Age of Virtualization | Hyper-V, App-V, Virtual PC…

Announced on MDOP blog  – Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.6, including App-V for RDS, is now publicly available as part of MDOP 2010. You can download MDOP 2010 via Microsoft Volume Licensing Site. As I wrote before App-V brings following new features:

• App-V 4.6 is now compatible with 64-bit Windows client and server platforms
• App-V 4.6 saves on SAN storage space by using a cache of virtualized applications that is shared across all your VDI desktops
• App-V 4.6 and SCCM 2007 R2 SP2 now deliver virtual applications faster
• More.

Today many companies implemented some version of Sharepoint as their internal document management system and overall document repository system. Sharepoint is great and easy to use, and companies can really benefit of Sharepoint’s use, so in some point they decided to use sharepoint site for various kind of documents. That’s really great, and everything work fine for those kind of documents if users have Office installed locally. They simply open Internet explorer, type sharepoint url and click on document they need. Of course, because everything is installed localy, when user click on, for example, xml document it is automaticly opened with Microsoft Office Infopath. Same rule applies to Word documents. But what when users are using virtualized version of Office applications? Well then the thing get little more complicated. When Office is virtualized with Microsoft Application Virtualization and then streamed to a client, every file association is discovered properly, so with virtualized Word, users normaly open .doc or .docx documents if these documents are placed somewhere on users disk. But if those documents are placed on Sharepoint site, then when user click on xml or .docx document,  SharePoint is looking for ProgID’s “Sharepoint.OpenDocuments.*” which are not part of file association, but are part of SharePoint COM objects. So when you try to open those documents with virtualized Infopath or Word you will get error that you don’t have appropriate application for opening documents, or something similar. But luckily things can be fixed.

How can this be fixed?

So if you have Sharepoint site and virtualized Office(Infopath or Word), you should do the following:

1. Sequence Infopath (Word) by best practices, but then in shortcut phase of sequencing include shortcut to Internet Explorer (It is easy, on application phase just click Add new application and then browse to executable of local Internet Explorer.)
2. Install Sharepoint services support from the Office CD. You can find this by normally installing Office and then in Office Tools subtree only check on Sharepoint services support.

If you do all that, opening document from sharepoint site should normally work.

One day I was doing demo of all six MDOP products, and 5 minutes after demo my Hyper-V virtual machine suddenly paused and my screen froze. What’s the deal with that, I was asking myself? So if something similar happened to you, and you were asking yourself the same question, the answer lies within low disk space. Anyway free space on hard disk for your virtual machine must not be lower than 200 mb, and if it does your virtual machine goes into PAUSED CRITICAL state. So if you have important presentation and demo, check your free space, and check it after you start virtual machine.

Especially if you plan to demo application virtualization, and one of demo scenarios is installing and virtualizing big applications. Then your vhd file could become bigger and you could run out of free space. And you don’t want that happen to you during demo.

Application Virtualization is getting more popular every day. Popularity means that a lot of people are using it, so they are trying to be more and more productive, and for that use, they develop some cool and useful tools. Here I  will mention few great tools developed by Login Consultants. All tools are completely free, you just need to register or login. After you login, there are five App-V tools available for download:

• App-V (Softgrid) Client Setup Kit

By using this tool you can easily create vb scripts for deploying App-V client to end user dekstop.

•  App-V Migration Tool 1.1.1

With this tool you can convert your automated applications setups to App-V Virtualized Applications, with little amount of user intervention.

•  App-V OSD Editor- As the name of this tool says, you can edit OSD files more easily. This can be extremely useful because in editing OSD files you can easily make mistake and then forget where the mistake is.
• App-V Add-on ADM v1.0  - The tool for configuring client settings for App-V for Windows Desktop Client.
• App-V Client Diagnostic and Configuration Tool

Really great and useful tool for getting the right diagnose out of your virtual applications.

With all of these tools in your ‘hands’ you can really solve your App-V problems more faster and easier. In my future blogs I will explain all of these tools with more details.

Cheers!