Microsoft Application Virtualization is generating a lot of interest throughout the IT community. It allows IT professionals to abstract application management away from SOE maintenance, and offers a highly flexible environment in which to manage and deploy applications.

As an App-V administrator, one of the tasks you may find yourself performing is moving the system database to another SQL server. This process has a number of gotchas because the database is referenced in a number of places which can prevent the App-V management service from starting, so here is a list of tasks to perform which will ensure a successful database move.

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I promise, this will be my last article about Microsoft VDI for a while. During my research for the Microsoft VDI series, I stumbled across quite a few interesting articles about the topic which I want to share. If you want to dig deeper, you will find additional valuable information.

Microsoft Desktop Virtualization

Microsoft Virtualization Product Portfolio

This page is link list from Microsoft about their virtualization products, quite a few white papers and other resources.

What’s New in Remote Desktop Services

This TechNet article gives detailed overview of the changes in Remote Desktop Services (formerly Terminal Services).

Operating system virtualization

Microsoft product homepage for desktop virtualization

Microsoft Accelerates Desktop Virtualization

The press release that caused the stir about VDI recently.

Competitive Comparison Between Microsoft and VMware Desktop Virtualization (PDF)

This paper is mostly about Microsoft’s desktop virtualization solutions and says only little about VMware.

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Jeff is an IT Pro Evangelist with Microsoft Australia, based in Sydney. In this interview he explains how Microsoft’s virtualization solutions integrate and how multiple solutions can be brought to bear to assist IT professionals manage their environments, mitigate compatibility issues and accelerate deployments.

Jeff’s blog can be found here.

JB: The large range of virtualization options available to customers means that there’s pretty much a solution to fit every usage scenario.

JA: There’s certainly been a lot of confusion in the local market with businesses and IT pros, simply because Microsoft has so much happening in the virtualization space, and sometimes it’s not clear how it all fits together. That’s why May 2010 is Virtualization Month for Microsoft Australia, where we’re running lots of Live Meetings to give IT pros a comprehensive overview of the key solutions. We’re following that up with free virtualization workshops across Australia throughout June.

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Michael is a Senior Technical Product Manager for VDI and Remote Desktop Services with Microsoft, based in Redmond. In this interview he discusses the advantages which RemoteFX will bring to Microsoft’s RDS and VDI solutions and compares the two technologies, looking at their relative advantages and disadvantages and what benefits they bring to business, while clearing up some common misunderstandings about VDI.

Michael’s blog can be found here.

JB: There’s been a quite consistent look and feel about Microsoft’s remote desktop/VDI technology to date, which has meant that the user is generally aware that they’re not using locally-installed software. The latest advances in the remote application user experience now seems to be at a point where the distinction between local and remote clients is blurring to the point of disappearing

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In the last post of my VDI series, I discussed the Microsoft’s VDI licensing. Since VDI is licensed per year, it will get more expensive than traditional desktop licensing in the long run. However, we all know that licensing costs are more or less negligible when it comes to calculating the TCO (Total Costs of Ownership).

People often think that desktop virtualization, like server virtualization, is a way to reduce costs in IT. I think, this is a misunderstanding, which I will try to clear up in this post. I will also say a few words about the so-called Microsoft VDI tax debate.

VDI hardware costs

The typical thin client argument that your client hardware can be less powerful and, therefore, cheaper doesn’t count when it comes to VDI because you need expensive additional server hardware for VDI. Obviously, your server infrastructure needs a lot more horsepower than with session virtualization (Terminal Server) because each user runs a virtual machine with a full-blown operating system on the server.

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Now, as you know more about Microsoft’s VDI products and technology, I will tell you a little about Microsoft’s VDI licensing. I will explain the old VECD licensing and the new VDA licensing. The question of whether you can reduce costs with VDI will be the topic of my next post.

The most interesting part of Microsoft’s recent announcements about desktop virtualization were the changes regarding VDI licensing.

VECD licensing

At the moment, you need the Virtual Enterprise Centralized Desktop (VECD) license if you run Windows desktops in a VDI environment. VECD licensing applies not only to Microsoft products but also to third-party VDI solutions such as VMware View or Citrix XenDesktop.

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In the last post of my series about Microsoft VDI I discussed the VDI software that Microsoft already offers today. In this article, I will give a short overview of two new technologies that might turn out to be vital for the adoption of VDI in Microsoft environments: RemoteFX and Dynamic Memory for Hyper-V.

RemoteFX

RemoteFX is a technology that Microsoft acquired two years ago with Calista Technologies. It is an enhancement of RDS (Remote Desktop Services) that will be delivered with Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 (no official release date yet, probably not earlier than Q4 2010). Essentially, RemoteFX will offer support for the following technologies in a Remote Desktop environment (session host and VDI):

• Windows Aero
• Full-motion video
• Silverlight animations
• 3D applications

Obviously RemoteFX could be essential for VDI because one of the major drawbacks of desktop virtualization is that the user experience of Remote Desktop is usually worse than on local PCs when it comes to graphics virtualization.

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In the last post in this VDI series I outlined Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Virtualization terminology. Today I will give an overview of Microsoft’s three VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) solutions.

Microsoft “In-Box” VDI

With In-Box VDI Microsoft refers to the VDI technology that is delivered with Windows Server 2008 R2. I have already introduced some of the In-Box VDI components in my previous article:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V 2.0
• RD Virtualization Host: Supports personal virtual desktops (PVD, each virtual machine has its own OS image) and virtual desktop pools (users/virtual machines share one OS image)
• RD Connection Broker: Supports load balancing and reconnection to existing sessions
• RD Gateway: Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) over HTTPS (SSL)
• Remote Desktop Web Access: Users access their virtual desktops through a web page

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Microsoft recently made a few announcements that made many believe that desktop virtualization is now ready for prime time. I suppose many Windows admins have not yet bothered with desktop virtualization despite the buzz about Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) in the media lately. With Windows Server 2008 R2 Microsoft finally entered the VDI market, so it can’t hurt to inform yourself about the topic even if you have no plans to introduce VDI at this time.

In a series of articles I will give an overview of all the essential concepts of Microsoft’s VDI products. In this first post, I will introduce Microsoft key terms with regard to desktop virtualization. You have to know these terms in order to be able to follow the next articles in this series.

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One of the much-touted new features in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 is VHD Boot, which lets you start the OS from a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD). Microsoft recommends it as a more flexible alternative to a traditional multi-boot configuration, because you can avoid the static partitioning of your hard disk.

Another advertised advantage of the new feature is ease of portability between physical and virtual, theoretically, you should be able to run the contents of a Virtual Machine on bare metal. But don’t expect, it’s going to be easy. Chances are that your computer will hang when starting from a VHD, you created using Virtual PC or Hyper-V. That’s because the virtual hardware may differ from the physical one. Additionally, paravirtualized drivers used to accelerate Windows in a VM pose a problem when booting an existing VHD physically. In many cases you will end up sysprep-ing your VHD before porting it over to the physical /virtual world.

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This article was written by Gilberto J. Perera from GilsMethod.com. Gil’s Method is the online resource for Windows related How-to Guides for the rest of us.

As an administrator you are probably dreading the possible transition from Windows XP to Windows 7 at your company, except this time you won’t have to worry Microsoft has been thinking about you for while developing Windows 7.

Microsoft got the message after the debacle with Windows Vista and its lack of success to attract larger businesses to transition from XP to Vista. In order to make that transition simpler, Microsoft has provided Windows 7 users with the capability to run a virtualized, fully licensed copy of Windows XP for program capability.

Using Virtual PC Beta and Windows XP Mode Beta (separate downloads) users will be able to run applications that may not be fully compatible with Windows 7. Applications running inside the virtual machine are fully integrated into the host operating system. Users won’t realize that the application is running in a virtual environment and when they save a file it is automatically stored on the host file system.

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Brian Madden wrote an interesting article about offline VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure). However, I strongly disagree with the main point of his article; i.e., that we need a bare-metal client hypervisor for desktop management.

One of the major disadvantages of desktop virtualization is that that the end user’s device requires a permanent connection to the backend where the virtual desktop is running. Furthermore, display protocols such as RDP and ICA still have problems with many applications. Brian acknowledges these problems and speculates that bare-metal client hypervisors might solve these problems in the future.

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The results of my last poll are somewhat surprising. I asked if you plan to introduce an application virtualization solution in your organization. 69% of you responded with “yes.” It appears that more admins than expected know about the benefits of application virtualization. However, one should know that the participation was lower than in my other polls.

I admit that I only had a vague idea of application virtualization before I actually started testing different products. It was only when I saw how easy it is to virtualize applications that I became more interested in this technology. I suppose the relatively low poll participation can be explained by the fact that many admins don’t really know what application virtualization is. Thus, they just ignored this poll when they stumbled across it. Perhaps if I had added a third possible answer like “I don’t know,” participation would have been higher.

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It seems that this was the longest series I ever wrote in this blog. The more I learned about this relatively new technology the more I was fascinated about it. By the way, German speaking readers might be interested in my new article about “Applikationsvirtualisierung” at Computerwoche. This post is probably the last one about software virtualization for the moment, although I might review another product sometime later. There might also be an article about the results of this poll.

I don’t want to influence your decision too much, thus I will keep this post short. I just want to add one further note. The funny thing about application virtualization is that it brings us back to the pre-Windows period. Do you remember the good old DOS times when applications were residing on a Novel Netware server? No installation was required on desktop computers, the term “registry” was only associated with public authorities, and administrators (called supervisors at the time) didn’t have the slightest idea that, only a few years later, Microsoft would send them to “DLL hell!”

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The features of software virtualization solutions that I address in this article are special in the sense that they don’t stand for conceptual differences. Nevertheless, they might turn out to be important or even decisive for your environment.

Settings: You might want to allow end users to configure their applications or install plug-ins by themselves. This means that they have to have the ability to modify the virtual environment. The various products solve this problem in different ways. Some tools allow you to store these settings on a server, thereby supporting application roaming.

Linking: This feature is related to the one above. Some products enable you to link virtualized apps. For example, one virtual environment could host the .Net Framework for .Net apps running in other virtualized environments. This feature can also be used to deploy add-ons. The more sophisticated solutions enable you to centrally manage the links between virtualized apps for your whole network. For instance, you could assign the Google Toolbar to a certain user group with just a mouse click.

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