When layers become a problem

I have seen a lot of discussion on the subject of layering of software images to deliver virtualized client computing. There are some interesting opportunities here but also a number of serious potential issues. This is too big an area for a single blog post so I am going to look at this over a number of post in the coming weeks.

There are number of different ways the word ‘layers’ is used in client computing. Firstly, when we think of our software stack we unsurprisingly think of the layers that make up that stack. Those layers are typically operating system, applications and user environment. We then think about how we manage those layers, either as the complete unwieldy stack or individually. As  such we are thinking about layers as a handy shortcut for what we want to manage individually.

Another way that the word ‘layers’ is being used is as a way of splitting the stack into a large number of separate layers. A number of small vendors are launching early stage products to try and deliver solutions based on a layer per application with those layers being delivered selectively depending on the user. The problem here is that each of the layers then needs to be managed separately including the impact of every combination of layers. Many of the organizations I talk to have thousands of applications in use across the business, that means thousands of layers and a huge combinatorial problem.

The change between the two uses of the word ‘layers’ is dramatic: In one case we are referring to three layers that we want to manage individually in the other case attempting to manage thousands of layers in a way that may well prove to be impossible. As I think of managing all those layers I am reminded of the mess that usually results from my attempts at eating a Napoleon, also known to the French as a ‘Mille Feuille’ – thousand layers.

Virtualization Executive Summit Event Review

Last week I attended the Virtualization Executive Summit, a great event attended by almost 100 Senior IT Executives (CTO’s, CIO’s, CEO’s, VP’s, Director’s etc..) from very large, international organizations. As the name suggests, the event focused on Virtualization, with a large proportion of the end user interest being in Desktop Virtualization.

I have to say, it was a very well organized and thought-out event, with each of the delegates having individual time tables based on their areas of interest. These time tables accommodated both vendor boardroom presentation sessions along with 1:1 meetings with the vendors too, so a busy two days for all involved.

As part of our sponsorship package, I was presenting in the AppSense Boardroom Session. It appeared to be very well received (with some of the attendees saying it was the best session they had been to <- queue big ego boost for me lol). There was a great mix of people in the room, some who had deployed Desktop Virtualization and some that had also done stateless / non-persistent Desktop Virtualization with a user environment management solution (like AppSense ;-) ) which was a great validation for the others in the room who are still in their planning stages.

Nearly all of the many meetings we hosted focused on the attendee’s plans for desktop virtualization in 2010, and I am glad to say, they were also asking how AppSense could help enable them to adopt the non-persistent virtual desktop model.

Thanks to all of those who helped make this a great event, and thank you also to all those who attended and are driving forward with desktop virtualization..

Looking forward to the next one :)

Inaugural Meeting of the Northern VMware User Group

On Wednesday 18^th November I had the pleasure of attending the inaugural meeting of the Northern VMware User Group (UK) at the Wellington pub in Leeds. There were about thirty five people in attendance, mostly administrators of VMware infrastructures, including some big ones, which was a pretty impressive turnout given the far from ideal weather conditions. A couple of VMware vExperts also attended the event.

A very informative presentation from Ross Bisby of b2net covering the details of investigating performance issues in ESX/ESXi environments kicked things off. Hats off to Ross for a top job given he was drafted in at the last minute. This was followed by informal breakout sessions covering topics such as VCP certification, iSCSI storage and VDI.  There was certainly a good deal of interest in VDI from many people there with a variety of experience from planning through testing to having, successfully, deployed it. It was encouraging too to find a number of the attendees already familiar with AppSense products.

Many thanks to the committee for organising such a successful event and to VMware and Veeam for sponsoring the bar – when in Rome …

Looking forward already to the next event!

AppSense Channel on YouTube

A few weeks ago AppSense HQ was the center point for our quarterly Systems Engineering / Pre-Sales Conference..

I thought, while I have 30 or so consultants at my disposal, to take this opportunity to catch them off-guard and have them white-board some of the key AppSense messages and overviews.

Videos / Whiteboard Presentations include (amongst others):

• User Environment Management Overview
• Windows 7 and VDI Overview
• Eliminating the need for Roaming Profiles
• Rolling-back User Personalization Settings
• Automatically Blocking Unauthorized Executables
• Controlling Microsoft Application Per Device Licensing
• Client & Cloud Computing

These videos have now been uploaded to YouTube and are available for viewing here – at the AppSense YouTube Channel

I hope these are of use to people, and where possible, I am keen to read your comments, so please do leave a note of your thoughts on there :)

AppSense on YouTube

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

Migrating User Profiles And Existing Personalization Settings to Win 7 with AppSense

A major challenge in migrating existing users to Windows 7 is user profile data and desktop setup scripts. It’s highly unlikely that anything the user has done to their existing machine to personalize it will be compatible with the new Windows 7 desktop. The result? All upgraded employees have to re-personalize their desktop – not a quick task, especially as the process to make such personalization changes may require changing options and settings in new menu locations.

One of the most important things to consider in your Windows 7 migration project is the retention of all user-specific information (we call it the “user personality”) from the ‘old’ desktop and simply injecting this back into the new Windows 7 desktop following upgrade, ensuring a seamless experience to the user and a de-risked Win 7 migration. 

AppSense Environment Manager has been providing user profile migration solutions for global companies for several years, and fast becoming an essential component in many Win 7 migration projects.  AppSense automatically identify all existing personalization settings on the current OS platform, separate them from the desktop and store them independent of the desktop itself.  These settings can now be re-applied to the new Win7 OS platform, regardless of how the OS is hosted or delivered, either physical, virtual or provisioned..

For more information, please download our free Windows 7 Overview  here or visit www.appsense.com/solutions/migration

Win7 Migration

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…

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.