Confessions of a Guru

With 2012 here and vacations behind us it is time to get serious about some App-V training. So what are our plans for training in the next quarter?

February 6th-10th Irvine, California, USA
	We are working with a new partner, Agile360, to finally bring our Masters Level App-V Training class to California. We always get a lot of requests for west coast classes but the is the first time that we have been able to make it work. So if you can’t come to us, book this one quickly! Details on this class here.

Maybe that location doesn’t work for you. It happens. So we have some other options for you.

February 6th-10th Copenhagen, Denmark
Normally every class I post here at www.tmurgent.com is run by Tim Mangan. This one time I am making an exception. We are expanding our partnership.We are often asked by training companies and other experts in App-V if they can train using our materials. We have proven ourselves to be very picky about letting others use the GridMasterTraining system that we developed (more on that below). We insist that the training turn students into full blown experts. That it must be hands-on. That is is conducted by someone that knows the product completely inside and out and can handle the unexpected, and has demonstrated the skills to teach others.
	So after three long years of work, we are finally ready to announce our new certified training partner.He is fellow MVP Nicke Kallen. Nicke has helped me in the European classes these last three years, and has earned his reputation as an expert through engagements and deployments in multiple countries. An excellent speaker (even if he doesn’t think so yet), we are thrilled to add him as our third Certified Trainer.
At the GridMasterTraining.com website, we post the published training schedules for all of our trainers, but we each have our own website where we advertise our own classes. Tim’s are here at www.tmurgent.com and my Canadian partner Kevin Kaminski uses his site at www.BigHatGroup.com. We are still “dotting the I’s” on contracts for Europe, so we aren’t ready to announce the website for Nicke, but we already have this class in Copenhagen. So if you read Danish, you can use this link: http://www.lean-on.com/154/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=535&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=107&cHash=8bcfb2e5a5 about this class.

But maybe it is that the date doesn’t work for you. That happens too. So instead consider this one.

April 23-27 Canton, Massachusetts, USA
	This class will be back at our home base. Details on April Class
We are sometimes asked, you hold the class in a Library? We do, as often as feasible. We have a great library here in town with just the facilities we need for the small classes that we run. I always keep the numbers in a class low so that everyone can get plenty of individual attention and the board meeting room there is a perfect size. Plus, I would rather have our meeting room costs go to a great cause – the library programming for the community. Sometimes this doesn’t all work out; the room isn’t available or we fill the class and we move to a nearby hotel. But yeah, if you want the best App-V training in the world, you might just have to go to the Library to get it!

So what is the “Masters Levels Training“? This uses the GridMasterTraining system designed by Tim Mangan and Kevin Kaminski. It is the most thorough training available anywhere in the world. We have been using this system for fiveyears now, and in one week we can bring a complete novice with general IT competencies up to an expert in Microsoft App-V. Every aspect and deployment model is completely covered, and we teach you the techniques to produce high quality packages, plus the skills needed to handle the worst applications out there. We always train to the latest version out there, but accommodate those using older revisions.

An introduction…

Dealing with the family over holidays can be stressful, and being an obvious geek sometimes helps. Sometimes it is just easier to disappear into the computer rather than ask questions, and because they are family they know me well enough to give me some slack. Because sometimes I see something and I just don’t want to know why. And clearly this is one of those times. You now also get to wonder without knowlege, since I’m writing this post instead of asking those questions. By the way, Fern the dog has her own Facebook page so if you really have the need, you can ask her yourself.

On to the post…

Score One for Justin Glass of Indiana University.

One great thing about teaching is that you always learn something new from the students. For some things, it is important to not to have been trained yet since you are not contaminated with pre-conceived notions of what should work and what shouldn’t. When you aren’t polluted with incorrect rules of how things work, it can help you to find things that none of us know about. And when it isn’t about my nephew’s dog, I might really want to know why. Our last Masters Level App-V Training Class is a great example of this.

One of our students made a mistake when sequencing an app and manually copied the wrong file into the package. He was testing this app up on the screen so that we could demonstrate a technique to break into the virtual environment to look at the files without cracking the package back in the sequencer. He confirmed that he had the wrong file and I was about to send him back to the sequencer. Then something extrordinary happened that I never would have considered.

Another student, Justin Glass, said “hold on, I’ll fix that from here”. A slight pause, then “OK, look at it now”. The original student looked at the file version inside his virtual environment. It now was the right version.

I asked how he did it. Quite simply really. He opened up the admin share to the virtual drive on the first students computer, then copied the file in. ” WHAT???? You can’t do that!” I exclaimed. Well he did and I was wrong.

I have since done some additional testing to look at what is hapening, and I am even more confused by what I found and what it means. While we were dealing with the desktop client OS in the class at that time, I have now also looked at a Terminal Server with the App-V client as well.

Let’s start with the Desktop OS:

• With the OS running, the user logged in, and no virtual apps running, you can remotely access the admin share to the virtual drive. On the other machine logged in with a domain admin account, just run the command “\\clientname\Q$” (where clientname is the name of the client machine and Q represents the virtual drive letter). You can connect, and you can view the asset folder list of all deployed virtual apps on that machine. You can’t look into the folders at this time.
• At the client machine, have the user start an app. From the admin share you can now change directory into that virtual app package asset folder. You can’t see into the other virtual app folders, just that one.
• Have the client user start another app in another package (without closing the first). From the remote share you can now see into the virtual app package folder of each open package.
• Have the client user make a visible file change that would affect the package. For example, save a file directly into the virtual app package folder. The new file is visible via the admin share.
• Do Justin’s trick. Overwrite a file in the asset folder by using the admin share. You can verify that the user sees this change at the client.
• Have the user close the app and re-open it. The changed file remains.
• Have the client user log off and log in using another account. Verify if this user sees the changed file when running the virtual application package. Huge sigh of relief when this session does not have the changed file.
• Use PkgView to verify that the changed file was stored in the original user’s PKG file in their APPDATA folder.

OK. So is this a security hole? Well you need admin rights to do this, and with those rights this might not be the worst thing that you can do. Still, it doesn’t seem “right” to be able to do this. Especially since it will look like the user did it to themselves.

But the clever of you out there now ask, “but what happens if you try that on a terminal server when multiple users are logged in at the same time”? Being a clever type myself, I did more testing.

The client on a terminal server (oh, forgive me, it is “remote desktop session host” now) has to deal with multiple users. So how would it know which user PKG to consider.

• Log into the TS machine 2 users. Have two different applications published, one to the first user and one to the second. With no apps open, check the admin share. You can view each asset folder in the list.
• Have each user start their app. From the admin share you can now change directory into each package.
• Notice that although you can cd into the VFS folder within the package, you cannot see anything below that level. I didn’t go back to the desktop OS to confirm if that behavior is consistent.
• Assign the same app to two users, one an administrator and another a standard user. Have each create a different file or folder under the asset root inside the virtual applciation. What do you see in the admin share? Only the changes made by the admin user.
• Have the administrative user close the virtual app. The admin share can still not see the standard user’s changes.

I don’t think these behaviors have much practical use, and I am inclined to think that Microsoft should probably look at this and close this loophole if they can. Strange behaviors indeed!

I have been asked something like a gazillion times over the years if TMurgent offered contract App-V Sequencing. Almost every time I say no. Sure, we do a little bit of it each year, but mostly to make sure that the training we give “is real” to what customers need.

Today, this changes.

The reason that I would say no in the past was that there existed other places that you could go to get your applications sequenced out-of-house. The quality of the results might not be so hot sometimes, but they offered a pretty low price. You see, they generally farm out to contractors working in parts of the world where they can get semi-reasonable technical people at a very low cost, so the price of these existing services sounds quite attractive. We have seen this work move from India, to Japan (I never understood that one), to Ireland, Poland, and now to Russia and former Russian territories. Ever driving to keep their costs down, the experience level of the people actually sequencing the apps is minimal.

These sequencing factories work on volume. They expect you to give them a lot of applications, some of which they have already done for someone else. Sure, there may be a few difficult apps, but over-all they build their pricing model on the idea that they can pump out apps quickly and with little effort. So they offer a per-application pricing model.

My experience in talking to customers that have gone with these factories is mixed, but generally unfavorable due to the quality of the product. In those conversations, I hear more satisfaction from European Companies that try to outsource their apps than I do from US based companies. I assume this satisfaction differential is due to a difference in the expectation or the outcome, not who they are outsourcing to (but I don’t really know for sure).

There are some folks out there offering these services with a reasonable record (considering what they charge), but it seems that more often than not, unless you spend a lot of your time and effort to manage the relationship and the quality of what they output to you, the quality of the product is less than desirable.

We have no interest in interfering with this contracting, nor competing with it. Some offer a reasonable service at a great low price. But we clearly hear the need for something different, and today we start answering that need.

Today, TMurgent is announcing that we are expanding beyond offering our internationally acclaimed GridMasterTraining Masters Level Training Program and that we will formally start offering Custom Contract Sequencing.

All sequencing will be performed by associates that have been personally trained by TMurgent’s Tim Mangan, and monitored for quality by TMurgent. We do not seek customers that want to outsource a large list of applications. We do not want your easy apps. We want “the hard stuff”.

Pricing will be by the hour, not the app. If we can’t do it, well first of all probably no one else could either. But if that happens we will share in that failure. Keeping in mind that we only take the hard stuff, we’ll make that a 75/25 split, which I think is fair. It is enough to give us both an incentive to succeed, and keep us in business.

More information on this service will be coming out before the year is over, but we think that this will make an interesting option for companies to supplement their own internal efforts.

We have a web page with a little more information on this service that went up on the main website today at this link. Check it out and let us know what you think!

An old friend, Michael Bilodeau, posted a blog last week about setting up an HTTP reporting portal for App-V. (See Technet blog http://blogs.technet.com/b/appv/archive/2011/11/10/how-to-create-a-sample-app-v-http-reporting-service.aspx). Michael might not be a familiar name to many of you, but he is to me. Michael was my development manager for the server side of the original SoftGrid server (now known as the traditional App-V server). So he knows what he is talking about.

Originally, SoftGrid clients reported application activity “real-time” with the server. Launch and Shutdowns of applications caused RTSP messages to the server which then recorded the event into the database for reporting.

When Microsoft updated the product in App-V 4.5, they changed the way this works. One thing they wanted to do was to be able to capture app usage when the client is offline. The early versions of SoftGrid didn’t support offline use at the client at all, that came in version 2.5 (I think). So reporting had never worked well for laptop users.

To fix this, Microsoft had the client record virtual application activity in an XML file. The next time the client talked to the App-V server, the server would ask for the file contents and the file would get cleared out.

For some time, I have wanted to be able to collect this metering information for clients not working with the Traditional App-V server. But the file wasn’t generated at those clients and Microsoft did not provide any documentation on how to turn it on. So no reporting for Stand-alone or SCCM clients.

As Michael’s post points out, the trigger for generating the data is in having a publishing server record in the Client Management Console. You don’t need to have a real App-V server, just an IIS page that performs a little magic, and his post documents that magic in C#.

This week I created a prototype of a web service loosely based on Michaels code. There is much more rich data contained in the XML file than he captured, and I chose to store it all into the database. I also eliminated the scheduled task, and produced some prototype web reports.

The first report you see here is a report on the use of a selected application (click on picture for blow-up):

Here is a report on a selected client machine:

And here is one on a selected user:

We can also calculate time spent in applications, and it should be possible to do much more. Interesting stuff to play with…

Citrix “Super Session”, Synergy Barcelona Oct 27, 2011

Otherwise called a Keynote, this morning’s session focused on three topics: Collaboration, Cloud, and Mobility. While Wednesday’s session was about announcements, this morning was about explaining the message. Mark T left the work to his minions (not sure if he was sleeping in or off somewhere). Can’t believe I am saying this, but I missed him (but only a little).

Kicked off by Citrix Online CTO Bert Christiansen, the first session on Collaboration was really about positioning the technologies that Citrix is involved with as being about changing the way work is done. There must have been something subliminal in the messaging yesterday, because that was exactly what I was thinking about over breakfast this morning.

I am convinced that we are in the throws of a serious change in how business gets done. Unfortunately, the “solutions” being sold are to today’s and yesterday’s problems. We think about enterprise employees as “task” or “knowledge” workers today, and part of what we need to do is change that thinking. Task worker jobs are jobs that either need to be replaced by automation, or fundamentally rethought of. We should be thinking about workers in categories of those that do their job by implementing processes and those that do their job by collaborating with others. For example, Call Center workers do the former. Today we treat them in a way that leads directly to customer dis-satisfaction. Rather than provide closed minded tools and encourage call volume handling to move the business forward, we should be enabling them to have better interaction with the customer to truly solve the callers problems. But how does the change being sold do this? No clue.

But the last 40 years have shown that businesses will need to use new technology to change the ways in which they get work done or they become less efficient and die. The keys, which were part of the messaging this morning are about transforming the infrastructure to get the work done. Each of the CTOs in essence talked about this, each in their own focused way.

CTO Bert used GoToMeeting, especially GTM HD Faces and the new Workspaces as a model to redefine how collaboration happens in the enterprise. More and more, getting work done involves working with people who may not be sitting right next to you. Structuring that work around tools to enable collaboration is nothing new, but kudos to Citrix for having a good one. Unfortunately, along the way, there was a very lame demo involving LinkedIn that looked to me like a perfect example of “because it can be done doesn’t mean it should”.

The demo involved Bert getting a request in Facebook for a video meeting, which he could launch right from Facebook. Really? Who spends all of their time in LinkedIn that I should receive the message there? Just send me via email, please, or else you won’t be there when I get around to noticing the request in a few weeks.

Second up was Sheng Liang, CTO of Citrix’s Cloud division, formerly from Cloud.com. I had a great opportunity to meet Sheng and part of his team earlier this week at the CTP summit, and I was quite impressed. Again, theme was change, which of course is a necessary theme to sell cloud.

But Sheng’s message wasn’t that you need to go to the public cloud. One stat that came out of his session was the 2010 hardware shipments worldwide. 8.8M servers, 350.9M PCs. Desktops matter folks! Sheng’s message was more about using the lessons of the large public cloud to transform how you privately provide desktops. Not just hosting, but planning for disaster.

A XenDesktop deployment, managed via a private cloud using Cloud Portal was shown. It looked no harder than any other XenDesktop deployment in a demo (in other works: much easier than reality).

Although Sheng described it as “Desktop bursting into the cloud”, a great term to use with your CTO to get buy-in, I’m thinking of this more in terms of the initial part of this morning’s presentation. Creation of temporary work spaces (desktops) for a project. As you dynamically create a team for a project, create specially crafted desktops to enable them to do that job. Accessed from their permanent desktop, the user gets everything they need.

Third up was Martin Duursma, head of Citrix Labs and Chair of the office of the CTOs at Citrix. Martin’s theme was the importance of enabling Mobility. I still get a creepy feeling when the CTOs tell me that the iPhone and iPad require us to reinvent the workplace, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore the things.

Martin went into a segment about “vertical stacks” which was lost on me. Maybe it was just me, but I felt that it was either a poorly communicated message or the wrong audience for the message. I’m not even sure that the vertical stack concept is even a good one at a strategy (a good tactic for some yes, but not all).

Fortunately he moved on and we got our first announcement of the day. Martin brought Adam Jaques on stage and they made a XenApp announcement. Yes, the product was actually mentioned on stage for more than 5 seconds!

XenApp 6.5 Mobility Pack was announced. This is an SDK that developers can use to transform boring apps into ones that can use the rich local resources at the other end of receiver. Think things like display form factors and GPS and the like. In a likely first for Synergy, Visual Studio was shown and an app was transformed to work with the phone. It wasn’t anything as easy as shown to transform that app, but the concept was cool. Project GoldenGate was also shown (as a simple screen shot).

Martin also brought Ryan McCune, from Citrix partner Avanade on stage to demo using the SDK. In another likely first for a Citrix keynote, this wasn’t a live demo but a pre-recorded video of a demo. Something must have gone horribly wrong for this to happen at a Citrix keynote, but it was a demo of what the partner did and not a demo of a Citrix product directly.

It isn’t clear what Citrix Customers were suppose to take away from the keynote this morning. As my friend Dr. Benny suggested to me afterwards, there were no actions for the customers. Perhaps this was a result of Mark T not driving the show this morning, perhaps because Citrix hasn’t had enough time to absorb the new acquisitions, or perhaps Citrix themselves aren’t sure where customers should be going.

Change, yes. But change to what?

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

This week I am at the Citrix Summit and Synergy shows in Barcelona Spain. I am also attending the Citrix Technology Professional (CTP) meetings where Citrix gives us a private briefing on what they are working on, although much of that is more distant work that remains under NDA so I can’t blog about that.

Summit, a two day show for started the week, is for the Citrix Partner channel. A few announcements come out there, although apparently not the Kiwi announcement!

Synergy fills out the week as an end-user oriented conference. Citrix over the years has become a larger, multi-faceted company. Where they once had one major release a year generally geared to coincide with the larger US show, they now have multiple releases each year, some of which are timed to be announced here at the European conference.

A number of announcements were made at this morning’s keynote, headlined by Mark Templeton, which I highlight below. The attached photo is actually from San Francisco and not Barcelona, but as Mark used the same outfit, you’d never really know if I didn’t tell you.

1. App DNA Citrix today announced that they acquired App DNA. Really cool technology at App DNA. Basically, it looks at your application and provides analysis if the apps will port well into a new environment. Generally used for XP to Windows 7 migrations, it also is used for native app to virtual app conversion process. No details on if remains run as App DNA was run, or if the (to me) important part of the company — the database of known app information — becomes generally available to Citrix customers. Would be really cool to get that information out, but I doubt it happens. Good move for Citrix.
2. ShareFileCitrix anounced the acquisition of a company called ShareFile recently, and today they provided some details on how they see it used. ShareFile is yet another DropBox-like application, but not as well known. The main reason for this is that they have been enterprise focused instead of consumer, but they are a very solid number three player in this space. While Citrix will continue the ShareFile business in the form it is in, Citrix today announced additional integrations of the technology using ShareFiles stong APIs to extend existing Citrix products. The first is an interesting GoToMeeting extension called GoToMeeting Workspaces. A Workspace is a project, documented oriented paradigm where multiple people can contribute to document editing, and messaging, but this also links into opportunities for instant on-line meetings when you need it. This would presumably become part of the standard GoToMeeting service and not include a separate ShareFile account (at least until the file volumes become too high). The second application is tied into Citrix Receiver and is called “Follow Me Data”. This looks like more of a better integrated automatic saving of the docs no matter which device you come in from, assuming you are using Receiver.
3. Kaviza Citrix acquired Kaviza earlier this year and today announced the Citrix branded version, called “Citrix VDI in a Box”. In a Box is a much simpler VDI than XenDesktop. Although originally talked about as for smaller deployments, it looks like it scales very well due to the distributed management. As part of the quick turn-around name change, the new release includes better HDX support, and now runs on not only XenServer, but also VMware and Hyper-V. That last one might be more prove important for this product than other VDI. I had a good meeting with the In a Box folks and am bringing the product into my lab. I’m thinking In a Box plus App-V stand-alone client to bring in virtual apps as a cool combination.
4. Personal VDiskThis is the RingCube acquisition integrated into XenDesktop. Yeah, OK. Not sure this is the best way, but at least they are trying. Noticeable that integrating into Kaviza isn’t mentioned. Is this to come, or do they want to keep Vdi in a Box “simple”?
5. HDX on a chip reference design. Citrix is working with partners to put HDX acceleration into silicon. Idea is to have a much cheaper zero client that performs great with graphics. Sounds cool, but I worry a lot about what this means to HDX improvements later on. Citrix has put a lot of focus on getting HDX everywhere, and made hints that they want to see it in everything all the way out to TVs in the future. This announcement also ties into Citrix’s belief that the cost to provide a virtual desktop is moving lower than a physical PC. Sounds like creative accounting to me, but it might be reasonable to say that virtual desktops are getting closer to physical desktop costs with In-A-Box.
6. Citrix Web Interface gets rebranded as Cloud Gateway Express and is free. That’s an announcement? If you’ve heard the term “Receiver Storefront”, this is also the same thing, renamed again. Citrix says the Storefront is the technology and Gateway the product, but I think it was just renamed twice when they got feedback that Storefront reminded people of Dazzle.
7. Citrix Cloud Gateway is a paid for product that includes the same functionality as the express gateway, plus more. OK. this one is an announcement. With this you get to add access to SaaS apps also. Interesting idea for enterprises to start managing SaaS apps by managing the access point.
8. Cloud Bridge. Netscaler gets better and Citrix positions it as the bridge between private and public cloud. Still too early for this except at a few places, but interesting to watch.
9. Cloud Statck and Cloud Portal. This is the acquisition of Cloud.com. Citrix clarifies what they are doing here and promotes it as the future. I’m not a cloud guy but those that are probably care about this.

That’s a lot of stuff for the off-conference of the year. The “One more thing” was quite odd, and possibly not what was originally planned. There were two PC’s up on stage never used. One playing a very active video, and the other looked like Google Earth. But Gus Pinto, who Mark introduced earlier in the keynote as “Chief of One More Thing” wasn’t brought out. Instead Brad P came out and showed Receiver integrated into Facebook. You could feel the eyeballs rolling. This was receiver everywhere gone too far!

Citrix was clearly trying to get their customers to get onto the cloud bandwagon, and I don’t think their customer base is there yet. But it took a lot of years of talking “Access” until we finally got it. Perhaps this will be the same? Oddly, the entire lack of talking about XenApp didn’t seem entirely foreign to me. Scary!

For Release not before October 24, 08:00GMT

Citrix Systems, of Ft. Lauderdale Florida, today stunned the computing world with an explosive announcement at their Europen partner conference in Barcelona Spain today.

Citrix President and CEO Mark B. Templeton is well known for ending his keynotes with “One More Thing”, and this was a doozy. “Today, for the first time, I am happy to announce that Citrix is merging with Apple Computer”, exclaimed Mr. Templeton. “The new company, which will be called Kiwi, will have the cache’ of Apple, with their great designs, and now the technical know-how and Sales excellence of Citrix.” While Citrix did not disclose the terms of the deal, it is rumored to be in the range of a $7 trillion dollars buyout by Citrix (for our European readers, this is roughly the cost of a happy meal in Barcelona). “Mr T”, as he is affectionately called (behind his back) then unveiled the new logo:

“I will finally be moving out of Florida to California to run the new company, and I am so excited about the future”, continued Mark. Then, he brought out some of his leadership team to explain what this means to the Citrix Partners.

In an internal move, Mark introduced his replacement as the new President of the Citrix Division in the new company, Joseph H, Nord. Said Joe, “Apple is like so cool. They’ve got all these pads and pods and phones, and we’ve got glass and gotos and gumption. And now we get to be cool too. It’s all good!” Joe then brought others from the Citrix management team to explain what this meant to the partners.

Gordon Payne, General Manager of the Desktop and Cloud Division, explained how the Cloud is the key component in bringing these companies together. “Consumers love to buy Apple devices, but they can’t get any real work done with them. We’ll fix all that. Apple devices remoting into applications in the cloud is what the next twenty years is going to be all about”.

Next, Al Monserrat (Sr. VP of Sales and Services) addressed the big elephant in the room. Said Al, “This doesn’t mean we are abandoning the channel, again. Quite the opposite. Instead ReImagine your business as an Apple Store, just with a big giant Kiwi in the front window instead. The future is touch, the future is the consumer. Sell that for peanuts and companies will pay you unimaginable riches to make it work.”

Later on, Chief Marketing Officer Wes Wasson appeared on-stage to provide some high level details on the product front. “I know how you guys like new names. And Apple is just so cool.” said Wes. “XenDesktop will now be iDesktop. To keep some of the Citrix tradition, the i in that will be upside down. XenServer, now iServer; XenApp is now iApp.” Then he continued, “Receiver, however, will still be called Receiver, because we think that’s already cool enough.”

Nobody from Apple would return a call to confirm this earth-shattering news. Google is rumored to be quite worried about this news, but has not commented publicly.

And so I don’t piss off everyone, it’s a Joke, OK?