June 2010 - Posts
Normally I want to keep the content on this blog more on the technical side but before my days as an App-V MVP and even further back to when I first put myself on SoftGrid training out of my own pocket in 2003 I saw the potential ROI story with application virtualization. As I started to consult in this area and perform some large scale deployments of App-V both the client and myself could see the ROI story play out rather quickly with the technology. As you can probably guess I see application virtualization becoming a fairly standard application deployment mechanism for environments in the 1000+ seat size.
So rather than try to have you buy into my vision Microsoft is having a ROI Microsoft has a presentation around Forrester’s Total Economic Impact model and how it applies to App-V. This session will help you identify potential savings your environment could realize through App-V including the business needs it can satisfy. If you feel that this may be a session for you or the ammunition you might need to sway management use the link below to view the event page.
https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032453953&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US
In an effort to aid the App-V community with sequencing guidance Microsoft launched the App-V sequencing forum yesterday. The goal of this area is to collect more App-V specific application sequencing guidance so that other users can reference and learn from other people’s experiences.
For example I put up recipe for Adobe Reader and for the most part Adobe Reader is a very easy application to sequence. But what I’ve seen most people do to turn off the auto updates they end up hacking the MSI to bits so that the feature never gets installed. In my recipe I utilize a more supported method by downloading a setup customization tool that easily configures the Adobe Reader installer to install with many options configured the way a systems administrator would prefer it to be.
I also tackled the Oracle 11G client even though most of you will probably not sequence just the client. The idea here was to give some idea as to best practice if you are using a TNSNames.ora file for service name resolution since that is a very common configuration of the client in sites I have been to. You’ll likely apply another application that uses Oracle to the same sequence or join the sequence with an application using DSC but at least you have a building block that will get you one step closer to your solution.
Take a look around and see the content currently available. If you think that you have found a sequencing solution that may benefit others open up the following post that you can use as a template for your recipe submission.
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/prescriptiveguidance/thread/ce5e2617-637a-4ab6-a6fe-f1ebe965709d
If you are only interested in browsing the current content use the following link to access the forum.
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/prescriptiveguidance/
Today fellow App-V MVP Ruben Spruijt has posted online the Microsoft App-V volume format specification over on his site for download by the public. Thanks to Microsoft and reviewer (another App-V MVP) Tim Mangan the details around the black box known as the App-V volume can be properly understood.
For those of you who really want to know what all these strange file types such as the .fsd .fsg .pkg and .tmp files are used for you can probably find more than you wanted to know. The real purpose here is to help the App-V ecosystem by enabling 3rd party developers to design new tools for use with App-V. MVPs Tim Mangan and Kalle Saunamäki have already released tools to read the package volumes. Both tools below allow you to view the changes made to the virtual application environment and in the case of Kalle’s Application Virtualization Explorer you can modify the user’s virtual environment. In case you weren’t aware of these tools here are some links to get you started.
Overview of Application Virtualization Explorer (Commercial)
http://www.gridmetric.com/products/ave.html
Overview of PkgView (Free)
http://www.tmurgent.com/TmBlog/?p=166
You might be wondering what other tools we may expect on the horizon. Gene Ferioli over at Microsoft suggested that Antivirus vendors can finally develop the capability to scan and repair infections inside the virtual environment without the virtual application running. Other vendors may decide to develop troubleshooting tools that go beyond what is currently available today. Maybe some vendors will develop tools to inventory the contents of a virtual environment and provide better software inventory capabilities to your systems management solution.
Microsoft will have the documentation up on their site soon but if you are curious here’s your chance for a sneak peek. Just download, execute the EXE in the folder you wish to unpack it in and agree to the EULA.
http://virtuall.eu/download-document/microsoft-application-virtualization-volume-format-specification
The reason I picked this error message as something to blog about is because I ran into a situation where this error code was a little bit misleading at face value. As a result more time was spent on this issue as we tried to isolate the root cause and resolve it. The funny thing about this error is that it can lead you on a bit of a goose chase as you try to fix your OSD task sequence if you don’t properly read your log.
At face value this error is nothing more than a simple problem with a package missing from a distribution point. The problem for me was that I was dealing with a bunch of issues straightening out the OS deployment piece where I was at so I wasn’t exactly trusting the infrastructure health. No matter what I did with the problem package the error would persist but if I recreated the problem package from scratch the error went away. Unfortunately once I fixed one package a new package became a problem. I then went about replacing all my packages until the task sequence started complaining about my installation source for the second time. At this point I knew I was in some sort of loop and recreating all my packages again wasn’t going to fix anything.
To make the situation even more confusing my 64-bit task sequence was using the problem packages without issue but my 32-bit task sequence was generating errors saying the content wasn’t available. At this point I was pulling out my hair trying to find out what the root cause of this mess was. Well it turned out the problem wasn’t SCCM but VMware Workstation. And to be fair it wasn’t VMware’s fault it was my mistake as to how I configured the virtual machines for imaging. So how could the VM configuration make such a big difference?
When I was reading my SMSTS.log it was very clear that package INI00027 wasn’t being found by the SCCM client environment.
But it wasn’t available for the usual reason which is usually missing files on the distribution point. When I looked at my only distribution point the files were happily waiting to be used. After another dive into the logs I realized that I wasn’t properly reading the SMSTS.log! If I look up a few lines I found the critical message.
My operating system deployment client thinks that the distribution point is not local and determines the package is not available which is a good behaviour. Most people wouldn’t want SCCM to deploy operating systems over a WAN link so this is why this is a default behaviour inside SCCM. So why it this virtual machine not appearing to be local to the distribution point? Easy, after looking at my virtual machine configurations in VMware Workstation I realized the mistake I had made configuring the virtual machines. The working 64-bit VM had its network interface set to bridged so it was getting an IP address off of the corporate network.
However the broken VM I had left the default of having the VM on a NATed network making the SCCM task sequence think the PC is not on a local network to the distribution point.
You might not see the specific situation I’ve encountered but hopefully this sheds more light on the logging and another possible cause for this error code. Also look at this blog post for the more common situations which this error can occur.
http://brothertu.blogspot.com/2008/09/failed-to-resolve-selected-task.html