math, the NT system could execute 3.3 million instructions in its timer interval. On the system I'm guessing you are using, it would be over 80 million instructions executed before the timer expires. That is a heck of a lot of instructions.

Why should you care?

Modern software design practices tend to avoid setting short term timers because, in part, the granularity of clock is not small enough for todays systems. Instead, they use asynchronous calls which instead puts the burden on the kernel of the OS. But there is still a lot of software out there depending on the timer that would work better if Microsoft made the timer shorter. Rogue processes would be better controlled, and VM clock slew might just be lowered. Ultimately, I believe users will receive better "perceived performance".

Sometimes timers need to be appropriate for off CPU activities. But even many of these activities have significantly sped up since I wrote the original paper in 2004. Our networks are faster (although there is no solution to the speed of light latency over long distance) and our peripherals run at faster interfaces as well. Speeding up the timer would allow some applications to perform better with todays hardware.

The downside

The downside is what would break. But Microsoft has some smart people and I'm betting they can work out a way. Even if it is to implement a faster clock, say 1ms granularity, for the kernel itself and for applications that specifically request the more granular clock.

And it might be too late for Windows 8 (or whatever it gets called when it is released), since Microsoft is well into the design. But I assume there will be a 9. Eventually this needs to change.

Someone's got your back with IE6 apps in Windows 7

Tim Mangan — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 04:00:00 GMT

I have been looking for a decent solution handling apps that require Internet Explorer 6, and maybe we have a good one now from Browsium.

One problem faced by many enterprises in moving to Windows 7 from Windows XP is that they have applications that only work in Internet Explorer version 6. Microsoft made significant changes in the IE7 rendering engine that broke many plug-ins and web applications. Windows Vista ships with IE7 and Windows 7 ships with IE8, and there isn't a way to downgrade your browser. You might think by now that companies would have fixed those applications, but they haven't because they stayed with Windows XP and could ignore the problem. But now these enterprises are moving their desktops to Windows 7, and are finding that they finally need to fix or replace these outdated applications. While they knew this, they are stunned at how very costly it will be to do so now - up to a million dollars in some cases.

A few people have found ways to hack their way around the problem, but it isn't easy. Usually, these solutions involve application virtualization, but as Spoon found out, a vendor has to be really careful not to run afoul of Microsoft licensing restrictions on distribution of their components. I hear that VMware and Symantec had similar problems and you can only find some very complicated instructions on how to hack it yourself. CSS Security also demonstrated they had crafted some sort of a solution, but they too have been strangely quiet after announcing.

For some time, Microsoft has been telling customers that running multiple instances of Internet Explorer on a single instance of Windows is not supported. Microsoft says that their supported ways to handle IE6 on Windows 7 is to use Med-V, which runs Windows XP as a virtual machine, or to stand up a 2003 Terminal Server, often using Citrix, to provide remote IE6 access. The latter has become "the norm" for customers moving to Windows 7 and still needing IE6. Now Microsoft has launched a marketing campaign to convince companies that IE6 is a big security issue. You can bet what Microsoft's reaction to anyone saying that would have been 10 years ago when the Beta was released!

The internet is a bad place today with a lot of ways to break IE6, so Microsoft has a point about using IE6 for all your browsing. But for companies that want to use IE6 for internal sites, I just don't see the risk. I don't agree with Microsoft's stance on supporting IE6, and have certainly let them know this on many occasions (as have so many customers). But they are not budging on this.

Along comes a new company called Browsium. Managed by three former Microsoft executives that helped build the Internet Explorer, they have come up with a solution that doesn't seem to run afoul of Microsoft licensing. As a plug-in, it even avoids the idea of running multiple instances of Internet Explorer. While this might not get you Microsoft support, the Browsium solution does not run multiple instances of IE- which seems to be Microsoft's concern.

The product, which if It dropped the final 's' would easily win the award for best product name of the year, is called UniBrows. UniBrows, released last week, is an internet explorer plug-in that supports site specific invocation of different rendering engines, including IE6 and IE7. Using configurable rules, you designate URLs or sites that need specific support. One instance of Internet Explorer, but using different rendering engines for different sites. UniBrows works by utilizing their own magic code to manage and invoke the appropriate dlls for the rendering you need for that page. But unlike attempts by others to include parts of IE6 in their solution, they have the customer repackage their client after downloading some publicly available distributable components that Microsoft has on their download sites. Once repackaged, and they make this very easy for you, you can deploy this to your machines.

I support a lot of customers using App-V, so naturally I wanted to make sure that I could sequence this plug-in and understand how to do the configuration of sites. I contacted Gary Schare, the President of Browsium, and after talking about what they are doing, he was happy to point me to the free 60 day download available to anyone on their website. I sequenced the plug-in using the latest 4.6 SP1 sequencer for App-V from Microsoft on Windows 7 SP1. The package worked well, although I had to be careful about creating rules.

There is a separate management app to aid in configuring when to invoke different rendering engines. This configuration is rules based, making it quite flexible. You can define a set of rules that look at the URL for different patterns, such as starting with a particular string, containing a string, or from a domain name. You can also specify what to do with cross site content on a page (for example, a site that pulls content from another site). The rules definitions seem well thought out.

The rules may be designated as machine or user specific. This would allow you to push out a set of rules across the company, and let users supplement their own rules. For some reason, with App-V, I had to use rules that were "machine based" and not "user based" to get them to work at the client. Possibly this was my fault, and it will need a look when I have more time, but if you are into App-V you probably want to use the same rule-set across the enterprise anyway so I didn't look into it further yet.

The rules may be deployed in three ways; via Registry, Group Policy Preferences, or File based. I went with registry based inside the App-V package. Group Policy method should work well with App-V, although you might need to tweak the transparency settings of a few keys in the virtual registry to get that to work. Because you may be unlikely to know every URL upfront for the rules, you probably want to keep the rules out of the App-V package. So Group Policy might be the way to go. Another potential is to configure the plug-in to use the file based rule set, and point it to a central share. I'm not sure if this would create a performance issue for launching, especially for laptop users using a VPN back to the office, but if that was a problem you could probably use an OSD script to help.

Of course the kicker is the cost, but in the face of not moving off of Windows XP or rewriting/abandoning your IE6 based apps, it could be well worth it. Pricing is yearly subscription based, so even as an interim solution while you move your apps it can be worth it. Pricing, when I looked, included a $5000 base, plus a per seat ranging from $4 to $20 depending on volume, plus a support plan. I queried Gary on what a seat meant for Terminal Servers, and he replied that it meant "maximum concurrent users". He said they would update the notes on the website to make that clearer.

It is great to see a professional product that addresses this important need to enterprises. Ultimately, you are going to want to replace those old applications, but at least for now, someone's got your back.

10 years after the Wow! (A look back at Softricity by an insider, 10 years after their founding)

Tim Mangan — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 21:05:00 GMT

Tim Mangan was at Softricity ten years ago, when application virtualization was in its infancy. In this article he looks back at the history and what's happening now.

On February 26th this year, Softricity, the creators of what is now called App-V, turns 10 years old. Well... sort of. Softricity was a rename from the previous company name, "Software Wow." Actually we really did the rename in the previous November, but we kept it private for three months to get our new act together before going public with the name. February 26th, 2001 seems to be the first public record of the name Softricity that I can find, so I'll just go with that date -- ten years ago today.

The biggest hit of the English band "10 Years After" was probably the song "I'd Love To Change The World", a title that embodies what we thought we were going to do with Application Virtualization. We were a really hot and new startup company. We were going to turn applications into a utility, like water or electricity that you just turn on when you need them. David Greschler loved to tell potential customers that "this is the last install you'll ever have to do." Perhaps a bit of marketing hyperbole? Of course! But we did believe that we were going to forever change the way companies dealt with distributing software. ASPs (the forerunner of "Clouds") were the next big thing. 10 years later we can look back and ask, "did we do that?" Not so much as we thought at the time... But not that the company and ideas weren't a rousing success.

Back then, we were replacing "sneakernet." The vast majority of application installs in the enterprise ten years ago were manually performed with the technician going to the desktop with the installation media in hand. Automation was being used by some, but not many. Originally, SoftGrid could help on a majority of those applications, but there were still many that it didn't work for. For companies that have gone this route, some claim today to virtualize over 95% of their applications. We will probably never get 100% coverage, but then we don't have to. The enterprise today has many choices to automate application deployment, and they will multiple methods to get to the 100%.

Another sign of success, Microsoft bought the company (rumored to be about a $250M purchase) and App-V (the new name under Microsoft) today has tens of millions of licenses out there. Over the years the capabilities of SoftGrid have steadily, if slowly, evolved to cover many of the problems we knew needed to be addressed even early on. Like how different terminal services and desktops are. Handing temporary offline usage cases. Covering a wider array of applications, including those with services. A solution to the "bubble to bubble" issue, or at least part of a solution. And it seems that today everyone talking about the new greatest thing, virtual desktops, acknowledges that application virtualization must be used to layer apps in if you are doing VDI.

Another sign of success may be the others out there virtualizing applications. Citrix, VMware, Symantec, and a host of other companies have parallel capabilities in this space. Each has their own take on how to handle applications and each has strengths and weaknesses, depending on your needs. New companies are also still entering this space, like App Zero. And one could argue others are embracing the ideas in new ways; with ideas like MokaFive's application and user layers.

By many yardsticks application virtualization has been a winner. But we didn't solve everything. Fundamentally, massive deployment of applications is hard. It doesn't matter how you try to do it, it will be hard. Each application has its own unique quirks. Each enterprise also has its own unique needs; needs that often were not under consideration of the developer. Heck, we keep these apps around through multiple generations of hardware and OS technology and that they work AT ALL should be considered a minor miracle. As much as we like to bash Microsoft (and who doesn't like to do that?) one thing that Microsoft has been pretty good at is providing a platform that tries to embrace the older applications as the platform evolves. Heck, you could still run those old 16-bit DOS apps from the early 80's on Vista.

The newest incarnation of App-V 4.6 SP1 is expected out sometime this quarter. From the previews at Tech-Ed Berlin, it is clear that Microsoft is squarely taking aim at making applications easier to deal with. And while the videos look cool and I'll be excited to work with the new version and will find it easier, virtualizing applications are still going to be hard. Because applications are hard.

So we didn't get it all right in the last 10 years, but I think that we got some of what we were dreaming of. At times I feel like "if we just rewrote these old apps the problems would go away." But the reality would just be another version of the same problem a few years down the road. We heard that story with Java. We heard it with web apps. We are hearing it again with Cloud apps. But we cannot write applications today that anticipate the changes of tomorrow, either in the surrounding technology or in what a business will need. So dealing with apps will remain hard. This means we need good tools to help with the bulk, and smart people to deal with the rest.

Not that the software vendor community can't help. I really don't think that the ISVs really understand how the enterprise modifies their products to make them work the way the enterprise needs them to work. Better information on what the applications touch is sorely needed across the board. Support for enterprise customizations -- things as simple as allowing IT to easily disable the update menu -- should be standard across the board.

So while application virtualization may have made great strides in the last 10 years, the adage "garbage in, garbage out" remains true. We will continue to want to evolve our environments, embracing new technologies and new concepts. Unfortunately, as the next evolution occurs we will need to bring much of the garbage along, hopefully cleaning up some of it from time to time, but only when we have to. As the song said:

I'd love to change the world
But I don't know what to do
So I'll leave it up to you

Virtual Desktops, The Cloud , and User Mobility, let's face it: we all want to change the world. In the next ten years we will make great strides, but you can bet that the world won't look like we think it will today anyway. Grand visions are great, but at the end of the month you need to improve your operations today. We need to be thinking at both levels.

Disappointed! (the true sad story of client hypervisor meloncholy)

Tim Mangan — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 05:00:00 GMT

Attribution: OpenPhoto.net All I wanted for Christmas was a decent client hypervisor . Two years in a row now. Was that really too much to ask for? Last year at Christmas I was only a little disappointed because I had kept my expectations in check. But...(read more)

"A Failure to Launch:" a new free tool for App-V troubleshooting

Tim Mangan — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 04:00:00 GMT

I have another free tool for people that work with App-V. One of the challenges of working with App-V is dealing with situations when things don't work right, especially when using the full infrastructure model. Since you have a multi-part delivery system involved, the component that tells you about the problem--the Client--doesn't necessarily have a clue to what the real problem is. Instead you get a cryptic error code:

It's hard enough for experts who work with the product daily to understand these. (We google the community sites for ideas.) Your typical help desk person doesn't have a chance. To help with this, I created a new free tool to provide some organized help with App-V Client errors.

This tool, called A Failure To Launch, is a Silverlight app that allows you to search for information on an error code produced by the App-V Client by using the last 8 or 10 digits. But rather than a search list of a bunch of people that had the problem, you get a concise set of information for the error code.

For each of the codes covered, the tool provides information about the cause (or possible causes), troubleshooting techniques or recommended actions, and links to Microsoft KB Articles when they exist. The tool also explains the error code format, and has an interesting flow chart showing the steps that the client and server go through to launch an application with links to the various errors.

Not all client errors are covered, and the flow chart is a “best guess” and is known to be inaccurate on some details. Most of the information in the tool can be found on the web somewhere, but some is not. Some comes from painstaking attempts to break the system in ingenious ways, and some comes from tips provided to be by friends. (A special mention goes out to fellow MVP Nicke Kallen.) I'll update the tool from time to time with these. Ultimately, the tool makes for a convenient first place to look. If you don't find it there, please send me some information on the error code and what you found to solve it. I will update the tool every so often!

I wrote the tool in Silverlight because you can install the app on any Silverlight-enabled device and then run the tool offline. To do so, just go to the tool off of the website. When it loads, right click in an open area and select the “install” option for the app. Now you can launch it anytime from your start menu, even disconnected from the Internet! Since I will be updating, you might want to check back now and then and download the latest version.

The "Failure to Launch" tool is available from the Application Virtualization Central page of my website, just below the "OSD Illustrated" tool.

"Advanced Format" 4k disk drives and performance: How will this impact your virtual disks?

Tim Mangan — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 04:01:00 GMT

Oh those disk drive guys... you'd better pay attention to what they are doing! (Especially with virtualization, there are significant performance and potential failure impacts on your system when you replace a hard drive.) Got your attention? Yeah, you really need to watch for these new "Advanced Format" 4k disk drives!

Why?

Hard drives traditionally use a 512-byte sector size. On the platter, when you write 512 bytes of information, it takes up not only that 512 bytes, but also some sector overhead. A major source of that overhead to error correction--around 50 bytes. The error correction block (ECB) is what allows windows to “fix” a bad sector. Additional info is written in the ECB that magically allows software to figure out which byte is wrong and what the right value should be. (The sector is then marked as "bad" and the good data is moved to another sector.) The ECB is 50 bytes for a 512-byte sector, meaning that more than 8% of the platter space is taken by this overhead.

To increase capacity, the hard drive manufacturers want to move to 4k sectors. Today this isn’t about how big of a drive is possible due to sector size--it’s really about how much usable data can be stored on a given platter size. With a 4k sector size, that overhead for the ECB (now 100 bytes) drops to just over 2%. This 6% yield is important to the manufacturer. And since the overhead is more than just the ECB, the yield might is greater. For example, Western Digital is talking about 7 to 13% improvements in yield in their EARS drives. Keep in mind this doesn't mean you get to store more data on a 1GB drive--these are just internal efficiencies. This is a chance to store more data for less money, and that is a good thing as long as it doesn’t hurt performance or break things.

When?

Now!

While some work began on moving to 4KB sectors back in 1998, drives didn't start to appear on the market until the end of 2009. I've heard that the move to “Advanced Format” drives will be rapid, possibly as fast as the vendors can change out their lines. All of the major drive manufacturers claim that any new drive lines release after January 2011 will be “Advanced Format.” The ability to even purchase 512-byte sector drives has the potential to dry up pretty quickly, although it's unclear if that will really happen. I've seen a report that it may happen by the beginning of 2014, but if there's a need, you can bet someone will fill it.

There are many of these drives are on the market today from multiple manufactures--you just need to look at the label. They should be marked “Advanced Format.” For example, the Western Digital Green drives marked with “EARS” are so labeled. Seagate is not quite as clear, but I think that some (or all?) of their “Momentus” drives are also.

Technical Terms to Know

First, you need to be aware that some of these drives are shipping now. The hard drive industry, through International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association, has issued a campaign at the end of June, called "Are You Ready?". As part of this joint effort, they've coined the term Advanced Format which is how they're labeling the drives.

You need to be aware that there are two potential types of “Advanced Format” drives using 4k sectors. The first, are “4k native”, meaning they do everything with a 4k sector, just like the 512-byte sector does it today. The second--and this seems to be what is shipping today--is a transitional technology referred to as “512e” (the “e” is for “emulation”).

With a 512e drive, the interface looks like a 512-byte sector drive to the controller and operating system. The drive internally uses a 4k sector, packing eight “logical” sectors in it. 512e allows the manufacturer to gain the yield while hiding potential issues with the OS, drivers, and applications, from seeing a sector size other than 512.

Of Performance and Problems

The 512-byte disk sector has been around a long time--something like 30 years. So it shouldn't be surprising that there just might be some software out there that hard codes 512 bytes. When it comes to applications, such a hard coding probably isn’t going to break anything since they don’t normally deal with the sector directly, but send chunks of data to the OS which then deals with the disk and the NTFS format. For applications, we're generally going to be okay at 4k sectors, with the application's performing the same (except with 512e as described later) but not necessarily gaining potential improvements.

But the OS, or driver, might do something bad with 4k. Today, for example, we are aware of “alignment issues”. Some NTFS format utilities, such as comes with Windows XP or Windows Vista operating systems, offset the NTFS partition by a sector count that isn’t a multiple of 8, such as LBA 63 for XP. This means that even when the OS tries to write a 4k block it thinks might be aligned, it isn’t. On a native 4k disk, I think this probably(?) wouldn’t work, but on 512e it's just really bad performance.

The 512e solution, while helping to keep things from breaking, induces some interesting performance differences. Consider two cases:

The OS writes a 512-byte logical sector. The hard disk must read a 4k physical sector, update 512 bytes, and write 4k out to the disk. Clearly this will hurt performance.
The OS reads a 512-byte logical sector. The hard disk must read a 4k physical sector and send the 512 bytes. While probably a little slower you’ll never notice the difference. But should the OS now read the next 512-byte logical sector that was in the 4k sector, it probably is already in the disk controller cache. So this will probably help performance a little.

In addition to operating systems, WinPE, cloning, and backup software may see the most performance impacts with 512e. Database applications would likely be susceptible also. And of course, in particular interest to this community, are OS virtualization solutions.

Microsoft’s VHD format is clearly optimized for 512 byte-sectors today, and you might see significant performance issues with 512e drives. I’m not sure about Citrix or VMware. Microsoft is also rumored to be producing a hot fix for 2008 R2, (you can search for KB 982018 981208 and find references, but it looks like that KB has been pulled for some reason).

Real World Examples

Users report that it takes up to 6 hours to format a drive on Windows 7. After formatting, the drive performance is reported as reasonable.

Manufacturers are releasing extra utilities to help. Basically you run these utilities after installing XP or Vista. For Western Digital, they call it the “WD Align” utility. For Seagate it's the “SmartAlignT” utility. These utilities essentially move the partition after it's created to make it more naturally align and may take 20 minutes or more to run. Windows 7, Mac, and Linux do not seem to need this alignment. How important is this alignment to performance on XP? Check out these benchmarks at HotHardware.

I also note that I recently purchased a hybrid drive (Momentus 500GB hard drive with 4GB Flash) that might be one of these “Advanced Format” 512e drives, although it doesn't say so on the label. (Possibly because they consider it hidden by the flash interface?) Formatting definitely took a long time, although the flash interface might have helped keep it from being 6 hours.

So Now What?

Make sure you know what you're buying. Keep an eye out for “advanced format”, “512e”, or “4k” designations. This will be especially important if replacing drives in a raid array. In fact, before using the new drives in a raid array (even matched 512e sets) I would want to contact the RAID manufacturer and get their advice.

Author: Tim Mangan is a Microsoft MVP for App-V and a CTP with Citrix. He holds the position of "Kahuna" at TMurgent Technologies and now considers himself a "researcher" (which means he web searches everything twice). He has spoken at every BriForum and other venues. Read more from Tim at his home blog or website.

Why Brian Madden and Chetan Venkatesh are missing the point about the future of VDI. It's really about the data.

Tim Mangan — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 04:00:00 GMT

After sitting engrossed in the breakout session that Brian Madden and Chetan Venkatesh presented at BriForum 2010 ("Deconstructing Brian's Paradox: VDI is here, like it or not."), independently both Brian and Chetan approached me and commented that I seemed to be shaking my head through parts of the session, but I didn’t speak up. I wanted to speak up, but what I had to say wasn’t a quick 30-second question or even what Steve Balmer refers to as a “commentary with a question mark appended to the end,” so I stayed quiet. At their prodding, I agreed to write up my thoughts on the topic.

The Background

Brian has already posted regarding the session in which he and Chetan discussed the original article The “Madden’s Paradox”. They each had very different views.

To pull a quote from the original article, the Paradox refers to Brian’s contention that “You only choose VDI because you want server-based computing but TS can’t cut it, and then to manage your VDI environment, you implement a shared master image system that makes your VDI behave just like Terminal Server”. Brian has further implied that this this means client-based VDI will better succeed more than server-based VDI garnering all of the hype (but that we need offline VDI capabilities for client based VDI to work), and maybe server VDI getting all of the hype doesn’t make any sense. (Forgive me Brian if I got you wrong, but that is how I interpreted it.)

In the presentation, Chetan made a potent other case. In his world, the PC as we know it is dead and server-based VDI is the future. I can’t possibly do his points justice, so hopefully you were at BriForum and can watch the video so you can understand his points accurately. [Unrelated to the rest of this post, I’ll nitpick and point out that Chetan’s proposal--which stated that 65-70% of all desktops will be server-based VDI in 5 years--does not pass my smell test. (Nor would a claim that all VDI flavors combined will be 90% within 5 years.) I find it totally unsupportable due to Newton’s first law (a body at rest tends to stay at rest), however this is really just a side (or snide) comment and I really appreciated hearing his points of view].

In the session the two made their points about why they thought their view of the future was the correct one. For those not at the session, the most telling difference between their viewpoints was their beliefs in the ratios of VDI deployments they expect to see five years down the road. Chetan believes 70% of all desktops will be server-based VDI. Brian thinks most VDI deployments (he was less specific towards a number) will be client-based. So why did they notice me shaking my head? Because I think they were both wrong about the problem. Here I will try to explain why. (It might take more than 30 seconds.)

Re-writing History

In some ways, Brian is correct in my view for his assertions that the limitations of server-based VDI (at least as practiced today) producing a user experience no better than TS at a higher cost. And Chetan may also deserve some credit for asserting that it just doesn’t matter, because the old assumptions that caused “fat client” domination for the last (almost) 20 years no longer hold. But I have a different view, and one that screams out “You’re both wrong!!!!!!"

A different way to view the last 20 years of computing history is to not consider it the era of the PC, but to consider it the era of the Application. The concept of “Information Technology” (IT) was born in the desire to increase business productivity of employees and companies by making Applications available to users. Citrix may be known for calling it “Access, to anything from anywhere”, but we all know that this was “access to applications.” From making applications available to making them stable by controlling how they become available to controlling access to the applications (both license management and security), it has all been about the application. The PC has been nothing more than a tool.

I believe, however, that the era of the application is coming to an end. In my mind this era will be replaced by another. It isn’t all about the application anymore. It’s all about the data.

It’s All About The Data

I think Tom Kite (not the golfer) said it best in his blog: “Go ahead, erase all of my .exe files, but don't you dare touch my data. Take word away from me, leave me my .doc files. I'll be able to find something that can process the data eventually”. Given that the hardware no longer increases capacity at such a high rate, we may soon find that the main reason for a desktop refresh is to get a clean copy of the operating system because ours has bogged down with too much junk. Extract my stuff off, give me a clean copy, plop it back on, and I’m good to go for another year.

At BriForum 2008, I presented a session called “The Data Problem” in which I discussed the need to identify the various types of data so we can build tools to successfully extract the right data, only the right data, and all of the right data. I think it would be fair to characterize the response as “Yeah, but that is way too big of a problem for me to get involved with”.

Incidentally, because server based VDI--when using a common image--attempts extraction (at logoff) and injection (at next logon), it has some additional benefit here. Of course today’s tools miss out on the “only the right data” part, storing too much in the deltas, but a server-based VDI user should experience less OS performance degradation over time. Not that this is a major reason to think server based VDI; it takes time to degrade, client based refresh on occasion is an option, and if this becomes important enough the client based world can implement the same type of solution.

But I sense a change in the air that is more fundamental when it comes to data. We are moving into a more dynamic world. The issues we face in IT are much larger than just handing the “new employee’s work and home applications at the same time. We need more than barriers between the applications and operating systems; layers, extractions, and injections. Don’t get me wrong: virtual machines, virtual applications, security appliances and methodologies are all great tools that we need; but these are tools and not solutions.

The primary change forcing an end to the era of the application is this: Users no longer equate to a device on a one to one basis. Users expect, and are receiving more and more, connectivity from anywhere.

Just this week I witnessed an extraordinary event, at least it was to me. I saw a user unplug a 10Mbps lan connection and use his 3G phone data connection to connect his laptop to the internet because it was faster than the service provided by the building. With Blackberries, smart phones, and iPads becoming standard fare, people expect to connect from multiple devices at different times and locations. We expect to access our work life from the road or home, and our home life (what is left of it anyway) when we are at work. TS, Server or Client based VDI--those are just implementation tools. In the end, we want access. But while we have been trained to think of it as access to applications, I firmly believe it is access to what the applications do for us. And in the end, what applications do for us is allow us to access and manipulate data. In the new era approaching, it will all be about the data.

Data used to be stuff in a file. Or maybe stuff in a database. It isn’t any more. My data is stuff in a whole bunch of files and a whole bunch of databases. On a whole bunch of servers. Stored at all sorts of companies. My applications work with all sorts of odd collections of data, not only my data but sometimes other peoples' data (that they choose to expose). When I read my email, accessing my stuff means I pull data from multiple Exchange servers (one for work and one or more for personal use). But it also links me into to data from places like LinkedIn, and Facebook, and presence-tracking data apps.

Wherever I am, and whatever device I have in front of me, what I want from IT today is access to all of my stuff. (Note: one must make an irrelevant passing reference to George Carlin when using that word.) My view is that we have evolved the technology to the point where we can say that not only are the platforms just tools, but even the applications themselves are becoming tools. Tools to access our stuff.

The application that is appropriate when I am on a large display device may not be my choice when on a small display device. Available input devices also dictate application choice. (You’ll never run word processing on a device designed with one button.) Network speed and latency also matter.

The job of Information Technology in the future will be to manage all of this data. Give me access to my data wherever and however. Turn all of those bits of data into something useful to me: Information.

Back to Head Shaking

Of Brian and Chetan’s views as expressed at BriForum, I am drawn more to Brian’s, but only because I'm very selfish. If server-based VDI wins out (as Chetan proposed), all of my work stuff will only be available when I connect into work--and it will remain separate from my personal stuff, walled off and segregated. If client-based VDI wins out (as Brian proposed), I’ll have access to all my stuff on the laptop I’m now carrying, and probably in a relatively seamless way to me.

But ultimately, I shake my head because I think they are both wrong. It isn’t about what platform technology prevails, or where the apps will run. It’s all about the data. And we need to start our thinking of the future from there. I might not be able to express my views as elegantly as others, but hopefully this makes sense to at least a few people out there. Maybe they can say it better.

Traveling with technology (or how to make new friends at the airport)

Tim Mangan — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 04:00:00 GMT

On the way back from BriForum, we ran into weather trouble in Atlanta that left us in an over-crowded airport, filled with a whole lot of miserable people (and whiney) kids. Knowing that we would be stuck for at least another hour, and already having drained my laptop on the previously delayed flight, I scanned for the ever popular electrical outlet. Fat chance on that.

Finding them filled, I took a nearby empty seat. The guy next to me gave me a look when I started to unzip my backpack. As far as he was concerned, he was there first and had dibs if a functioning outlet opened up. But no worry. I did something I've never seen anyone do at an airport other than me. And it is so simple! His look, a combination of mistrust and macho ire, changed to one of confusion when I pulled it out. And then he smiled. I got up, unplugged one of the lucky people already plugged into the wall (as politely as possible) and plugged me in. And then the people around me applauded!

Note to self. Always pack one of these for future flights.

Updates on Microsoft App-V

Tim Mangan — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 11:54:00 GMT

This is an updated post. Microsoft happened to make additional announcements today, after I posted!

There is a variety of news regarding App-V to share. None of it might be earth-shattering individually, but collectively it adds up.

1. App-V 4.5 SP2 Upgrade Released

2. Microsoft Releasing “Pkg” format specification

3. TMurgent releases free tool to read “Pkg” files

4. TMurgent releases White Paper and Video on App-V 4.6 DSC and Transparency

5. Attachmate "first ISV" to release in SFT format.

6. Microsoft hosted "recipe" site launched.

Each are described below…

App-V 4.5 SP2 Upgrade Released

Microsoft released an “upgrade” release for App-V 4.5 called SP2. The release is described in KB980847 - Description of Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 Service Pack 2, and may be downloaded from Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 Service Pack 2, This release was also made available through Microsoft Updates, which is a very scary thing to me! When I train people in our training classes, I warn them that when installing App-V components, to select the choice to not enable the component to be upgraded via Microsoft Updates. While the upgrade is fine, there usually needs to be a coordination for the order of these upgrades (client, server, sequencer), so automation is a really bad idea in my book!

Microsoft released 4.6 in February, and the client portions of this release play catch-up with some of the new support in 4.6 (such as for Office 2010 support) but not others (such as x64 support). But even 4.6 customers might want to check this out if they use the full App-V infrastructure because 4.6 uses the 4.5 App-V Management Server and Streaming Server, and that is also updated with some important hot-fixes.

The features listed in the documentation http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff699129.aspx , but to summarize:

Support for Office 2010 as a Virtual Application. Microsoft made client improvements in 4.6 to better support Office 2010 (and 2010 includes changes to better support App-V). These changes were retrofitted to the client in 4.5 SP2.
Support for Database Mirroring. This has long been a huge bone of contention for App-V Customers. Just ask Shawn Bass about this. Multisite customers have long wanted to deploy with a mirrored database at major remote sites.
Two important fixes, previously released as hotfixes:

- Improved client support for PCs with certain “full disk encryption” products.

- Fix for management server cores that fail under certain circumstances

It isn’t clear to me if the disk encryption hotfix for the client is available on 4.6 or maybe already included in 4.6, but that is the only documented change that might not be available to 4.6 clients if they implement the server side of this service pack.

Microsoft Releasing “Pkg” format specification

When users run App-V virtual applications, any file and registry changes that the virtual application tries to make are captured and shuttled off to a file with an extension of “.PKG”. The format of this file has never been documented. Last year, Microsoft posted the format specification for the “.SFT” file, but now Microsoft is finally documenting the Pkg. This has been a request for a long time. While the SFT format was reasonably understandable, both Kalle Sumanaki and I had tools that could understand the format, until recently (see below) the Pkg has been impenetrable. Microsoft finally documented the format. Why?

The SFT format was documented to aid third party vendors of packaging tools so they could produce SFTs in addition to MSIs. We believe the PKG has now been documented to aid the anti-virus vendors so they can now treat this file as more than a black blob. Not a bad idea.

TMurgent releases free tool to read “Pkg” files

For four years I have been working on a tool to read the Pkg file. It is, hands down, the most obtuse file format I have ever seen. The reason I want to read Pkg files is two-fold.

First, we need to understand (and verify) what is getting written to which Pkg file. There are actually a minimum of three Pkg files when a user runs an application, one of which roams with the user and the others stay behind.

Second, sometimes users do funny things. When they do it to a virtual application, the funny things end up in a Pkg. If it breaks the app, we have always needed to “reset the users pkg”, which essentially puts them back as if they were using the app for the first time. While it solved the problem, it left the user to re-establish all of their customizations that they make (things like what toolbars to show or what options to set). With a tool that can look into the Pkg we can potentially find the bad file or registry setting and remove it.

A couple of weeks ago I released a free tool (Download page for PkgView at TMurgent) ) that allows you to look into a Pkg file and dump the contents of files. You can’t edit with this tool, but once you find the culprit you can remove by using the /EXE option in the package.

Kalle has also released an update to his Application Virtualization Explorer tool (not free, but worth it). This tool allows for modification of SFTs, and viewing of PKGs.

TMurgent releases white paper and video on App-V 4.6 DSC and Transparency

When Microsoft released the Dynamic Suite Composition (DSC) feature with the 4.5 release, they indicated that it was for “simple” dynamic application integrations only. They did not define what they meant by “simple”, nor did they fully describe the way that the implementation works. In experience, we see customers doing simple integrations of things like plug-ins to web browsers, but more complex things like Office and plugins to Office have caused customers a lot of problems.

Recently I did some research to determine how DSC layers file and registry information from the multiple sources (the client host information, SFTs from multiple packages, and saved changes from the PKG files associated with those packages. The White Paper (at TMurgent.com) describes the testing, using purpose built apps, and test results. The Video (Episode 10 of Sequencing with Tim Mangan) walks you through the test results and proposes some “better practices” for working with DSC.

Attachmate "first" ISV to release in App-V SFT format

Microsoft announces today that Attachmate is the "first" ISV to release in App-V SFT format. Details at Attachmate here, however I know that I have released tools in the past in that format and, if memory serves me, Kalle has also. This is something we "expected" to happen way back in 2001 when we released SoftGrid, but it never materialized.

Microsoft launches App-V Recipe Site

Microsoft announced today a Recipe site for collecting information on how to sequence applications. This is something we have really wanted for a long time. It is a colaborative site that all may add to.

I’ll look forward to seeing many of you at Briforum next week, or at my training class in Boston the following week. Be sure to say “hi”.

Author: Tim Mangan is a Microsoft MVP for App-V and holds the position of Kahuna at TMurgent Technologies. He has spoken at every BriForum and other venues. Read more at his home blog or website.

Tool for Publishing App-V on XenApp Farms

Tim Mangan — Mon, 03 May 2010 04:01:00 GMT

If you use both App-V and XenApp together, once you have deployed App-V virtual applications to your XenApp 4.5 and 5.0 Farm, you will want to publish the shortcuts to users. This can be a slow and tedious process for App-V virtual applications when using the XenApp Management Console, requiring you to reference sfttray, the OSD name, and then locate the correct icon file. This winter I was doing some work with XenApp and decided to make this process a little easier.

Originally, I located a downloadable tool from the Citrix Developer Network "Code Share" program called "XenApp Publishing Extensions 1.0" that looked promising. Shannon Ma, who no longer works for Citrix, had created this tool to allow you to right click on an existing application shortcut and pop up a wizard that would publish the thing the shortcut points to into the Management Console. I found a problem with using this tool with App-V. The problem tool was that because App-V is using a launcher program, the published icon ends up displayed to the user as a black box instead of the icon used by the original shortcut.

So I took the source code and fixed that issue. At the same time, I happened to be contacted by a customer asking about publishing to XenApp and was interested in my App-V Deploy and Publish Tools for deploying App-V virtual applications without a back-end infrastructure. In talking with the customer, we decided that a bulk publishing tool was needed. Using some code from the updated Publishing Extensions tool, I created a new wizard based tool that will input information from all of the App-V apps from the App-V management console instead of a shortcut. Start this wizard, use checkboxes to select which virtual appications, which servers in the farm, and enter the users or user groups from Active Directory, and it publishes all into the XenApp console. No matter how your users receive applications from XenApp (pn, pn agent, wi), they now have access.

The two tools are now available for free on the CDN Code Share as "XenApp Publishing Extensions 2.0". These two tools work with any style of App-V distribution, including the full App-V Management Server, SCCM, and "Stand Alone Client". The tools work with XenApp 4.5 and 5.0, but not 6.0 due to changes in the Citrix SDKs. They are free. Information about them, and downloads for both an msi and source code are available from the Citrix site at http://community.citrix.com/display/xa/Citrix+XenApp+Publishing+Extensions+2.0

Hyper-V on a laptop (Take 2).

Tim Mangan — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 22:30:00 GMT

Back in November of 2008, I posted an article called A Look at Microsoft "Hyper-V Server" on a Notebook , where I detailed a failed experiment to get a type 1 hypervisor (bare metal) on a notebook. The experiment failed and I was forced to resort to a dual-boot solution.

Fast forward to April 2010. The year that Brian, six months prior to my prior post, had written his infamous post that claimed VDI technology would be ready for "wholesale desktop replacement by June of 2010". Now one would think that if the mainstream would be ready for VDI in June, a bleeding-edger like me might be ready in April. Brian has since eaten crow and backed off of that prediction (not that I can't jab him about it now and then) as VDI proved out to be more difficult to deliver for production than some had thought. Here in 2010 the basics are in place for smaller deployments, but the tools really are not sufficient for mainstream use except for by a few that don't mind all of the hoops they will need to jump through to get it working smoothly.

But where, you ask, is Tim with his need for a client hypervisor for offline use? Well, I am further along but just not where I want to be. First, let's review where I want to be. I don't claim to be mainstream in this need, but if I can be satisfied I am sure that others closer to the mainstream can be too.

Somehow in the last 10 years I have stopped being a developer and have become a consultant. I still do some software development, but on a regular basis I use my laptop to test things. Not having an office to go to (well, not unless you call the kitchen an office) my private life and my business life have very little separation. I might get separation on the golf course, where my laptop is not allowed, but otherwise I'm pretty much always ready to do some work wherever I am. So I need a personal computer to manage my daily activity, such as email and word processing. But I also need access to a PC with one of several versions of Microsoft's Visual Studio. Sometimes I do development for customers and each manages to use a different version. So separate VMs with different versions of the tools, and often VPN access, makes a lot of sense to ensure complete separation between customers. And then there is this whole App-V thing that is the major focus of my business. I need to be able to put up a server, database, and Active Directory infrastructure to demonstrate App-V to customers. Plus VMs to sequence and VMs to test. Throw in SCCM or XenApp/XenDesktop and I have a heck of a lot of needs for a single laptop. Thank goodness disks have gotten bigger (and faster on the laptops).

So where am I now? Citrix has a Type-1 hypervisor I could be testing, but you can only have 2 VMs at a time. That is a non starter. VMware might or might not have the same (I'm not sure if it is available yet because I lost total interest when they said it would be limited at first also). I am waiting for Virtual Computer to support the graphics chip on the really hot new laptop I bought this year, but I think they are making headway. Neocleus wouldn't even talk to me if I wasn't at least a medium sized enterprise. I've done all of the Type-2 hypervisors, from VMware Workstation to Virtual PC, which are OK -- but I want more performance!

So for my new laptop (for now) I have chosen a hybrid approach. Last year Microsoft included some lesser noticed improvements in Hyper-V that almost make it reasonable for a laptop. In the end, I opted for a dual-boot setup using Hyper-V R2.

My personal boot is using Windows 7 Ultimate x64. I run this probably about 70% of the time. All of my email and word processing happens when booted in Windows 7.

Using the "boot to VHD" techniques that Microsoft describes for Windows 7, I installed a second boot option on the laptop that stores itself inside a VM, and used bcdedit to make the machine dual boot. The difference I did is that rather than installing another Windows 7 in the VHD, I installed Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyyper-V. When I boot up, I am presented these two choices, Windows 7 for Windows Server 2008 R2.

Booting to Windows 7, I can see a vhd file on my C: partition where the Server 2008 R2 is stored. Booting to Windows Server 2008 R2, I see the contents of that VHD as my C: drive, but then I mount the actual hard drive partition used by Windows 7 as a D: drive. I make this server a domain controller for a new test domain, and use Hyper-V to create new virtual machines, which I store on the D: drive, that live in this domain. Now I can have lots of server and desktop VMs for whatever I need. Using SCVMM (loaded in one of those VMs) I can back VMs off to external drives when I am "in the office" when i finally reach disk saturation (which I estimate should happen by November this year unless I add a second drive into the empty slot on the laptop).

Inside of Hyper-V my wireless internet card is now working, which was a major issue before. Hybernation is supposed to work, and seems to, but quite frankly I don't trust it. The only problem is that there is no driver for this funky remote control card that HP includes for Windows Media Center, but I don't use that anyway (and if I did it would be from the personal image). Performance is pretty good - I would say on par with the Dell server I bought just 2 years ago, although I'm sure I can't scale up with as many VMs churning disk access at once.

Ultimately I really want that type-1 client hypervisor. I want the performance and I want my email when working in the VMs. But for now, this is OK.

_________

PS: I'll see some of you at my App-V training classes this month and next, or at Citrix Synergy where they actually asked me to speak! How times have changed...

AutoVirt: File Virtualization

Tim Mangan — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:14:00 GMT

I had a chance to meet the CTO of AutoVirt, Klavs Landberg, the other night and to learn about what they do. A small three year old venture capital backed company based in Nashua, New Hampshire, they have what seems to be an interesting idea they call "File Virtualization". They may not be the first with this idea, with EMC, Acopia, and Brocade either in or previously talking about this space, but others may have failed by being too early.

File Virtualization is about breaking the relationship between remote file references and the remote files themselves. By virtualizing the references to remote files and shares, you become free to manipulate where things are actually stored and become more creative about duplication, all without having to worry about breaking an application because you moved things.

If you have worked with DFS and DFS-R (formerly FRS), you probably understand some of the limitations in what DFS provides. Companies that have lots of existing file shares (and who doesn't?) need to pretty much manually modify the application references to shares and files to use DFS. AutoVirt doesn't require you to do this. Instead, automates the process of setting up the indirection by scanning the environment for shares and configures what looks to me to be a DNS broker service. When an application makes a remote file request, that broker redirects application requests to be best location. So now you can use the broker to move or replicate. Being based on DNS, the broker also takes care of locality pretty easily too.

I haven't worked with the product at this point, so there may be lurking issues with what they are doing, but Klavs (pronounced "Claus") had excellent answers to all the questions posed to him by me and others. The company is focused on the enterprise, but I'm not sure that their might not be a more important role in the Cloud for this stuff. Check them out at www.autovirt.com. If you already have checked them out, let us know what you think.