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

Citrix XenApp & Citrix Edgesight recommendations when using Anti-Virus

Citrix Technology Professional (CTP) Alexander Ervik Johnsen has written a very useful piece on how best to configure Citrix XenApp and Citrix Edgesight when using Anti-Virus solutions.

AV is recognized as a major drain of shared resource in a Citrix XenApp environment, Ervik provides some recommendations to reduce the aggressiveness of the AV scans.

“The following are suggestions to help ease the negative affect that standard Anti-virus settings can cause on Citrix XenApp servers. As these servers are not used in the normal sense of the word Server, the scan and realtime aggressiveness needs to be adjusted for the Antivirus Software or performance will be affected.”

The main article can be found on his website here.

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

This is the third 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 8.0 Service Pack 2 introduces a new protocol for transferring data between the endpoint device and the server database which holds all the user personalization settings.

The change means that the Personalization Server now benefits as it has to do a lot less processing in order to insert or extract the required data from the database, and can therefore support a lot more users and even faster response times.

Part of this change is to store the user’s personalization data in a compressed format in the database, which means the required database footprint is a lot smaller (in some cases by a factor of 10).

Internal performance tests yielded the following results:

• 87.5% increase in performance scalability between version 8.0 and 8.0 SP2.
• 45.0% increase in performance scalability between version 8.0 SP1 and 8.0 SP2.

Note: On upgrade to Service Pack 2, User Personalization data is in the old protocol format. This data is upgraded to the new format, in the database, on demand as applications are used and such, will incur a small performance hit on first launch. However, once all endpoints are upgraded to Service Pack 2 and all data in the database has been upgraded, the performance of User Personalization will be much higher than previous releases and scalability will be dramatically improved.

As always, if you have any questions or require any further information, please do get in touch.

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

Citrix, Microsoft & AppSense Roadshow with VAR MTM

MTM Technologies, a leading Citrix VAR, team up with Citrix, AppSense and Microsoft to and go on the road in a series of seminars across the USA to show how you can build a dynamic and flexible virtual infrastructure based on proven cost-effective technologies.

There will be demonstrations enabling you to learn about:
 –  Reducing LAN and WAN bandwidth requirements
 –  Providing best user experience
 –  Cutting desktop TCO
 –  How to use single image of OS and Apps across the enterprise
 –  Enable user personalization without Roaming Profile issues
 –  Automatically configure desktops without complex logon scripts

Register Today and you have a chance of winning a $100 Best Buy Gift Card.

The road show will be visiting the following cities, please click on the link to find more about the seminar date and venue location, along with registration form.

Irving, TX

Houston, TX

Chicago, IL

Los Angeles, CA

San Francisco, CA

Cincinatti, OH

Atlantic City, NJ

St. Louis, MO

We look forward to seeing you there!

TheGenerationV have also blogged on this exiting event

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

Here is the second 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 8.0 Service Pack 2 introduces a new option – Connect As.

Similar in functionality to the Run As option (see previous post), the Connect As option is only available from the Drive and Printers Actions.

This new feature can be used in conjunction with the existing AppSense Environment Manager policy actions, one example is that of mapping a shared network drive or folder, where multiple users would connect with the same user name and password.  By using AppSense Environment Manager and the new Connect As command, all required users will have the drive automatically mapped with the shared user name and password.

Note: When connecting as a specified user, AppSense Environment Manager impersonates the current user. This ensures the connection is added to the correct location in the registry

P:S
As this is an ever growing blog topic, more 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

Does Citrix XenDesktop Help Companies during Natural Disasters?

Jon Wallace from www.InsideTheRegistry.comwrites an interesting piece on how Citrix XenDesktop may be able to help organizations during natural disasters and power outages..

“I’m currently building out a demo rig for an upcoming tradeshow and while I was installing the various bits and bobs for the XenDesktop solution it got me thinking as to its unusual uses.

I live in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and during the summer, power outages are normal due to thunder storms and other bad weather.  This along with hurricanes, tropical storms and other activity makes working at home especially interesting at times.

When the power goes out, so does my communication.  I lose my internet, my landline and depending on the duration my laptop but one thing can be assured, the local Starbucks is always on – obviously people need coffee when they have downtime.  Anyway, back on track…

Imagine I was a columnist for a newspaper or magazine and I was working on the latest scoop that some celebrity has been caught eating a burger when the power went out – without connectivity I can’t upload the article to my corporate servers and get it out before my competitor does…”

Click here to read the rest of the article and learn how Citrix XenDesktop can help in this case…

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

This is the first 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 8.0 Service Pack 2 introduces a new option – Run As.

This emulates the Microsoft Run As command and allows actions to be executed in the context of another, specified user.  For example launching an application in a different user context.

When selecting the Run As tab in an action you are presented with one, two or three options:

Current User: Available on all relevant User actions. This is the default selected method and runs the action in the context of the logged on user.

System: Available on all actions. This is the default method for Computer nodes and runs the action in the context of the System user.

User: Available on all relevant User actions. On selection of this option the administrator is prompted to select a friendly name to run as. If no friendly name exists, the Run As Library can be launched where friendly names, usernames and passwords can be stored for re‐use.

The friendly names are stored in the configuration in a reusable library section. Each friendly name is accompanied by the username and password. The password is encrypted using a one‐way public key. This prevents passwords from being reverse engineered.

During installation of the AppSense Environment Manager Agent, the private key is added to the machines key store. This is a write only store, i.e. it cannot be read.

When an action is run as a specified user the associated username and password are used to impersonate said user. AppSense Environment Manager uses a handle to the private key to decrypt the password at this point.

Note: The Run As specified user only impersonates that user. This means the user’s profile and registry hive are not loaded from the domain due to the associated overhead. This results in the environment variables for the action representing the System user and not the currently logged on user or specified user.

Note: This is both a very powerful and potentially dangerous function. Even though the password is encrypted, the username and password pair can be applied to any action and a malicious user may be able to alter the configuration to possibly bypass security. Therefore, this function must be used with extreme care.

P:S
As this is an ever growing blog topic, more 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