Jeroen van de Kamp's Blog - All Comments

re: Bring Your Own Application with Microsoft App-V

vgernyc — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 18:19:52 GMT

This is just my interpretation. Microsoft seems to be looking into a successor to App-V

www.zdnet.com/.../11009

re: New free tool lets you manage XenClient with Microsoft SCCM

Peter Blum — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 19:27:38 GMT

@jklincewicz The Synchronizer does a number of things including management of XenClient, deployment and update of images, policy controls for VMs, enables disk encryption, allows VM backup and recovery, etc. So the integration is a pairing with Synchronizer that allows you to leverage your exisitng investments in SCCM and gain new capabilities with Synchronizer.

re: New free tool lets you manage XenClient with Microsoft SCCM

jklincewicz — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 13:58:30 GMT

So does this eliminate the need for the Synchornizer Xenserver Appliance in the back end ? My organization has little appetite for a second hypervisor standard in the data center (even if it IS an "appliance.") SCCM, though, they can manage.

re: New free tool lets you manage XenClient with Microsoft SCCM

Tom Reed — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 18:41:47 GMT

NxTop from Virtual Computer has had this feature for some time, we are leading the client hypervisor world. We have enterprise customers using our SCCM installer today in production. VC is also a memebr of the system center alliance and we demo'd this feautre at MMS. Personally its one of my favorite features of all our management features!

re: Free XenClient 2.0 Integration Toolkit for Config Manager released

Mike Bijl — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 12:44:51 GMT

WOW!!! Is this the missing link for client hypervisors to be implemented in the enterprise environment?

re: Bring Your Own Application with Microsoft App-V

Craig Miller — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 03:20:23 GMT

This type of technology was something I was really wishing to see from Microsoft in the next version of Windows for a couple years now. I envisioned it being hooked into the UAC, that would automatically trigger a sequence when a software install was detected...sadly from what they've shown at BUILD, they seem to be ditching the App-V technology and pushing the new App-X technology down our stovepipe. Somehow I envision this move to be a failure since it requires the developers to redevelop the application in a App-X environment/model and good luck with that.... look at how successful they were on getting all developers to release their applications as an MSI installable executable.

re: Bring Your Own Application with Microsoft App-V

Frank Peter Schultze — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 13:18:25 GMT

I like that on-demand sequencing idea. It is an option when you're willing to allow users to install their own software and want to shelter their OS from clutter and possible damage.

re: Bring Your Own Application with Microsoft App-V

Kalle Saunamäki — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 10:43:52 GMT

@Matthias,

I understand your point about complex applications, but it is still the same problem when trying to drive Sequencer automatically = complex MSIs might not install silently (which is, if I understood correctly, you idea here) or even if they do, resulting [virtual] application that you capture might not be in correct state when some critical configuration parameter was skipped during setup. Granted, you can use also EXE based installer which is of course a plus vs. doing it locally using dedicated engine. And yes, WiX (or DTF subset specifically in context of this discussion) is MSI only technology.

Regarding use of non-MS originated products: would you not have that same issue with any other technology or toolkit under the sun if looking it like that? Would not that same argument hold true for users using your product(s), be it free or paid-for?

btw, are you coming into European App-V UG day in November (I guess you are, since Login is the organizing party), maybe we can continue the discussion over there about fine points of automatic conversions :-)

re: Bring Your Own Application with Microsoft App-V

Matthias Wessner — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 09:58:38 GMT

@Kalle

I assume you mean creating an App-V package without a sequencer? This would not work with more complex Setups, which is crucial for success of the concept from our view. Right now we have the idea of managing a sequencer pool in the back end. WiX from my point of view only supports MSI and we need to support also other setup routines. We dont want to dig toooooo deep into App-V to easily support new versions that hopefully support the same Command Line Options.

To be honest I dont know the Lib-V too much bzut because this is not official Microsoft I fear a little bit to use it. What happens if a new version off App-V is released. Then we would be stuck to wait until someone updates Lib-V.

Thanks a lot for this idea. We keep in in mind for further development if it can solve some upcoming problems.

re: Bring Your Own Application with Microsoft App-V

Kalle Saunamäki — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 08:50:17 GMT

@Jeroen, @Matthias

Very interesting concept; but IMHO running on-demand sequencing using VM and Microsoft's Sequencer is quite heavy-handed process especially if running it on local VM. Have you guys thought about parsing MSI directly (would not help with complex MSIs with licensing things built-in/custom actions etc., but success rate for those using automated Sequencer process is about the same, like Carl mentioned) and outputting App-V package directly?

As you may or may not know, we do have App-V SDK (Lib-V) available which would handle the technicality of the second part, first part can be done e.g. with DTF which is part of WiX.

re: Bring Your Own Application with Microsoft App-V

Matt Diglio — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 14:11:55 GMT

Great work! I'm excited to see someone take an interest in this and start developing a product.

You mentioned trying this method using other app virtualization solutions. I have a UIA program that uses the Citrix Streaming Profiler SDK. This will virtualize the app, instantly publish the application in the citrix farm to all users or to only the user who wanted the app, and then send an email to an admin for licensing review purposes.

I'd be happy to discuss the results of using this in our environment or give you the different pieces of code used to make it work. The hard part is already done for us in the Profiler SDK.

You can watch a video of it here (if GoView is working...sometimes takes a minute to load the video)

blog.scottsdalecc.edu/diglio

re: Bring Your Own Application with Microsoft App-V

Magnar Johnsen — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 13:51:26 GMT

This is cool, nice work! I hope this will be a feature in future APP-V. Why not integrate APP-V client into the windows installer, and the sequencer into Visual studio?

re: Bring Your Own Application with Microsoft App-V

Matthias Wessner — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 11:03:19 GMT

@Carl

I totally agree, that this current solution has its limits and in any state it will have limits but as Jeroen wrote we are working on an interactive solution, where users can really run the setup routine. I can also understand your worries about licensing etc. but we see customers, especially in very large enterprises, that have problems to manage all their over 10.000+ applications. With this tool you can give some users the possibility to make applications available without hurting your underlying system. As Gabe wrote in another article a couple of vendors created some tools around it but I thought if you already have a virtualization layer why to introduce a new one. I demoed this tool last week on our roadshow and first some people thought that I might have come crazy but then after discussing the scenarious a litte bit their faces changed and they startet to think about prossible scenarios in their environment.

@Dustin - cool - sad is that Matt Diglio did not publish it. I also had this idea already for a while. and while working on the App-V analyzer with Falko together I was in coding and scripting mood so I also started then finally this project. I am very curious about feedback guys. Enjoy trying it out!

re: Bring Your Own Application with Microsoft App-V

dustin.fennell — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 06:24:55 GMT

We've had what we call "user installed apps" working in our XenApp environment for over a year now. Our system admin, Matt Diglio, developed and demonstrated this functionality quite a long time ago. Works with .msi and .exe files. Automatically virtualizes the application and then publishes it to the end-user and notifies the system admin. We have not made this available to all our end-users yet, but it is working well. I often demo it.

re: Bring Your Own Application with Microsoft App-V

Carl Walker — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 19:25:40 GMT

Its an interesting idea, but as soon as you get past Firefox I can see it rapidly breaking down. In fact, a default install of Firefox leaves the automatic updating enabled, not a good idea when sequencing, or even creating standard format packages. More apps than not have some kind of first run requirement which App-V has allowed us to remediate for a greatly improved user experience, this solution doesn't appear to have an answer for that and it would need one to be of any real use. The ultimate outcome of this seems to indicate an automated application packaging solution which, owing to the general nature of applications, would be unbearably complicated to code; and if it doesn't handle complex apps what's the point of it? Users would become rapidly disillusioned with a solution that couldn't handle the majority of what they needed packaging.

Also, how does it handle licence keys, and licensoing in general; it's an Asset Managers worst nightmare!