The VDI Penny Is Starting to drop.

Enviroman (Oliver Sills, Product Manager for AppSense Environment Manager) was in the office the other day, pestering me about signing a petition to change the Environment Manager “colour” from green to Tangerine – something to do with some UK footy club. I told him the Budgie Smugglers don’t look any better in Tangerine, so stop sitting on my desk :-)

Just about then the phone rings, it was a Solution Architect from a large software company. “Tell him about Personalization”, Environman whispers in my ear. I covered the phone, told him to go way, and went back to the call.

Turns out one of his clients was trying to deploy 600+ Virtual Desktops, and it had just dawned on them that Policy, Profiles and the User Personality had become a nightmare to maintain when using a Non Persistent Pooled Desktop environment.

Think about it – each user, every time they log in, has a brand new base model PC.

This Client did a Proof of Concept – easy – P To V a couple of desktops, load a client, connect in using RDP – jobs a good’un – look Mum no hands – I’m doing VDI :-)

So then they ticked all the boxes, app compatibility – tick, ease of use – tick, centrally managed and deployed – tick, user acceptance – tick, user personalization – tick – hey, not so fast.

You CAN have a tick in that box if you are talking One to One, dedicated hosted virtual desktops for a small number of users – otherwise, you need to think again.

It’s like when I started talking to the Aussie market about AppSense back in 2004 “Yes I hear what you say, but I’ve only got 5 servers – it’s not a problem” 6 months later “Yes I hear what you say, but I’ve only got 10 servers – it’s not a problem” 6 months later “Our farm is out of control, now we have 15 Citrix servers we now understand what you guys were on about 6 months ago”

As we always say – we don’t hold a grudge – and we don’t ever say “I told you so”.  After all we’re from AppSense – we’re here to help :-)

Virtual Desktops are starting to ramp up, and unfortunately with some clients projects, the devil will be in the detail.

Like the client we are now helping, they thought the “Profile Stuff” built into the VDI solution would be the easy bit. “There’re tools built into the base product” they say – yes there are, but those built in tools can be compared to other in-built free software like NTBackup – yes it will backup a file, but it’s not granular enough, and it just won’t cut it in an Enterprise environment – that’s why companies invest in a Third Party backup products.

AppSense is exactly the same. Built in “Profile” tools or features are o.k. for a simple small deployment where one size fits all, but the reality is most organisations will need more.  The reason for this is simple, profile management tools are there to solve profile issues such as bloat and logon times.. they are not designed to be cross platform, cross delivery mechanism personalization solutions, not to mention the need for policy action control also.

It’s just not as easy as saying “We use Roaming Profiles and redirected folders” – try reimaging every PC in your business, every morning, and see if it causes a few hassles for users.

So we keep plugging away out there – educating the market in advance, some clients “get it” up front and they’re the ones with the smooth running, no surprises VDI projects.

As for the rest of you – we’ll be here, happy to answer questions, happy to show and tell – all with passion and enthusiasm.

After all – we’re from AppSense – we’re here to help :-)

DABCC Podcast – AppSense (Martin Ingram) And Doug Brown Discuss Citrix XenDesktop 4 & User Environment Management

Douglas Brown interviews Martin Ingram, Vice President of Strategy at AppSense. Douglas and Martin discuss the recent release of Citrix XenDesktop 4, what this means for the desktop virtualization, AppSense, and VMware. Martin also talks a bit about their upcoming “user installed applications” technology which will allow end-users to install their own applications and have those apps roam with the user while allowing IT to centrally manage these ‘one off’ applications centrally.

The podcast is hosted on DABCC.com and can be found here

DABCC Podcast

AppSense Achieves Record Growth in Q3

Despite such tough economic times, I am very pleased to be part of an industry sector that despite budget cuts, is operating at a profitable level and achieving record growth.  Virtualization is a core part of many computing environments, and as technologies progress greater costs reductions can be achieved and as such is able to secure IT CapEx budget and continue to fuel virtualization development.

AppSense have experience profitable year on year growth since inception back in 1999, yet despite all the financial trouble we read about on a daily basis, 2009 has proven to be a record breaking year for AppSense.

A huge part of this success has come from our strong Channel, following huge investment and years of close relationships.  With that said, to accommodate the huge uplift in demand for our solution set, AppSense have now reached out to a leading training company to help provide technical support and knowledge transfer for our ever growing Channel.

Further details on this can be found in this press release.

Citrix & VMware VDI Offerings – Is AppSense User Environment Management ‘Really’ included in their products?

I recently read a great article titled ‘Windows 7 May Spur Virtual Desktops, On and Off the iPhone’ on CIO.com by Kevin Fogarty.

It is a great article and brings attention to the options available to us in how we can deliver desktop (sessions) to our users, even when they are not sat in front of a typical PC or Thin Client device – bring on, the mobile/cell phone device.  However, I have recently received a few emails and mentions on my Twitter Account in relation to the write-up regarding how AppSense is represented in the article.

The article goes on the reference how ”VMware, Citrix and a range of other companies are putting clients on smart phones” and as part of this mobile discussion AppSense User Environment Management is rightly referenced as “The User Environment Manager from AppSense, for example, is designed to make a virtual desktop mimic the real thing by allowing end users to make changes, install software add photos, store cookies and do all the other things they’d do on an actual “personal” computer”.

Unfortunately however there appears to be a slight misrepresentation on the relationship between AppSense and the vendors Citrix& VMware, in that it says AppSense code is part of both the VMware and Citrix VDI offerings, “AppSense, whose code is part of both VMware and Citrix’s VDI offerings, stores all that data and code on the server and reloads it all every time that user logs on, no matter through what device the access comes” .

While AppSense enjoy a very close and strong relationship with both vendors, providing some of the strategic requirements for the VDI offerings in many of the largest enterprise deployments, I must at this point highlight that the AppSense capabilities come from a separate solution outside of VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop- in the form of the AppSense Management Suite.

The AppSense Management Suite is a standalone management framework and solution set which completely separates all elements of the user from the underlying desktop session, operating system and application set.  While this platform agnostic technology integrates seamlessly with the VMware and Citrix offerings, AppSense code is NOT part of any VMware or Citrix offering, and must be implemented in addition to the VDI solution from either vendor.

Hope this clears up any confusion, and please do remember I fully support the article and agree with the other points made.. I just wanted to ensure no one is disappointed when they trial or purchase either VMware View or Citrix XenDesktop and find out there is no AppSense software built in J

Look forward to reading more great articles on the possibilities of desktop deliver.. and of course that AppSense is a key part to this personal computing shift…

(the original article can be read here).

Windows 7, The Secrets to Migration Success…

Unless you’ve been living on a desert island in the mid-Pacific for the past few months (actually, that sounds pretty good!), you’ve probably heard something about a new Microsoft OS called Windows 7.  By all accounts, this OS looks set to be the next logical upgrade from XP (with many companies skipping Vista for reasons I don’t need to go into right now!).  So not only will companies be looking to upgrade their existing physical PCs to this wonderful new OS, but the availability of Win7 will inevitably bring about a re-assessment of the corporate desktop estate. That re-assessment will of course consider the prospect of lowering management costs by moving from physical machines to a virtual desktop environment; Win7 seems much more ‘VDI friendly’ than any of its predecessors.

So….a company-wide OS upgrade is coming….  A migration from physical to virtual desktops is probably also coming…….

You might be thinking a couple of things about this….
1. “Will I see my family again?”
and
2. “I want to make this upgrade really work.  I’m not going to have any support calls on this and I’m going to use this to reduce my costs….”

Well, I’m not sure what we can do about the family challenge, but I do know how you can answer number 2.

Let’s break the problem down into two parts; 1. upgrading to Win7 on the physical PC, and 2. the migration to a virtual Win7 environment.

Upgrading to Win7 on the physical PC

Win7 is quite different to XP.  You may very well have problems running legacy or homegrown XP apps on Win7.  In order to solve this problem, you might have to consider virtualizing troublesome apps rather than wait for upgrades from multiple app vendors. 

Another problem you’ll have is the user profile data and desktop setup scripts.  It’s highly unlikely that anything the user has done to the XP machine to personalize it (at both the OS and the application level) will be compatible with the new Win7 desktop.  This is because XP uses a completely different User Profile format and structure to that of Win7, meaning it is not as simple as re-using their old profiles on the new OS.  The result?  All your upgraded employees have to re-personalize their desktop.  I don’t know about you, but I’ve done a lot to personalize my desktop and applications over the years.  I have all my apps just the way I want them, my email signature and rules are set just right and there’s probably a hundred other settings I’ve forgotten about and wouldn’t know how to re-do on a new OS.  What a great start to my Win7 experience….a bland, impersonal machine.  By the way, the same thing goes for policy settings, such as printer and file drive access as well as other ‘logon processes’.  So, one of the most important considerations in your Win7 migration is to retain all this user-specific information (we call it the “user personality”) from the XP desktop and simply ‘inject’ this back into the new Win7 desktop following upgrade to ensure a seamless experience to the user.

Migrating from an XP PC to a Win7 virtual desktop

Rather than just upgrading physical PCs, you might want to take this opportunity to move employees over to a virtual environment.  Not only does this provide the user with a nice, new Win7 desktop, it also can provide some huge desktop management cost reduction opportunities;  no need to upgrade the desktop machine with hardware capable of running the new OS (as this can now be re-purposed as a ‘thin client’), centralized management of desktops, monitoring of the environment to reduce support costs etc .  However, the real big opportunity to reduce costs here lies in the use of a single, standardized and leveraged Win7 desktop image across the entire company.  Imagine creating ONE standardized, corporate Win7 desktop (possibly with a selection of baseline corporate apps such as Outlook and IE) and to have this provisioned to each employee as they require it.  When the employee goes home, the desktop is deleted.  No need to store and manage lots of desktops….instead they’re delivered on an ‘as-needed’ basis.

However, this standard Win7 image is by no means personal to the user – not if it’s being used by thousands of employees!  This is where the user personality comes in.  By centrally managing the user personality independent of this standard Win7 desktop, it can then be applied to the desktop when needed.  So you now have a low cost, standard Win7 estate, with employees experiencing the same working environment as when they were using their desktop PC.  Sound like heaven?

Well, it certainly might sound like futuristic, but believe me this is happening today!  I see it in many of our enterprise customers, our VAR partners and our System Integrator partners – and it’s gaining huge momentum (see Sumit Dhawan’s latest blog on this here).

 Win7 will be a game-changing event in the corporate desktop world.  It will essentially be the catalyst to a whole new way of looking at and managing the desktop – and what we know to be true is that the user aspect of the corporate PC must now be treated as a separate entity unto itself – enabling the business tools (apps and OS) to be standardized and their delivery automated, leading to huge reductions in cost (management, storage, licensing) and productive employees.

Here are some of the things we believe you must consider as part of your Win7 migration.  Remember all these things are possible today. There are some vendors who can provide some of the items below…..but there’s only one that can do them all! ;-)

Pete Rawlinson
VP WW Marketing, AppSense

 

• Low cost, low risk migration to Win7 on your physical PCs

      Seamlessly decouple all aspects of the user from the employees existing PC (XP, Vista), and reapply this data into a fresh, standard Win7 PC.  The employee sees no change to the personal settings post-upgrade.

• Eliminate the costs associated with using legacy scripts and bloated user profiles

      Your Win7 migration affords the opportunity to replace outdated and management-intensive methods to manage the user experience on the desktop.  Complex, often large login scripts can be replaced and selectively executed dependent on the user needs.  Maintenance is reduced, as is the user logon time. 

• Low cost, low risk migration to Win7 in a virtual desktop environment

      Decouple the user personality from the existing PC and store this independent of the desktop.  The user can then be redirected to a low cost, standard, virtualized Win7 image, where their personality is applied on-demand.  A low-cost physical-to-“Win7 virtual” migration process, with the employee seeing no change to their PC experience.

• Ensure seamless user experience in multi-OS desktop estate

      Regardless of whether your desktop estate is a mix of XP, Vista or Win7, the same centralized, independent user personality is able to seamlessly ‘roam’ across each OS version.  This enables you to implement Win7 into your desktop estate gradually, without having to create multiple user profiles for each OS version. 

• Establish lowest cost Win7 desktop environment through standardized, personalized desktop images

      Desktop management and storage costs can be reduced significantly by standardizing on your Win7 corporate image.  By having one standard Win7 desktop provided to employees on-demand, desktop management becomes much easier and less risky.  Including personality management into this scenario enables this standard desktop to be dynamically personalized on-access, providing the employee with their familiar PC-type experience.

• Personalize virtualized applications

      Many legacy, home grown and XP-based applications are unsuitable for use in a Win7 environment, making application virtualization a necessity.  Unless the company is prepared to virtualize each individual employee’s applications, virtualized applications must be standard and therefore non-personal in nature.  Applications must be automatically configured for each specific user and/or connecting device, and automatically personalized to the user based on their personality. You can now accelerate the Win7 roll-out since incompatible applications are virtualized, yet still remain personal to the employee.

• Quickly and easily scale Win7 implementation with no impact to user experience

      The user is provided with a consistent personal experience across multiple client OS versions, multiple delivery technologies, multiple accessing devices and accommodates the employee context (e.g. security level, accessing location etc). 

• Ensure quality user experience as your Win7 implementation scales through visibility and remediation

      Migration to Win7 in your organization is a significant and on-going event.  Adherence to SLAs and reducing support loads are paramount during this process. In addition to ensuring a consistent and personalized user experience during the Win7 migration process, you must also provide desktop optimization and remediation through reporting, monitoring and auditing of the user personality.

Process “Hibernation” Utility

Guy Leech, a contributor on this AppSense Blog has developed a utility to pause processes, minimize the process/application window, free up the Memory while paused, and provide the option to resume process at later date.

Here is the article intro along with link to the original post (containing the download):

“Ever have the need to pause a process so that you can come back to it later – maybe something that is resource hungry, difficult to get back to the same point in if you quit it or possibly doesn’t work when away from the corporate network? Then this is the utility for you – via a simple user interface it allows you to pause and resume any of your running applications/processes.”

Read more about this cool utility with option to download it here

Live from VMworld – VMware to OEM RTO Virtual Profiles™ into VMware View

Live from VMworld 2009 – A press release shows that VMware are to OEM the RTO Virtual Profiles Product into VMware View.

On the recent announcement at VMworld 2009,  VMware are planning to OEM the RTO Virtual Profiles™ technology into VMware View – this is great news, and yet another proof point of the importance of user personalization in the virtual desktop space.   It looks as though VMware have made a similar move Citrix did some months back when they acquired SepagoPROFILES for inclusion into their Xen line, and it makes total sense.

Let’s take a minute to appreciate the basic premise of how to reduce desktop TCO through virtualization.  The only way to deliver cost-effective virtual desktops is to standardize the corporate image.  However, if you standardize, then you also have to provide personalization capabilities in order to get the user adoption needed to make the transition to virtual desktops a success.  In this respect,  providing some level of personalization baked into platform solutions such as View is necessary.

By adding RTO technology, VMware will leverage the Windows User Roaming Profile -  which has been successfully used in Terminal Services environments for many years.  This will certainly ease some of the pains typically associated with Roaming Profiles, such as profile corruption and slow logon times.  However, in more complex, enterprise environments, something more than profile management is required to provide a local PC equivalent experience from a virtualized, standard corporate desktop (as Sumit Dhawan has explained here).   Personalizing a virtual desktop requires the ability to automatically set-up and configure the desktop based on the user’s role and context (e.g. what printers they can use, what drives they can access, use of peripheral devices), support for the installation and persistence of user-installed applications, as well as the application of all user-customized settings across all applications.  All these in combination are known as the ‘user environment’, and the most important characteristic of the user environment is that it is client OS and delivery mechanism agnostic – effectively providing a ‘follow me’ user personality anywhere, using any delivery method and to any device.  This is simply not possible using profile management alone, and why a User Environment Management Solution is required.

The thing is, most companies don’t have homogeneous desktop estates.  This is true in physical PCs today and will also be the case in their virtualized equivalents.  Companies typically use combinations of delivery technologies, applications (corporate and non-corporate), client OS and devices to deliver an optimum, productive working experience to their employees.  Based on extensive experience with many customers rolling out desktop virtualization projects, we know that successful (i.e. low-cost, high adoption) virtual desktops require the ability to automatically deliver non-persisted, leveraged corporate OS and apps on-demand from a centralized source.  To this fresh, clean desktop session must then be added the independently-managed user environment as described above – note this must be added selectively in response to user actions.  We are well beyond profile management now!

Adding RTO Virtual Profiles into the View offering will certainly enable VMware’s customer base to start to roll-out Windows XP based virtual desktops (Windows Vista & Windows 7 will be supported in future releases)  in a controlled way, while providing some personalization capabilities.  As these implementations start to grow, the need for a more comprehensive treatment of the user environment will become essential.

User personalization is an exciting and rapidly-growing space!  We’re working closely with VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and our joint customers to ensure successful and viable virtual desktop roll-outs …..we look forward to seeing this vital part of the new desktop paradigm grow in importance over the coming months and years!

Pete Rawlinson
VP WW Marketing, AppSense

Live from VMworld 2009 – A press release shows that VMware are to OEM the RTO Virtual Profiles Product into VMware View. Press Release can be found here

NEW FEATURE No. 7 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Trigger Action Time Audit Event

This is the seventh installment in a series of posts about the new features and options in AppSense Version 8 Service Pack 2.  (If you have not yet downloaded this latest release, you can read more info and download it from here )

AppSense Environment Manager Service Pack 2.0 introduces a new auditing event – Trigger Action Time.

A Trigger is the instigator for both conditions and actions to be processed.   For example:

Please see the screenshot below showing that when the ‘JD Edwards’ application is launched, and the user is running the application on a client within a ’set IP address range’, then a specific printer is automatically mapped as the only printer available for the application.

Click to see full size capture

In the above case, the Trigger is the  launching of  ‘an’ application, the condition is meeting both the application being ‘JDEwards.exe’ and the IP address range criteria and the policy action is the mapping of the specific printer.

Other Trigger actions include Computer Startup, Computer Shutdown, User Logon, User Logoff, Process Started, Process Stopped, Network Connect, Network Disconnect etc…

On selection, this new event is raised for every used Trigger.  This details the start time, end time and duration for the chosen trigger conditions and actions to complete.

P:S
As this is an ever growing blog topic, the previous posts on the other new features we have detailed can be found below:

NEW FEATURE No. 1 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Run As

NEW FEATURE No. 2 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Connect As

NEW FEATURE No. 3 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Improved compression and data handling protocol

NEW FEATURE No. 4 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Manipulation of files in Personalization Analysis

NEW FEATURE No. 5 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Run Once

NEW FEATURE No. 6 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Group SID Refresh

NEW FEATURE No. 7 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Trigger Action Time Audit Event

NEW FEATURE No. 8 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Stop If Fails

NEW FEATURE No. 9 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – New Application Categories in the User Interface

NEW FEATURE No. 10 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Refresh

NEW FEATURE No. 11 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Registry Hive Exclusions

NEW FEATURE No. 6 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Group SID Refresh

This is the sixth installment in a series of posts about the new features and options in AppSense Version 8 Service Pack 2.  (If you have not yet downloaded this latest release, you can read more info and download it from here )

AppSense Environment Manager Service Pack 2 introduces a new option – Group SID Refresh.

User Group Membership (and Primary Group) conditions are evaluated by using a Security Identifier (SID) token look‐up function, which is processed extremely quickly. If the SID is not present in the configuration an Active Directory lookup is performed instead.

SID tokens are added to the conditions during creation and a more time‐costly look‐up is performed at this stage.

If a configuration is copied from one discreet domain to another, for example, ‘Test’ to ‘Live’, both the fully qualified domain names (FQDNs) and the SIDs will be incorrect.

The Group SID Refresh option allows administrators to both search and replace elements of the FQDN and update the SID values to the new FQDNs.

This can also be used to refresh SID values without any replacement.

P:S
As this is an ever growing blog topic, the previous posts on the other new features we have detailed can be found below:

NEW FEATURE No. 1 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Run As

NEW FEATURE No. 2 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Connect As

NEW FEATURE No. 3 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Improved compression and data handling protocol

NEW FEATURE No. 4 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Manipulation of files in Personalization Analysis

NEW FEATURE No. 5 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Run Once

NEW FEATURE No. 6 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Group SID Refresh

NEW FEATURE No. 7 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Trigger Action Time Audit Event

NEW FEATURE No. 8 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Stop If Fails

NEW FEATURE No. 9 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – New Application Categories in the User Interface

NEW FEATURE No. 10 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Refresh

NEW FEATURE No. 11 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Registry Hive Exclusions

How To Guide: Streaming Microsoft Office with Citrix XenApp 5 – Best Practice Guide & Licensing Overview

Citrix Technology Professional (CTP) Alexander Ervik Johnsen has written a very useful piece on how to Profile and Stream Microsoft Office 2007 using Citrix XenApp 5.0

This is a great guide and covers how to stream Office to a desktop, or, into a Citrix XenDesktop session.  His article and guide can be found on his website here.

Further to the actual process of profiling and streaming the Office application, I also want to ensure everyone is aware of the Microsoft Per Device Licensing Model for Server Hosted Applications.

Many Microsoft applications, including Microsoft Office™, Project™ and Visio™, are licensed on a per-device basis. This means a desktop application license is required for each and every device that is able to potentially access the application or server where the application is installed, regardless of whether a user executes and runs the application of not.  This makes licensing Microsoft applications in virtual environments a tricky, potentially very costly, and misunderstood subject. 

One misconception is that by ‘publishing’ or ’streaming’ applications to a limited “user” group, that group is compliant with the Microsoft license agreement – in other words, Microsoft licenses their applications per user.  This is in fact in breach of the Microsoft licensing model, and can lead to legal action.

I have written a blog, which also includes official Microsoft approved whitepapers on how to control and enforce application access and license compliance on a per device basis  in such virtual environments,  that blog can be found here

In addition to helping ensure compliance, effective license control and management can also reduce Microsoft License requirements and associated costs – more information on this can be found here.

If anyone has any questions or comments, as always, please do let me know.

Thanks
Gareth