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

VDI Webinar: Citrix CTP Alexander ‘Ervik’ Johnsen hosts a VDI webinar with Citrix, AppSense & Commaxx

Citrix CTP and owner of www.Ervik.as - Alex ‘Ervik’ Johnsen – is hosting a VDI webinar discussing the challenges faced in rolling out VDI, along with best practices and discussions & demonstrations from Citrix, AppSense and joint VAR Commaxx.

This webinar will include a Citrix XenDesktop overview, along with why AppSense is the only solution recommended by Citrix for Personalization and Policy management to enable the customization of single OS and App images to be tailored for each and every user in an organization.

Join us to understand how Commaxx, AppSense and Citrix can simplify your desktop virtualization plans, reduce cost, simplify management and provide the best user experience.

The webinar takes place on Monday 19th October, you can register your place here: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/937376570

Together Citrix and AppSense have over 4,000 joint enterprise customers and have deployed some of the largest VDI environments in the world… attend this webinar to see why..

Click Banner To Register For Webinar

 

CSC Dynamic Desktop – Citrix XenDesktop & AppSense

I have just returned from a successful 2 day IPexpo event in London, and was extremely excited to see the many Google Alerts for ‘XenDesktop’, ‘AppSense’, and ‘User Environment Management’ in my inbox.  Upon clicking on the alert I was taken to Daniel Fellers ‘Ask the Architect’ pages within the Citrix Community site.

In this instance, Daniel (a Lead Architect for the WorldWide Consulting Services at Citrix) interviews Sandy Kingdon (a Dynamic Desktop Architect at CSC) on how CSC has designed and is well into the implementation of Citrix XenDesktop, VMware ESX and AppSense User Environment Management to support a 40,000 user environment.

Sandy explains how CSC were able to overcome some notable challenges, including:

• Supporting multiple users across different sites using different language and MUI packs from just 2 vDisks
• Controlling Application Access
• Persisting User Personalization Settings between sessions
• Current and future plans for supporting User Installed Applications in a non-persistent environment

As AppSense are a core component of CSC’s standard offering for Dynamic Desktop, Sandy covers how by virtualizing the user and controlling Policy and Personalization separate from the underlying OS and App components that CSC were able to overcome the above challenges.

The podcast can be found here

Thanks to both Daniel and Sandy for the great podcast and an insight into a real world large scale XenDesktop deployments.

Citrix XenDesktop 4 – Now Includes XenApp.

Today Citrix announced the availability of XenDesktop Version 4, to be released in November 09.  This is a significant announcement as it incorporates the combining of XenDesktop and XenApp into one (marketed) product – XenDesktop 4.  Effectively, XenDesktop 4 is now the Citrix virtual desktop solution for all user types (including task workers on TS) with XenApp providing the application / TS side.

Citrix have made a bold and significant move here.  By combining their new VDI solution with their long-standing and highly penetrated server-based computing solution, they have not only created a compelling product and simplified message, they have also provided a nice VDI on-ramp to their existing XenApp customer base, enabling them to potentially take a decent piece of market share. XenDeskop 4 will provide Citrix customers an easy on-ramp to VDI while maintaining their existing XenApp investment, as well as enabling them to leverage other technologies such as Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere.

What this move demonstrates is the high importance the major players like Citrix and VMware are now putting on VDI.  We’re starting to see some major moves in the space as companies make a play for market share and I’m sure there’s a lot more to come. 

As Citrix points out in their press release, the quality of the user experience is of paramount importance in the mainstream adoption of this new desktop estate – a desktop estate that will combine terminal server, server- and client-hosted VDI, blade systems, physical desktops and myriad other technologies, to deliver the lowest-cost, highest quality desktop to the employee.  Maintaining a consistent, personal and productive environment to the user regardless of how the desktop is delivered seems set to become a major objective in this ‘new world’.  Using Citrix FlexCast™ to accommodate the needs of all user types could be used in conjunction with a personality management solution to ensure a ‘follow me’ persona across all delivery mechanisms – effectively making the method of delivery seamless to the user.

With Windows 7 on its way, this could be just the catalyst needed for the VDI adoption curve to change its trajectory……….

Sharing Personalization Settings between Operating Systems – Debunking the Myth

I have recently heard, from several different sources, that it is “best practice” not to share user profiles, or personalization settings, between different operating system platforms. On the surface, this seems a sensible limitation since different operating systems have different user profile structures. 

Vista and Windows Server 2008 (WS08) put most profile data somewhere in “\users\%username%\appdata”, whereas XP and Windows Server 2003 (W2K3) may place it in “\documents and settings\%username%\application data” or “\documents and settings\%username%\local settings” or somewhere else entirely.

We can’t predict where the data will go for a given application which doesn’t help us understand the “splatter” that it makes in the file system. This folder lottery is further compounded by the fact that Vista and WS08 implicitly add the “.v2” extension to any profile path you define for a user. What this results in is that with a roaming profile solution, you are forced to have different profiles, and therefore different settings, between XP/W2K3, which implicitly use a “v1” profile, and Vista/WS08 which explicitly use a “v2” profile (even though the path defined for this profile does not actually include the “.v2” extension).

Applications should get the paths to use within the profile folder hierarchy by using operating system API calls that are the same between the different operating systems but will yield the correct folder for the operating system it is being run on. Unfortunately, not all applications are written this way and some will make assumptions about paths and maybe even hard code them which is likely to cause problems even before operating system migration, particularly in Terminal Server/Citrix XenApp environments.

There is also the class of setting that is actually different between the different operating systems. Take for instance the good old desktop wallpaper which most people, if pushed, will confess is the one item that makes their PC experience “personal” (while this is not an essential productivity related personalization setting, it does however provide a good example as to how even the most basic of settings fail to migrate between OS platforms)  Although users don’t know, and indeed do not need to know, they are actually stored in different file formats between XP/W2K3 and Vista/WS08. Therefore if the setting for this, which is stored in the user’s registry hive, was just unintelligently transplanted between the two operating systems then one of the desktops wouldn’t show the correct wallpaper.

Some implementers may say that it is a good idea to start with clean profiles when moving from one operating system to another system since it is a good opportunity, in their view, for a clean start and to leave all the myriad of settings behind that aren’t apparently used for anything and just clutter the profile. However, against this has to be weighed the cost of the user having to re-personalize their applications and desktop. This costs both in terms of time (both users being interrupted during their workflow as they find a toolbar or application setting they need is missing, and then having to remember where and how to re-make the customization, which could be different to how they would have changed the option on their old OS)  and also can cause a certain amount of resistance when these users tell their yet-to-be-upgraded colleagues is that this great new operating system, which has been months in planning, has lost all of their settings and they are struggling to find the new ways to set things the way “they should be”.

Enter AppSense Environment Manager. All of the technical issues outlined above are addressed by Environment Manager making the migration from one operating system to another, and back again if required, a much less painless experience and instead now becomes an automated, seamless process for both the user and administrator alike. The files used by an application within the locally cached profile folders are stored in a relative, rather than absolute, form in the Environment Manager database which then allows them to be subsequently put back in the correct, operating system specific, folder hierarchies. Because Environment Manager functions on a per-application basis, it can much more accurately target which settings need to be brought over onto the new operating system and it also silently transmogrifies items and their settings, such as desktop wallpapers, to help ensure that seamless migration that administrators dream of. All this, of course, is done with next to no configuration by administrators so they do not need to understand the intricacies of any of the applications and subsequent registry settings and profile structures the user uses. This helps make for quick and easy migrations, although I don’t personally like the term “migration” since it implies a one way movement whereas Environment Manager provides bi-directionality with no extra effort.

So in summary…While it is right to say that it is NOT best practice to share ‘roaming profiles’ across OS platforms, AppSense Environment Manager dispels the myth that sharing ‘personalization settings’ between operating systems is not a recommended best practice –in fact AppSense recommend you embrace it…

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.

VDI – The Need For User Personalization

Martin Ingram, VP of Strategy at AppSense has been inundated with Press and Analysts wanting to interview him to learn more about the strategic requirement for user personalization within VDI environments. 

Personalization is key to reducing risk and increasing user satisfaction and enabling the adoption of lowest cost, non-persistent VDI environments.

You can read more about this topic along with the views of industry leading Commentators and Analysts at:

IT Business Edge – Putting a Personal Touch on VDI, by Michael Vizard

Virtualization Review – All about the User Personality, by Beth Schultz

These posts come further to Citrix recognizing the need for user environment management solutions in VDI environments, as posted by Sumit Dhawan here

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