The Microsoft Server Application Virtualization team blog

Introducing the Server App-V Remote Application Packager

Derrick Isoka — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 18:04:00 GMT

Traditionally, packaging an application for deployment through Server App-V has involved installing your application while the Sequencer monitors its progress and packages the results. Today, we are introducing the Server App-V Remote Application Packager which allows you to package an already installed application following the basic workflow below.

Install the Server App-V Sequencer and Remote Application Packager on your sequencing server
Launch the Server App-V Sequencer and select a custom installation workflow
Launch the Remote Application Packager, when the Sequencer is ready for you to run an installer
Provide the machine name with the natively installed applications
Select the applications you want to package and click start
The Sequencer copies over your application and produces a Server App-V package

That easy and your natively installed applications can now enjoy the benefits of easy and flexible deployment using Server App-V and VMM Service Templates.

Applicability

The traditional sequencing process may not always be an option in your environment. For example, you may not have the application’s installer or the application’s installation and configuration requirements. Virtualizing an application provides numerous deployment advantages and the tool is a great facility to achieve this especially if any of the following scenarios apply:

You need to deploy an application to a newer version of Windows Server

Note: Using this tool does not guarantee that your application will work with a newer version of Windows Server

You need to migrate an application from physical server a to a virtual machine
You want to leverage VMM Service Templates to deploy a select number of application workloads

Enter the Server App-V Remote Application Packager.

How It Works

Determining Candidate Applications

The first phase the tool performs is determining the applications that are candidates for packaging. Most applications make entries in the registry that allow the tool to generate a list of the applications installed on the remote machine. After that, the following criteria are applied:

Is the application’s installer MSI based?
Is it present on the Sequencing machine?
Is it installed machine wide and not for a specific user?

If the criteria are satisfied, the application is presented as a candidate application for packaging.

Packaging Selected Applications

The remote application packager uses a variety of techniques to gather information from the remote machine. Most of the information is gathered using built-in remote management capabilities such as WMI, remote registry, remote SCM and administrative shares. The exception is IIS content which relies on the web deployment tool (the tool needs to be installed on both machines).

There are 3 steps performed:

Create an application model – determine the application’s components (files, IIS sites, registry entries etc.)
Optimize the application model – perform additional logic to ensure that everything related to the application is included in the model and can allow us to move the components in an efficient manner
Copy the application to the sequencing machine – get the components from machine A to B via copy

Note: Your Sequencing OS must match the remote machine OS.

Supported Scenarios

Server App-V Sequencer SP1 (build 4.9.37.2003)
MSI based installers
The following Windows components:

Windows services
Registry
File systems
IIS
Environment variables

The tool is available here. We hope you try it and let us know if you have any questions or issues.

Derrick Isoka - Program Manager, Server Application Virtualization

KB: A .NET application crashes after installing the Microsoft Server Application Virtualization client

J.C. Hornbeck — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 19:24:21 GMT

Here’s a quick KB article on an issue you may run into where a .NET application crashes after installing the Microsoft Server Application Virtualization client. This is a pretty easy fix and you can read about it here:

2791762 - A .NET application crashes after installing the Microsoft Server Application Virtualization client (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2791762)

J.C. Hornbeck | Knowledge Engineer | Management and Security Division

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System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 Beta Now Available for Download

J.C. Hornbeck — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 16:28:13 GMT

The Beta of System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (“SP1”) enables System Center customers to jointly evaluate System Center 2012 with Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8. The Beta is for evaluation purposes only and not to be used in production as described in the EULAs associated with the product. No license keys are required to do this evaluation. The Beta includes updates and enhancements to the following System Center 2012 components:

Virtual Machine Manager
- Improved Support for Network Virtualization
- Extend the VMM console with Add-ins
- Support for Windows Standards-Based Storage Management Service, thin provisioning of logical units and discovery of SAS storage
- Ability to convert VHD to VHDX, use VHDX as base Operating System image
Configuration Manager
- Deployment and management of Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012
- Distribution point for Windows Azure to help reduce infrastructure costs
- Automation of administrative tasks through PowerShell support
- Management of Mac OS X clients and Linux and UNIX servers
- Real-time administrative actions for Endpoint Protection related tasks
Data Protection Manager
- Improved backup performance of Hyper-V over CSV 2.0
- Protection for Hyper-V over remote SMB share
- Protection for Windows Server 2012 de-duplicated volumes
- Uninterrupted protection for VM live migration
App Controller
- Service Provider Foundation API to create and operate Virtual Machines
- Support for Azure VM; migrate VHDs from VMM to Windows Azure, manage from on-premise System Center
Operations Manager
- Support for IIS 8
- Monitoring of WCF, MVC and .NET NT services
- Azure SDK support
Orchestrator
- Support for Integration Packs, including 3rd party
- Manage VMM self-service User Roles
- Manage multiple VMM ‘stamps’ (scale units), aggregate results from multiple stamps
- Integration with App Controller to consume Hosted clouds
Service Manager
- Apply price sheets to VMM clouds
- Create chargeback reports
- Pivot by cost center, VMM clouds, Pricesheets
Server App-V
- Support for applications that create scheduled tasks during packaging
- Create virtual application packages from applications installed remotely on native server

For all the details and a download link please see the following: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34607

J.C. Hornbeck | Knowledge Engineer | Management and Security Division

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Troubleshooting Server Application Virtualization 1.0

Derrick Isoka — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 15:19:30 GMT

In this post, I’m going to walk through most of Server Application Virtualization (SAV) with the intention of calling out all the different resources and techniques you can use to troubleshoot problems. I’ll go through installing the sequencer, doing a simple sequencing, installing the agent, and deploying a package and talk about what you can do in each of those phases. I won’t dive deeply into any particular technique but instead will try to give you an overview of all the options available.

I’m doing all of this on Windows 2008 R2 Server virtual machines with SAV v1 (4.7.27.1491) from the SystemCenter 2012 release. I’ll use WS_FTP from Ipswitch as a sample app. For details on how to sequence and deploy it, see our recipe at http://blogs.technet.com/b/serverappv/archive/2012/05/09/server-app-v-recipe-ws-ftp-server.aspx.

Installing the Sequencer

The Sequencer installer is actually a chainer (an executable that orchestrates the install process) wrapped around a few MSI files. To get the most verbose logs from the MSI installers, you can turn on MSI logging by setting the registry value Logging to ‘voicewarmup’ under HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer before you install. For more details on that technique, see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314852.

I set this registry value and ran the Sequencer installer with no command line parameters, just clicking through and taking all the default options. I didn’t run into any errors, but if I had, I would have first looked at the chainer’s log, since this summarizes overall setup progress. This is a file called SavSetupChainerLog.txt in your temp directory. (Easy ways to find the temp directory are to open an Explorer window and type ‘%temp%’ in the address bar, or open a command prompt and type ‘cd %temp%’.)

When the chainer runs, it installs an MSI with the SAV Sequencer components, pre-requisite MSIs, and the desktop App-V Sequencer (because the SAV Sequencer is built on top of the desktop App-V one). In this example, the 2005 VC redistributable was the only pre-requisite that needed to be installed. Since the installation was pretty straightforward, the log was, also. Here’s the whole thing:

6/15/2012 11:43:41:753 Setup will perform an Install on the product.

6/15/2012 11:43:55:721 Performing install of product Packages\SavSequencer.msi with command-line INSTALLDIR="C:\Program Files (x86)\Server Application Virtualization Sequencer" REBOOT="ReallySuppress" ARPSYSTEMCOMPONENT="1"

6/15/2012 11:44:4:110 Performing install of product Packages\vcredist2005sp1_x86.exe with command-line Packages\vcredist2005sp1_x86.exe /Q

6/15/2012 11:44:18:218 Performing install of product Packages\Setup.msi with command-line INSTALLDIR="C:\Program Files (x86)\Server Application Virtualization Sequencer" REBOOT="ReallySuppress" ARPSYSTEMCOMPONENT="1"

You can see the command lines passed to each phase of installation, which can help you figure out what might have gone wrong if anything did. Also, if the MSIs return any errors, they’ll show up here so you can tell which phase of the install failed. In the event of a failure, the next step is to look at the MSI logs. The link about verbose MSI logging above has more details on how these files are named, but in short they are the files in the temp directory that start with MSI and end with .txt. They tend to have a lot of information and as a result can be hard to interpret. A good technique is to search for the first instance of the word ‘error’ to get to the approximate area of the log file where you might learn something about what went wrong.

Sequencing the Application

I started the Sequencer, chose Create a New Virtual Application Package, and got to the Prepare Computer page. This page automates some of our best practices and troubleshooting tips.

It’s a great idea to pay attention to warnings and errors you see here. In my example, both System Center Configuration Manager (“SMS Agent Host”) and an antivirus program were running, and either of those could kick off tasks during sequencing that would invalidate the package I produce. Double-clicking on each warning provides a pop-up dialog with more info on what is wrong and how to fix it.

I continued through the Sequencer, specifying the WSFTP installer and a name for the package, to the point where the Sequencer started the installer for me. If I saw any errors up to this point, my best option would have been to look in the Sequencer’s log file, sft-seq-log.txt in the Logs folder under the Sequencer install path. By default on a US English machine that’s C:\Program Files (x86)\Server Application Virtualization Sequencer\Logs. This is a simple text file with the date, time, and a couple other pieces of information in square brackets at the start of each line. For example, here’s a section of the log file where virtualization subsystems are being loaded. Note the warnings about IIS and WebDeploy not being installed—I had to go back and fix these before I could sequence WSFTP).

...

[06/15/2012 14:46:04 VRB ] The 'Performance Counters' subsystem factory was loaded from module 'c:\Program Files (x86)\Server Application Virtualization Sequencer\sav_perf32.dll'.

[06/15/2012 14:46:05 WRN ] The Virtual IIS Subsystem could not be loaded because the IIS WMI Provider is not installed. IIS applications cannot be sequenced (error 4960113B-8004100E).

Corrective actions:

Enable the IIS role.

Enable the IIS Management Scripts and Tools role service (on IIS 7).

Restart the Server Application Virtualization Sequencer.

[06/15/2012 14:46:07 WRN ] The Virtual IIS Subsystem could not be loaded because the Web Deployment Tool is not installed. IIS applications cannot be sequenced.

Corrective actions:

Install Web Deploy.

Restart the Server Application Virtualization Sequencer.

[06/15/2012 14:46:07 VRB ] The 'SSRS' subsystem factory was loaded from module 'c:\Program Files (x86)\Server Application Virtualization Sequencer\sav_ssrs32.dll'.

[06/15/2012 14:46:07 VRB ] The 'Windows Roles and Features' subsystem factory was loaded from module 'c:\Program Files (x86)\Server Application Virtualization Sequencer\sav_roles32.dll'.

...

Once you’ve reached the point where your app’s installer is running, you’re in the same situation you would be in if you were trying to install without SAV. Any techniques you’d use to debug a failed installation of a native application, like looking at MSI log files, are equally valid for debugging failures here.

After I finished with the installer, I went back to the Sequencer and checked the I am finished installing check box, then clicked Next. After the Sequencer collected system changes and generated a package, I got to the package report page:

This is another useful page to look through to proactively find problems with the package you’ve created. For example, I double-clicked Files excluded from package and saw all the files that were modified during packaging time but not included in the package (because of heuristics we use to try to exclude things like temp files from your packages). The Sequencer also saves all of the information on this screen into a file called report.xml that ends up on disk with the rest of the package you create. If you notice a package failure at deployment time, it can be useful to go back and look at this report.xml file to see if you missed anything that would point you at a solution.

After I finished and saved the package, the package artifacts like the SFT file were available on disk for examination. Sometimes looking at these artifacts helps to diagnose other potential problems. A tool like Application Virtualization Explorer is valuable here. AVE allows you to open up the SFT file and see what files and registry settings ended up as part of the package. AVE was originally for desktop App-V packages but works just as well with Server App-V packages, except that the virtual services tab is not functional.

Package Upgrade Notes

If you’re doing a package upgrade in the Sequencer, there are a couple of extra things to consider.

First, if your package had deployment configuration, we have to apply it during upgrade on the Sequencer. If your deployment configuration file has errors in it (like missing credentials for services), you’ll see a failure. We put information about deployment configuration failures during package upgrade in the Application Event Log, not in sft-seq-log.txt, so you will have to open up the Event Viewer to see this set of errors.

Second, a common source of errors on package upgrade is extension point conflicts. As part of setting up the package to be upgraded, we have to deploy it to the machine, which includes registering all of its extension points. If there are any conflicts, e.g. a COM object that’s part of your package but is also present on the native system, this registration fails. You should be able to find more details about these failures in the Sequencer log, sft-seq-log.txt. You can also use AVE to look at the application’s manifest (the appv_manifext.xml file in the root of the package) to see what COM objects, services, WMI providers, etc. we register on the local system.

Installing the Agent

The SAV Agent setup is structured much like the Sequencer setup, with a chainer that orchestrates several MSI installations. The agent chainer log is also called SavSetupChainerLog.txt and will also show up in the temp directory. You can enable verbose MSI logging with the same ‘voicewarmup’ registry value and see the MSI logs in the temp directory.

For the purposes of this blog post, I am going to use the SAV PowerShell cmdlets rather than managing the SAV Agent through System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), so I installed those separately. The same error codes and messages that I talk about PowerShell returning below are also surfaced through VMM when you use it. The cmdlet installer uses the same chainer and the logs end up in the same place (the temp directory).

Deploying the Package

Before I started deployment, I took a look at the package. This can help you get your target machine set up correctly, or can help you debug issues after you see them. The manifest (called <package name>_manifext.xml) includes, among other things, the list of Windows Roles & Features that were enabled on the Sequencing station. Here you can see a bit of that section of my manifest:

Note that if any roles and features were enabled on the Sequencer, you need to enable them on the machine you deploy the package to.

If you use AVE to get into the SFT file (as described in the sequencing section above), there’s a second manifest in the root of the package, called appv_manifest.xml. Near the top of this manifest, you can find a list of applications that were installed on the sequencing machine, like this:

This can help you figure out things like what version of .NET you had on the Sequencing station, since the Agent you deploy to should be configured the same way.

For the actual deployment, I used the Add-ServerAppVPackage PowerShell cmdlet. I deliberately typed one of the paths wrong to get an example error message:

The first lines of that include an error code (0FD02560-00000002 in this case), whether it’s a general Windows error code or an App-V-specific error code (Windows, here), and the text associated with that error (“The system cannot find the file specified”). For Windows error codes, the last eight digits are the hexadecimal representation of a standard Windows system error codes. For App-V errors, you can often find help by searching online for the last 10 digits (60-00000002 in this example). In general, answers about desktop App-V error codes will also apply to Server App-V.

To get more information about what was wrong, I looked in the Application Event Log. I opened up Event Viewer, navigated to the Application log under Windows Logs, and looked for errors from the source App-V Services. Here’s what I see:

The text of the message in the screenshot is:

AddPackage could not find or open the Manifest file ‘C:\packages\WSFTPmanifest.xml’ due to error 0FD02520-00000002: The system cannot find the file specified.

I left out the underscore in the middle of the manifest file name, hence this error. In most cases, you’ll see more than one message from SAV in the event viewer so be sure to check through all the ones around the error you saw—sometimes you’ll be able to put together a more detailed picture of the problem by assembling pieces of data that we logged separately.

If you want to crank up the verbosity of the logs we generate, you can do that in the registry. Under HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\SoftGrid\4.5\Client\Configuration, there are values called LogMinSeverity and SystemEventLogLevel. You can set them independently from 1 (least logging) to 5 (most). SystemEventLogLevel controls how much gets written to the event log we looked at here. LogMinSeverity controls how much gets dumped to a corresponding text file log on disk. LogFileName under the same key shows you the path to the log file on disk. You do need to reboot (or at least restart all of the App-V services) to apply log level changes.

The event logs are useful for errors from Server App-V, but you may also see errors directly from your sequenced application. We’ve tried to make the process of debugging application-specific errors as close as possible to the native experience. For example, if a service isn’t starting, you can open the Windows Services console (services.msc) and try to start it there, look at its properties from there, etc. You can use tools like dcomcnfg or wbemtest to interact with COM objects or WMI providers that don’t seem to behave correctly. If you need to launch a tool or process inside a virtual environment, so it has full access to the application’s registry etc., you can do this by appending /RunInVE:<package name> to any command line anywhere on the system. For example, to get regedit running inside the virtual environment for my WSFTP package, I ran “regedit.exe /RunInVE:WSFTP”.

If you run into a situation where a deployment fails and you can’t find the answer in a log message, you may want to examine the state of the system to see if you can find any clues. This can be difficult, since Server App-V rolls back any changes it makes as part of package deployment if the deployment fails. You can prevent this rollback by setting the DWORD value DisableSavUndo to 1 under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\SoftGrid\4.5\Client. After this is set, if you deploy a package and deployment fails, the Server App-V agent will leave the system in whatever partially-installed state it ends up in when the failure occurs.

The ultimate troubleshooting tool for misbehaving virtual applications is Process Monitor. This tool lets you see almost every resource request an application makes, so you can look for errors or compare transcripts of virtual and native instances of an application. Depending on your platform, you may need to add the /HookRegistry flag to catch virtual registry transactions (see ProcMon’s documentation for more details). For many more details about using Process Monitor, see http://blogs.technet.com/b/appv/archive/2008/01/24/process-monitor-hands-on-labs-and-examples.aspx.

Conclusion

I hope this post provides a good reference for the set of techniques and logs that can help you troubleshoot Server App-V problems. If you have follow-up questions or ideas of your own, please feel free to post here.

Eric Jewart

Principal Development Lead, Microsoft Server Application Virtualization

Server App-V Recipe: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 Reporting Services

Chris Baldwin MSFT — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 19:19:00 GMT

Hi all,

Two things:

New Recipe

I am announcing the posting of yet another Server App-V recipe. This time it's for SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services. The recipe shows you how to package a report server instance and easy deploy it as a scale out node to an existing SSRS deployment. You can find the recipe here:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/serverappvirtualization/thread/cc12ba52-e3cc-4d48-8a1b-f9d795bf814f

New Recipe Site

Second, we've started posting our recipes to a forum-base site. While this blog site had its benefits, the forum site has two distinct advantages. First, it allows users to contribute their own recipes to help out the rest of the community. Second, it lets the community vote on the recipes so we can determine which ones are the most helpful.

Find the new recipe site here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/serverappvirtualization/threads

Let us know if you have any questions or issues with Server App-V, or if there are any blog topics you'd like to see articles written on.

All the best,

Chris

KB: Custom actions for the Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V) Sequencer installer package

J.C. Hornbeck — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:05:12 GMT

Here’s a new Knowledge Base article we published today. This one documents the custom actions that are available for the Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V) Sequencer installer package.

=====

Summary

The following is a list of the custom actions for the Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V) Sequencer installer package.

More Information

Installer : Server App-V Sequencer
CA: MUOptinRequired
Method name: MUOptinRequired
Description: This is an immediate custom action to check if MU optin is required.

Installer : Server App-V Sequencer
CA: OptinToMU
Method name: OptinToMU
Description: This is a deferred custom action to perform MU optin. This Custom action does not run in Sequencer.

Installer : Server App-V Sequencer
CA: SetSSRSRealTlsAllocCountProperty
Method name: n/a
Description: This sets an MSI property which includes the number of TLS slots to allocate in SSRS Injector subsystem.

=====

For the most current version of this article please see the following:

2704939 - Custom actions for the Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V) Sequencer installer package

J.C. Hornbeck | System Center & Security Knowledge Engineer

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Server App-V Recipe: Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 SP1

Chris Baldwin MSFT — Fri, 11 May 2012 14:32:36 GMT

Hello again, this is the third Server App-V Recipe I’m posting this week. The recipes are designed to give you a step-by-step guide to successfully package applications for use with Server App-V.

Verified With

SAV Version	System Center 2012 RTM (SAV v4.7.27.1491)
OS Version	Windows Server 2008 R2
App Version	Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 SP1

Prepare for Sequencing

1) Dynamics NAV requires that database components be installed as a prerequisite for the server. On a machine with SQL Server on it, run the Dynamics NAV 2009 SP1 installer and install the database components. During the NAV installation process described below, you will provide information so that the Dynamics server can connect to this SQL Server.

Sequencing Steps

SAV Sequencer Steps

1) Start the SAV Sequencer and select “Create a New Virtual Application Package”.

2) Address any issues highlighted in the “Prepare Computer” phase. Double-clicking a message will provide more details as well as a suggested resolution. Click Next.

3) Click Browse in the sequencer UI and locate the Dynamics NAV installer. Click Next.

4) Give the package a name (eg, in this example I chose DynamicsNAV).

5) Leave the Primary Virtual Application Directory as-is (the default is fine to use, but you can optionally change it to a different path if you desire).. Click next. This will start the Dynamics NAV installer.

Dynamics NAV Installer Steps

6) In the Dynamics NAV installer, accepting the software license terms and conditions

7) Select "Choose an Installation option"

8) We want to install the Server option, with custom settings. Click the "Customize" link under the "Server" heading.

9) Leave the "Destination Folder" values, the location to where the files will be installed, as they are.

10) Select the RoleTailoredClient option (this will install a client, which we can use to verify the functionality of the server after sequencing). Select "Run from My Computer".

11) Under "Server", deselect the "Microsoft Office Outlook Integration" option.

12) Click "Next"

13) The server must be configured before it can be run. Click on the "Server" link in the Specify Parameters dialog.

14) In the SQL Server pane, in the SQL Server textbox, enter the name of the database server on which you installed the Dynamics NAV Database Components prior to sequencing. Then, click OK.

15) Click Apply to commence the installation

16) When the installation completes, click Close to exit the Dynamics NAV installer.

17) In the Services manager, verify that the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server service is running. This indicates that the installation was successful.

SAV Sequencer Steps

18) Return to the Server App-V Sequencer and select "I am finished installing."

19) On the Configure Software dialog, click Next

20) On the Package Completed dialog, click Close

21) On the Deployment Configuration Items page, add a deployment configuration item for the database server. This will allow you to configure which database the Dynamics NAV server connects to at deployment, in case you want to change it.

22) Click "Add Deployment Configuration Item"

23) Search for "DatabaseServer" to locate the configuration item that stores the name of the destination database server.

24) Select the item that is found, and click Add. Observe that a new configuration item has been added for the database server.

25) Under the file menu, select Save to save your package. On the "Package Completed" screen, click Close.

KB: Custom actions for the Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V) Agent installer package

J.C. Hornbeck — Thu, 10 May 2012 19:29:50 GMT

Here’s a new Knowledge Base article we published today. This one documents the custom actions that are available for the Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V) Agent installer package.

=====

Summary

The following is a list of the custom actions for the Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V) Agent installer package.

More Information

Installer : Server App-V Agent
CA: MUOptinRequired
Method name: MUOptinRequired
Description: This is an immediate custom action to check if MU optin is required. If MU optin is required, MU optin page will be shown to the user by the user interface, if the user is running in UI mode.

Installer : Server App-V Agent
CA: OptinToMU
Method name: OptinToMU
Description: This is a deferred custom action to perform MU optin. This custom action runs as elevated and impersonated (Runs as the user running setup)

Installer : Server App-V Agent
CA: RegisterMOFFile
Method name: RegisterMOFFile
Description: This custom action registers a MOF file during install

Installer : Server App-V Agent
CA: RollbackRegisterMOFFile
Method name: RegisterMOFFile
Description: This custom action unregisters a MOF file during rollback when install is interrupted

Installer : Server App-V Agent
CA: UnregisterMOFFile
Method name: RegisterMOFFile
Description: This custom action unregisters a MOF file during uninstall

Installer : Server App-V Agent
CA: RollbackUnregisterMOFFile
Method name: RegisterMOFFile
Description: This custom action registers a MOF file during rollback when uninstall is interrupted

Installer : Server App-V Agent
CA: ModifyAppInitDllProperty
Method name: ModifyAppInitDllProperty
Description: Reads the AppInitDll registry value from registry and appends a space to the cached value if the original value is not empty

Installer : Server App-V Agent
CA: ModifyAppInitDllRegistryValue
Method name: ModifyAppInitDllRegistryValue
Description: This is a deferred custom action, that is run during uninstall. This custom action modifies app init registry value and deletes the value avcpmon.dll from it. If this results in app init registry value being empty, on windows 2008 and above machines, this also sets load_appinitdll registry value to 0.

Installer : Server App-V Agent
CA: RollbackAppInitDllRegistryValue
Method name: RollbackAppInitDllRegistryValue
Description: This is a rollback custom action, that sets the value of AppInitDll registry value back to its original state at the time of uninstall

Installer : Server App-V Agent
CA: SetModifyAppInitDllRegistryValue
Method name: n/a
Description: This sets an MSI property which includes new AppInitDll value with avcpmon dll path.

Installer : Server App-V Agent
CA: SetOptinToMU
Method name: n/a
Description: This sets an MSI property which includes a path to the MU auth cab file.

Installer : Server App-V Agent
CA: SetRegisterMOFFile
Method name: n/a
Description: This sets an MSI property which includes a path to the MOF file to register the MOF file.

Installer : Server App-V Agent
CA: SetRollbackAppInitDllRegistryValue
Method name: n/a
Description: This sets an MSI property which includes the AppInitDll Registery value

Installer : Server App-V Agent
CA: SetRollbackRegisterMOFFile
Method name: n/a
Description: This sets an MSI property which includes a path to the MOF file to unregister the MOF file.

Installer : Server App-V Agent
CA: SetRollbackUnregisterMOFFile
Method name: n/a
Description: This sets an MSI property which includes a path to the MOF file to register the MOF file.

Installer : Server App-V Agent
CA: SetSSRSRealTlsAllocCountProperty
Method name: n/a
Description: This sets an MSI property which includes the number of TLS slots to allocate in SSRS Injector subsystem.

Installer : Server App-V Agent
CA: SetUnregisterMOFFile
Method name: n/a
Description: This sets an MSI property which includes a path to the MOF file to unregister the MOF file.

Installer : Server App-V Agent
CA: SetAVCPMon32PathProperty
Method name: n/a
Description: This sets an MSI property which includes the path to avcpmon DLL file

Installer : Server App-V Agent
CA: SetAppInit_Dll32AdditionProperty
Method name: n/a
Description: This sets an MSI property which includes the path to avcpmon DLL file

=====

For the most current version of this article please see the following:

2704938 - Custom actions for the Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V) Agent installer package

J.C. Hornbeck | System Center & Security Knowledge Engineer

Get the latest System Center news on Facebook and Twitter:

The Forefront Server Protection blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/fss/
The Forefront Endpoint Security blog : http://blogs.technet.com/b/clientsecurity/
The Forefront Identity Manager blog : http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ms-identity-support/
The Forefront TMG blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/isablog/
The Forefront UAG blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/edgeaccessblog/

Server App-V Recipe: Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009

Chris Baldwin MSFT — Thu, 10 May 2012 16:30:00 GMT

Intro

Hi everyone, this is the next instance of a couple planned Server App-V “recipes” that we will be posting. These are written with two specific goals in mind. First, if you need to sequence this particular application, you can following these directions to get a successful deployment. Second, even if you aren’t sequencing this app specifically, reading these guides is a good way to get introduced to sequencing apps for Server App-V in a general sense.

Verified With

SAV Version	System Center 2012 RTM (SAV v4.7.9.1491)
OS Version	Windows Server 2008 R2
App Version	Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009

Special Notes

1) Dynamics AX requires a database, which must be installed separately from the AOS and Client which will be packaged as part of this recipe. Prior to sequencing, run the Dynamics AX installer and install the database. During sequencing you will point to the database you created in this step.

Prepare for Sequencing

Before sequencing, prepare the OS with the following prerequisites:

1) Enable Web Server IIS Role including all features

2) Enable .NET Framework 3.0 features (WCF Activation, Non Http Protocols)

3) Enable Message Queuing feature with default options

4) Enable Windows Internal Database feature

5) Enable Windows Process Activation Service feature

6) Install all Windows updates before starting the sequencing

For information on how to enable Windows Server roles and features, see here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc732263.aspx

Sequencing Steps

SAV Sequencer Steps

1) Start the Sequencer and select “Create a New Virtual Application Package”.

2) Provide the Package Name. In this example, I chose “DAX”.

3) Provide the Package Root. It will default to Q:\DAX, which you can use or optionally change it to something different. Click next.

4) Locate the Dynamics AX installer (setup.exe) and click Next to start monitoring. The SAV sequencer will now start the Dynamics AX installer.

Dynamics AX Installation Steps

5) Accept the EULA.

6) Select the “Custom Installation” Option and continue next.

7) Select the following options from the Select Components menu, then click Next:

a. Application files

b. Application Object Server (AOS)

c. Client

8) Select the database type you want to which you want to connect. Select “Microsoft SQL Server” in this case. Click Next.

9) You may be prompted to install prerequisites as shown below. If so, click the button to install these prerequisites:

10) Modify the file location to point to the package root at Q:\DAX. For example, the file location will be: Q:\DAX\Microsoft Dynamics AX\50.

11) On a 64 bit OS, you will be asked for two file locations. One path is for 64 bit and the other is for 32 bit components. For both, make sure you specify a path under Q:\DAX.

12) On a 64 bit OS, you will see the following pop-up. Continue by pressing “OK”

13) If prompted with the dialog shown below, warning about non-default file paths, press “OK”.

14) Provide the details for the database you created prior to sequencing. (Note: make sure the user running the installer has administrative privileges on the SQL Server).

15) Select the country or region you want to install and press “Next”.

16) Provide the port number you want to use to run the AOS instance.

17) Provide the account details to use to run the AOS service

18) Select display language and press “Next”.

19) Select the “Start AOS instance after installation completed” checkbox, then click Install to begin the installation

20) After installation completes, you will see the following screen which indicates that it has succeeded.

21) Verify that the Dynamics AX Object Server service has started in Service Control Manager. Please note that the services may take some time to start the first time.

22) Start the Dynamics AX Client by locating the shortcut in the Start menu and follow the Initialization check list below.

23) Return to the Server App-V Sequencer and select “I am finished installing”.

24) Save the package.

Server App-V Recipe: WS_FTP Server

Chris Baldwin MSFT — Wed, 09 May 2012 18:57:00 GMT

Intro

Hi everyone, this is the first of a couple Server App-V “recipes” we will be posting. These are written with two specific goals in mind. First, if you need to sequence this particular application, you can following these directions to get a successful deployment. Second, even if you aren’t sequencing this app specifically, reading these guides is a good way to get introduced to sequencing apps for Server App-V in a general sense.

Verified With

SAV Version	System Center 2012 RTM (SAV v4.7.9.1491)
OS Version	Windows Server 2008 R2
App Version	Ipswitch WS_FTP Server 7.5.1

Prepare for Sequencing

Before sequencing, prepare the OS by installing the following prerequisites:

1) IIS Web Server role (ensure IIS management scripts and tools are installed)

2) WebDeploy 2.0

Sequencing Steps

SAV Sequencer Steps

1) Start SAV Sequencer

2) Click Browse in the sequencer UI and locate the WS_FTP installer

3) Give the package a name (eg, WSFTP)

4) The SAV sequencer will now start the WS_FTP installer

WS_FTP Installation Steps

5) Accept the terms and conditions

6) Select Custom installation

7) Choose which WS_FTP components you wish to install. In this recipe, I will install only the WS_FTP Server.

8) Choose the database server you wish to use. PostgreSQL is the default, and is the choice used for this recipe.

9) When given the option to choose the destination folder for the installation, click Browse

10) Change the WS_FTP installation folder to the Q:\PackageRoot drive. For example, this package is named WSFTP, so the location should be changed to Q:\WSFTP

11) Now, do the same thing for the PostgreSQL application files and data files.

12) Choose a web server for Admin site. I chose IIS for this recipe.

13) Enter the fully qualified hostname to create. The default value in the textbox is probably fine.

14) Create Admin username & password. In this example, I used:

a. UserName: admin

b. Password: WS!Admin

15) Select the Default website

16) Click Install to begin the WS_FTP install process

17) Enter product key activation information

18) If asked to restart, select Yes. The SAV sequencer will notify you that the reboot request has been canceled.

19) Open the Services management console and manually start the following services:

a. Ipswitch WS_FTP Server

b. PostgreSQL Database Server 8.3

20) Verify that the services are operational

a. Open a Windows comment prompt

b. Run the command "ftp localhost"

c. Observe that a connection was made to the local WS_FTP server

SAV Sequencer Steps

21) Return to the SAV Sequencer window and select "I am finished installing"

22) After the sequencer finishes collecting changes, it will ask you if you want to run specific programs installed by WS_FTP in order to complete configuration. This is unnecessary, so click "Next".

23) On the "Package Completed" screen, click Close.

24) Review your deployment configuration settings, then select File > Save

Special Deployment Steps

1) Remember to deploy the prerequisites as noted in “Prepare for Sequencing” on the OS with the SAV Agent installed prior to adding the Server App-V package.

2) This application adds two services and a local user to the system. Remember to specify passwords to pertinent resources in the deployment configuration file. Here is a screenshot of a sample deploymentconfig.xml file:

End to End Application Packaging, Deployment and State Management using Server App-V

Derrick Isoka — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:50:00 GMT

This blog post will cover a portion of my MMS session (AM-B316) and will be useful if you're looking to familiarize yourself with some of the key value propositions of Server App-V. This post will allow you to:

Grasp how packaging using the Server App-V Sequencer works
Understand how deployment with PowerShell is easy
Understand how Server App-V allows for application portability through state separation

This post has 3 sections; Packaging, Deployment and Application Portability. Enjoy!

1. Packaging

Required Installers:

Server App-V Sequencer (RTM)
Apache: httpd-2.2.17-win32-x86-openssl-0.9.9o.msi
PHP: php-5.3.5-Win32-VC6-x86.msi
PHPBB3: phpbb 3.0.8
MySQL: mysql-essential-5.0.41-win32.msi

Pre-Requisites:

You're an administrator on the sequencing work station
All the installers and the files attached in the installphpbb.zip, at the end of the blog post below, are in c:\installers

Ensure the phpbb3.zip is extracted to C:\installers (i.e. C:\installers\phpbb3)
Ensure the installphpbb.zip is extracted to C:\installers (i.e. C:\installers\installphpbb.bat and C:\installers\httpd.conf)

The Sequencer's virtual drive should remain as the default Q drive
Sequencer OS is Windows Server 2008 R2 (I used Standard edition)

Instructions:

Install the Server App-V Sequencer with all default settings. After installing the Server App-V Sequencer, launch it and select "Create a New Virtual Application Package"
Resolve any issues that show up in the "Prepare the computer for creating a virtual package." screen and click Next
Select perform a custom installation
Name your virtual application package as BlogPhpBB and click next
At the Install your applications now screen, you can now install the application
Open Windows Explorer, navigate to C:\installers and run installphpbb.bat as administrator

Installing Apache

After running installphpbb.bat, the Apache installer will launch
Click Next in the Apache installer, accept the license agreement, click Next, click Next
Make sure "for All Users, on Port 80, as a Service" is selected, click Next
Select "Custom," click Next
Confirm the install path is Q:\BlogPhpBB, click Next
Click Install then Finish

Installing PHP

After completing the Apache installation, the php installer will launch
Click Next, accept the license agreement and click Next
Confirm the install path is Q:\BlogPhpBB\PHP, click Next
Select Apache 2.2.x Module, click Next
Confirm the Apache Configuration Directory is Q:\BlogPhpBB\conf\
Click Next, Click Install then Finish

Installing phpbb Application

At this stage the command prompt should show the phpbb folder being copied into your package. Once it completes, the MySQL installer will launch

Installing MySQL

Click Next at the first screen
Select Custom and click Next
Confirm the install path is Q:\BlogPhpBB\MySQL\ click Next
Click Install, Next, Next
At the Wizard Completed screen, uncheck configure the MySQL Server now and click Finish
The script will then configure MySQL then complete and exit
At this point opening Internet Explorer, type in localhost in the address bar and IE will present the phpBB Installation Panel. Close IE (you can install phpBB to have the installation as part of the package if you choose, but for this post we won’t)

Complete Sequencing

This should complete the packaging process. At this stage you can return to the Sequencer UI and check the box, "I am finished installing" and click Next
The Sequencer will take a few moments to collect system changes and once that is complete the "Configure Software" screen will be presented. Since we don’t need to configure any software, click Next and the Sequencer will again collect additional changes that may have occurred in the case that we actually run any programs in the Configure Software screen
The package will then be created and you should see the “Package Completed” screen. Some files may be excluded from the package and the following screen will be presented. Click close to see the Deployment Configuration screen for the package
You can now review the deployment configuration for the package. The detected Apache and MySQL services will be displayed and browsing the various tabs should show you the package’s registry and file system etc.
Click file and save your package. Create a folder named blogphpbb and save your package into that folder (it should have the default name blogphpbb). After saving, close the Sequencer and verify that your package contents are similar to the screenshot below
Remember to copy the package folder off the sequencer machine to a network file share so that we can deploy it on another VM.

2. Deployment

Required Installers:

Server App-V Agent (RTM)
Server App-V Agent PowerShell cmdlets (RTM)
PowerShell 2.0 (available by default on Windows Server 2008 R2)

Pre-Requisites:

You're an administrator on the Agent work station
The package folder is on a local drive, e.g. c:\packages\
Agent OS is Windows Server 2008 R2 (I used Standard edition)

Instructions

Install the Server App-V Agent and Agent Cmdlets using default settings
Launch PowerShell as administrator
Run: import-module serverappvagent (note: you may need to turn remote signing on by running the following cmdlet: set-executionpolicy remotesigning –force)
Run: add-serverappvpackage –name blogphpbb –manifest “path to manifest file” –SFT “path to SFT file” –configuration “path to deployment configuration file”
The package will successfully add
Start the virtual environment for the package by running: start-serverappvpackage blogphpbb
At this point you can now launch IE, go to localhost and see the phpBB Installation Panel
To get rid of the error on the top of the page open an elevated notepad and edit php.ini in the php installation directory - Q:\blogphpbb\php. Find the line that contains: '; date.timezone = ""' and replace it with: 'date.timezone = America/New_York' (without the single quotes, of course). Save the file and restart the Apache service from the Services control manager will effect the change
At this stage you can proceed to complete the installation and customize your application

Configuring phpBB After Deployment

Click the “Install” tab
Click “proceed to next step”, then “start install”
Provide the following information:

Db server: 127.0.0.1
Db server port: 3311
Db name: phpBB
Db username: root
Db pw: 123

Click “proceed to next step”
Provide the following information:

Administrator username: administrator
Administrator password: password
Contact email address: test@emailaddress.com

Click “proceed to next step” until you reach to the congratulations screen. Ignore sending statistical information and click “Return to the ACP if you do not wish to send statistical information to phpBB”
Click login to complete the installation

Delete the install directory under Q:\blogphpbb\htdocs so that you don’t see the admin control panel every time you access the application

You can now configure your board to customize your installation from the Administration Control Panel (Board Configuration section). For example I modified Board setting to provide a site name and description. I also created new forums and categories from the Forums tab
After completing configuring the application, proceed to the final step to learn how to manage your application’s state

3. Application Portability

Once a virtual application is running, the Server App-V Agent tracks all local state changes for the application. Server App-V separates the state changes from the immutable virtual application package. State changes include all configuration and file changes that are in the virtual environment. In this section we will illustrate how Server App-V allows you to move an application’s state from one machine to another.

Application portability is relevant for numerous scenarios. The most common scenario is when patching an OS. For example if you need to deploy a patched version of an OS and want to minimize unavailability of your application you can deploy the same application package from section 1 (Packaging) to a machine with the new, patched version of Windows Server, backup state from your non-patched version of Windows Server and restore the state on the new machine with the patched version of Windows Server. Once you verify that your application is working satisfactorily, you can choose when to make it available as you deprecate the already deployed server.

Backing Up Virtual Application State

Pre-Requisites:

You're an administrator on the Agent work station
The Server App-V Agent PowerShell Cmdlets are installed
You are on a machine with a virtual package deployed (preferably the VM we just deployed the package in the Deployment section above)

Instructions

Since we made changes to our deployed virtual application we can perform a backup of our application state to capture all the local configuration drift that occurred post deployment

Note this will be performed on a machine with the Server App-V Agent and the Server App-V PowerShell cmdlets installed. the machine we deployed the package above will suffice

Create a folder in the packagestate under the C drive (c:\packagestate)
Launch PowerShell as administrator
Run: import-module serverappvagent (note: you may need to turn remote signing on by running the following cmdlet: set-executionpolicyremotesigning –force)
Backup the package state. Run backup-serverappvpackagestate blogphpbb c:\packagestate\
You can browse to the package state location and confirm the package state was created
You can now copy the package state from c:\packagestate to a network share

Restoring Virtual Application State

To illustrate how this occurs, we will deploy the virtual application package we packaged in section 1 (Packaging) to a new VM. To perform this, follow the instructions from section 2 (Deployment) until step 7 (At this point you can now launch IE, go to localhost and see the phpBB Installation Panel) then proceed with the instructions staying in the open PowerShell prompt.

Instructions

Using Windows Explorer, create a folder in the packagestate under the C drive (c:\packagestate)
Run: import-module serverappvagent (note: you may need to turn remote signing on by running the following cmdlet: set-executionpolicyremotesigning –force)
Restore the package state: restore-serverappvpackagestate blogphpbb c:\packagestate\
Start the package: start-serverappvpackage blogphpbb
You should now observe all the state changes from your previous machine applied to your new machine by launching IE and navigating to localhost

Thanks for reading. I hope this helps you understand how Server App-V can be used to simplify deployment and management of applications in your datacenter.

Derrick Isoka, Program Manager Server App-V

Support policy for Microsoft applications that are running in a Microsoft Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V) environment

J.C. Hornbeck — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 18:07:51 GMT

Here’s another new Knowledge Base article we published today. This one spells out the official Microsoft support policy for Microsoft apps running in a Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V) environment:

=====

Summary

This article covers the Microsoft support policy for Microsoft applications that are running in a Microsoft Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V) environment.

Server App-V builds on the technology used with Application Virtualization (App-V) by separating the application configuration and state from the underlying operating system running on computers in a data center environment. Server App-V allows for dynamic composition of application and hardware images which can help significantly reduce the number of images that need to be managed. Server App-V also enables automation of deployment and management scenarios which can improve reliability, availability and serviceability of datacenter applications.

Not all applications are supported for use with Server App-V. Applications such as antivirus software that require device or kernel driver support are not supported. Server App-V is primarily designed for use with business applications or the business tiers of multi-tiered applications. Consequently some large server applications such as Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint are not supported. While there is no list of supported applications for use with Server App-V, Server App-V has been optimized to create virtual application packages for applications with the following attributes:

· State persisted to local disk
· Microsoft Windows Services
· Internet Information Services (IIS)
· Registry
· COM+ / DCOM
· Text-based Configuration Files
· WMI Providers
· Microsoft SQL Reporting Services
· Local Users and Groups

Microsoft will provide commercially reasonable efforts to make Microsoft Server applications, other than those listed below, run in a Server App-V environment. We recommend that you perform significant testing of virtualized applications to verify that the applications meet the requirements and the expectations of your particular environment.

As part of any support issue investigation, we may require the issue to be reproduced independently from the Server App-V software. We may require this for additional clarification and to make sure that the correct Microsoft group is handling the support issue.
Note: The following Microsoft applications are not supported in the V1 release of Server App-V:

· Microsoft Exchange Server
· Microsoft SQL Server
· Microsoft SharePoint

More Information

For more information on Server App-V, please visit the following Microsoft site: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg703262.aspx

=====

For the most current version of this article please see the following:

2692654 : Support policy for Microsoft applications that are running in a Microsoft Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V) environment

J.C. Hornbeck | System Center & Security Knowledge Engineer

Get the latest System Center news on Facebook and Twitter:

The Forefront Server Protection blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/fss/
The Forefront Endpoint Security blog : http://blogs.technet.com/b/clientsecurity/
The Forefront Identity Manager blog : http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ms-identity-support/
The Forefront TMG blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/isablog/
The Forefront UAG blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/edgeaccessblog/

Support policy for third-party applications that are running in a Microsoft Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V) environment

J.C. Hornbeck — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 17:32:03 GMT

Here’s a new Knowledge Base article we published today. This one spells out the official Microsoft support policy for third-party apps running in a Microsoft Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V) environment:

=====

Summary

This article covers the Microsoft support policy for third-party applications that are running in a Microsoft Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V) environment.

Microsoft will provide commercially reasonable efforts to investigate issues when you run third-party applications in a Server App-V environment. As part of that investigation, we may require that you reproduce an issue independently from the Server App-V environment. If the issue is determined to be related to the third-party application, you must contact the third-party vendor for more information about how to resolve the issue.

More Information

For more information on Server App-V, please visit the following Microsoft site: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg703262.aspx

=====

For the most current version of this article please see the following:

2692652 : Support policy for third-party applications that are running in a Microsoft Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V) environment

J.C. Hornbeck | System Center & Security Knowledge Engineer

Get the latest System Center news on Facebook and Twitter:

The Forefront Server Protection blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/fss/
The Forefront Endpoint Security blog : http://blogs.technet.com/b/clientsecurity/
The Forefront Identity Manager blog : http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ms-identity-support/
The Forefront TMG blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/isablog/
The Forefront UAG blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/edgeaccessblog/

Overcoming WMI Deployment Conflicts in Microsoft Server App-V

J.C. Hornbeck — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:46:24 GMT

Introduction

You have just gone through the process of sequencing a package, you go to deploy it in your test environment and you get an error message that says “The operation could not be completed successfully because a WMI class or provider in the package is already registered on the machine.” What do we do now? In this post, we will see how to identify WMI conflicts and methods for overcoming these conflicts without re-sequencing.

Identifying the problem

At the time of deployment, Server App-V performs a series of conflict detection checks to ensure that the package’s components and the machine’s components can coexist. If one of these checks fails, the package cannot be deployed to the target machine. For WMI components, this means that one or more of the classes or providers detected during sequencing is already present on the deployment machine. This often occurs when a non-essential process is accidentally left running during sequencing.

So how can we know that the add package failure is due to a WMI conflict? The error code for a WMI conflict is 1D-00003007 as shown in the Powershell screenshot below. A similar error is produced when deploying via Virtual Machine Manager.

Now that we know there was a WMI conflict, we need to determine which items in the package are actually conflicting with the native system. To do this, we open the Application event log and locate events with an Event ID of 13318 from the “App-V Services” event source. If more than one conflict was found, there will be an event log entry for each conflict.

From this event log message, we can determine which class or provider conflicted and in which namespace it resides. With this information we can begin the process of fixing the package.

Addressing the Conflict

The first thing that we need to determine is if the conflicting WMI classes and providers are part of the application itself. This is the most difficult part of this process and requires some knowledge of the application itself. Many applications publish information about their WMI classes and providers as part of their documentation. In other cases, it may be obvious that the class or provider captured belongs to another application. For the rest of this post, we will assume that the conflicting components are not part of the application (i.e. they shouldn’t be in the package).

There are two techniques for removing these components from the package, both of which leverage the package update functionality on the sequencer. The first technique is called “namespace exclusion” and provides the capability to remove entire WMI namespaces from the package. The second technique is a more targeted approach for removing individual entities within a namespace you need to keep.

NOTE Both of these techniques change the content of the package in a non-recoverable way. Backup your package before starting this process.

Namespace Exclusion

Namespace exclusion removes entire WMI namespaces from the package. This feature is not exposed in the user interface and must be configured through the registry.

From the previous section, we identified a conflict in the root\cimv2 namespace for the serverappv_collision_sample. After looking at the application’s documentation, we confirmed that the application does not put any WMI content in this namespace, so we can simply exclude it.

To do this, we open regedit on the sequencing machine and navigate to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software[\Wow6432Node]\Microsoft\Softgrid\4.5\ServerAppV key and edit the WmiNamespaceExclusions multistring value. This value consists of one namespace per line and is blank by default. We add “root\cimv2” to the value and close regedit.

Now, we start the Sequencer and open the existing package for update. We follow the Sequencing Wizard, selecting “Perform a custom installation” on the Select Installer step, and simply complete the wizard without installing anything. Once the wizard is completed, we are back in the main Sequencer window and can save the package. This package contains all of the previous content except the WMI components in the root\cimv2 namespace. When we deploy this package on the Agent machine, we no longer receive a WMI conflict (notice the ssrs2008_2.sft in the second Add-ServerAppVPackage call).

Targeted Removal

In some cases, an application may place classes or providers in the same namespace as other applications. If this occurs and we need to remove a specific set of WMI entities, we can use the package upgrade process as described above (without the registry change) and simply remove the problematic items from the WMI repository during the Installation phase. These components can be removed through Powershell. Below is an example of removing the serverappv_collision_sample class:

# WMI Connection Parameters
$savHost = "localhost"
$namespace = "root\cimv2"
$authLevel = "PacketPrivacy"

Remove-WmiObject -Authentication $authLevel -Namespace $namespace -Class "serverappv_collision_sample" -ComputerName $savHost

We can then complete the wizard, save the package and deploy the new version in the test environment.

Secondary Problems

During package upgrade, the same registration process that occurs on the Agent occurs on the Sequencer. This could result in a WMI class or provider that was captured in the package preventing the upgrade from succeeding. When this occurs, an error is received during the Installation phase of the Update wizard.

In this case, the sequencer log will contain an entry with the same message that was seen in the event log on the Agent. At this point, you can either find a machine that does not have the WMI entity causing the conflict or remove the conflicting component from the native system.

NOTE Removing the native component may result in a negative impact on the system’s function. This should only be done within a non-production virtual machine that you are willing to lose.

To remove a native component, follow the same process described in the Targeted Removal section above.

Conclusion

WMI conflicts can cause an otherwise usable package to fail deployment. By leveraging the package update process on the Sequencer, we can correct some of these issues without needing to completely re-sequence the application. The techniques described here can save a significant amount of time when trying to correct a minor sequencing issue.

Jeremy Dunker | Senior Software Design Engineer | Server App-V

Accessing Virtual Application Resources

Derrick Isoka — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 19:17:57 GMT

Applications consist of a set of resources (e.g. files, registry values, services, web sites, WMI providers, etc.) that work together to deliver product functionality. When one of these resources is not configured or functioning properly, the application may fail to operate and require an administrator to troubleshoot and correct the problem. Virtualization can hide or move these resources making them more difficult to locate while managing and troubleshooting. This post outlines three features provided by Server App-V that give greater visibility into virtual applications.

1. Native Registration

Server App-V integrates many virtual application components with the native operating system. A few examples include NT services, IIS based websites, WMI providers and COM objects. Since these components are registered natively, existing tools can see and interact with them as if the application were installed. This makes managing and troubleshooting these types of components consistent with how they were managed in the past. A few examples of this are:

· Starting/Stopping services from the Services MMC

· Viewing IIS web application settings from IIS Manager

· Viewing application specific users and groups in Computer Management

· Accessing an application’s WMI provider via Powershell

Although Server App-V integrates many virtual application components with the native system, there are two key aspects of a virtual application which do not appear in the same location as a native installation: the application’s registry and file resources. These can be accessed with the following techniques.

2. Running in the virtual environment

State separation is achieved by redirecting registry and file access for processes running in a given virtual environment to an alternate location. For the file system, this location is on the virtual file system drive (Q by default) and for registry entries, the virtual registry is used. This redirection occurs transparently to the application; in fact, the application itself may request the file C:\Program Files\MyApp\foo.txt but the request will actually be fulfilled by a file that resides in Q:\MyApp\VFS\CSIDL_PROGRAM_FILES\foo.txt. In many cases, it is advantageous to troubleshoot the operation of a virtual application by running tools inside the same environment that the application itself runs in, thereby allowing the utility to interact with the application’s registry and file resources the same way that the virtual application does.

Server App-V has made this process very straightforward with the addition of the /RunInVE parameter. This parameter can be appended to the command line of any process and it takes the form of /RunInVE:Package, where Package is the package GUID (available in the package manifest) or the name of the package that was specified when it was added. Note: /RunInVE must be the last parameter on the application’s command line.

Launching “cmd.exe /RunInVE:Package” produces a command prompt that sees the same redirected file system view as the package’s virtual applications. To see the merged virtual registry view, use “regedit.exe /RunInVE:Package”.

3. Viewing the virtual registry and file system outside of a virtual environment.

Server App-V has also made it possible to view virtual file system and registry resources from outside the virtual environment entirely. The file system can be navigated (without the redirection benefits mentioned in the previous section) by simply navigating to the virtual file system drive (Q by default) and the virtual registry can be accessed via WMI.

When each package is added to the machine, a new WMI namespace is created under root\microsoft\appvirt\server called “package_packageGUID” where packageGUID is the package identifier without braces or dashes. Within this namespace, you can use the StdRegProv class to access the virtual registry. More details on the StdRegProv class can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa393664(VS.85).aspx

The following example uses powershell to access a “test” value in the virtual registry of a package with the identifier {ADDA1A2D-62E7-4B5B-8CE0-662FD0659C46}.

# WMI Connection Parameters

$savHost = "localhost"

$namespace = "root\microsoft\appvirt\server\package_adda1a2d62e74b5b8ce0662fd0659c46"

$authLevel = "PacketPrivacy"

# Parameters for GetStringValue

$hklm = 2147483650

$keyName = "Software"

$valueName = "test"

invoke-wmimethod -Authentication $authLevel -Namespace $namespace -Class StdRegProv -Name GetStringValue -ArgumentList $hklm, $keyName, $valueName -ComputerName $savHost

Using native management tools, running utilities in the virtual environment and knowing how to browse virtual resources outside of the virtual environment simplifies the task of managing and troubleshooting virtual applications.

Video Walkthrough of Sequencing and Deploying Pet Shop 4.0

Derrick Isoka — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:06:00 GMT

A lot of people are new to the packaging process using the Server Application Virtualization Sequencer. As such, we’re providing two videos on how to sequence and deploy Pet Shop 4.0. These videos will give you a good idea on how to use the Server App-V Sequencer to create a virtual application package and then how to quickly verify the validity of the package using the the Server App-V PowerShell cmdlets. Of course the package created can also be imported into your VMM Library for deployment via a Service Template.

Note that the PowerShell cmdlets used in the video are from the VMM 2012 Release Candidate release. They have been updated from the VMM 2012 Beta release and use a new set of nouns found here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/serverappv/archive/2011/05/12/how-to-manage-virtual-applications-using-the-server-app-v-agent-cmdlets.aspx

Much thanks to Steve Bucci (Senior Support Escalation Engineer) who created the two videos!

Sequencing Pet Shop 4.0 Using Server App-V

View this video as a WMV

Deploying Pet Shop 4.0 Using Server App-V PowerShell Cmdlets

View this video as a WMV

Deployment Configuration Items - It’s all about customization

Gene Ferioli — Tue, 17 May 2011 16:17:00 GMT

In Server App-V, we wanted to provide a way to make your virtual packages customizable for you; a number of settings you can create based on your needs. In the next few moments, you will be introduced to deployment configuration items, a very unique feature of Server App-V that makes your deployment scenarios flexible.

Chapter 1 – DCI 101

Imagine you just sequenced a server application and created a package with the Server App-V Sequencer. The virtual applications in the package will do something when they are deployed and run. They may try to connect to a database server, listen on a port, access a specific machine or use specific credentials to access some resources. If we don’t give you a chance to control the settings of your virtual applications, they will always try to connect to the same database machine, listen on the same port and use the same credentials that you used on the sequencing station.

A basic scenario will make this clearer: I sequenced an application and during sequencing I configured my application to connect to database X. When I deploy the Server App-V package, the application will always try to connect to database X, unless I do something to change that. Over the next few years, I might want to deploy the very same package to hundreds of machines. How can I change the database that my application connects to?

The Server App-V Sequencer allows you to detect or even add environment specific application settings at sequencing time which can then be customized at deployment time. These settings are called “Deployment Configuration Items”. At the end of the sequencing, the last screen of the sequencer will allow you to see automatically detected deployment configuration items. From the same page, you can search and add additional deployment configuration items based on the needs of your application. For example; you can search for the string “database” which will look in all the places applications typically store configuration for references to that string. One of those references could conceivably be a database connection string for which you can create a deployment configuration item. By changing this item at deployment time, you can customize the application to point to the database that is appropriate for the environment that you are trying to deploy to. Having deployment configuration items will give you great flexibility during deployment time because you will be able to deploy the same package with different settings to each machine.

Chapter 2 – Show time

Now that we know what deployment configuration items are, let’s take a look at an example.

I sequenced the Ipswitch File Transfer (WS_FTP) application which uses IIS components, a local user, a couple of Windows Services, etc.. In the last page of Server App-V Sequencer, you will see the following screen which is all about deployment configuration items:

First, you will notice that the deployment configuration items generated are categorized into areas such as IIS, Local Users and Groups, Manual and Virtual Services. This is not a complete list but it covers the most popular ones. Let’s take a look at a couple of them and try to understand what they mean.

If you look at the second IIS entry:

This is classic IIS identity information. During the sequencing process, Server App-V IIS subsystem captures information and creates deployment configuration items for the information. In this case, the application creates a user identity and sets it to “IPS_wsftp_admin”. IPS_wsftp_admin is a local user that’s also created during sequencing. Now, what happens if we want to change the value of IIS user identity to something else for our deployment scenario? No problem… We can easily do that since we have the deployment configuration item for the user identity. I will show you how to modify these values in the next section but for now let’s take a look at another example:

In the image above, we notice that Server App-V Sequencer LUG (local users and groups) subsystem captures information about a local user during the sequencing process. WS_FTP creates a local user on the machine and we expose the password for that local user as a deployment configuration item. However, notice that there’s no value associated with this deployment configuration item. Passwords are confidential information, we will ask you to provide the password you want to create the account with during deployment time. Having the ability to enter the password as a deployment configuration item gives you the power of deploying this package to servers which have different password policies since you don’t have to stick to a single password now!

There’s also a “Manual” deployment configuration items section in the Server App-V Sequencer. As a user, you can create your own deployment configuration items by using the “Add Deployment Configuration Item” button on the right side of the sequencer page. Server App-V sequencer already uses subsystems such as IIS, LUG, Virtual Services to generate automatic deployment configuration items but in most cases you will want to create very application specific deployment configuration items. After I clicked “Add Deployment Configuration Item” you will see a new window like the one below:

You can do a search in this window to create deployment configuration items. For example, I used “DB*” to find everything starts with the string “DB”. I can add DBDataDir as a deployment configuration item and change the database data directory’s value during deployment time based on my needs.

Chapter 3 – Playground

We just learned what deployment configuration items are and how to create and use them. Now, let’s take a look at how this fits into SCVMM2012. In SCVMM 2012, as part of the VM template creation workflow, you create an Application Profile which includes the Server App-V package along with its deployment configuration items, all surfaced in the VMM UI

You can create as many application profiles as you want and use the very same Server App-V package with different deployment configuration items. This feature gives you great flexibility to customize your deployment scenarios. All you need to do is to enter the deployment configuration items for a specific environment and save it in an application profile. You can then later use the application profile in a service template to deploy your instances with a one button operation. The deployed instance will have the Server App-V package configured with the settings you customized from the SCVMM UI. If you are not familiar with SCVMM 2012 and application profiles, I would recommend that you download the SCVMM 2012 Beta and play with it. Server App-V along with SCVMM 2012 is designed to make deployment of applications as easy as pie.

Chapter 4 – Automation

Server App-V Sequencer has functionality to automatically detect deployment configuration items. Here is a list of deployment configuration items detected by each Server App-V subsystem

COM subsystem searches for DCOM and COM+ credentials.
IIS subsystem searches for web site bindings, application pool settings and IIS component credentials. You can control the port and IP address of a website by using deployment configuration items.
LUG subsystem searches for new local users and groups and creates deployment configuration items for their credentials.
Virtual Services subsystem searches for new services added to the system during sequencing process and creates deployment configuration items for the service credentials. By this way, you can run a service as Network Service or Local System or a domain user account!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I hope you enjoyed the blog post. Next time you sequence an application, pay special attention to deployment configuration items and customize your package settings based on your needs. We are looking forward to get your feedback!

Emre Kanlikilicer – Software Design Engineer II – Microsoft Server Application Virtualization Team.

How to Manage Virtual Applications Using the Server App-V Agent Cmdlets

Derrick Isoka — Thu, 12 May 2011 10:59:00 GMT

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012 has everything you need to manage your Server App-V packages. You can add Server App-V packages to the VMM library, create application profiles, and deploy packages to your VMs by using SCVMM’s user interface. SCVMM is perfect for your production environments. However, you may want to use something else to quickly test your sequenced packages in your test environments. To make your development and test scenarios easy, Server App-V gives you a set of PowerShell cmdlets. By using these cmdlets, you can do any kind of package management operation in your dev/test environments.

Here is a list of PowerShell cmdlets and what they are for:

Module name: ServerAppVAgent

Get-ServerAppVAgent cmdlet gives you information about the machine that’s running Server App-V. It lists information such as the Server App-V version on the machine and the logging level of Server App-V.
Get-ServerAppVPackage cmdlet gives you information about Server App-V packages added to the system. It lists information such as package name, package version and size of the package.
Add-ServerAppVPackage cmdlet is my favorite cmdlet as it demonstrates how a deployment scenario can be as simple as running a single command. This cmdlet takes your SFT file path, package manifest file path and a package name as parameter and adds the Server App-V package to the system. Depending on your package size, this operation may take a while. You can also specify deployment configuration file as an optional parameter to the Add-AppVPackage cmdlet.
Set-ServerAppVPackage cmdlet applies a deployment configuration document to the specified package. Basically, you can change settings of your Server App-V package by using deployment configuration items. This cmdlet is intended to run after Add-AppVPackage cmdlet to configure your package, if you didn’t pass a deployment configuration file into the Add-AppVPackage cmdlet.
Start-ServerAppVPackage cmdlet starts your Server App-V package. “Start” means that all Windows Services, IIS sites and other applicable processes of your package that would normally start at system startup will be started by Server App-V Agent. This cmdlet takes the package name as input parameter and is intended to run after Add-AppVPackage and Set-AppVPackage cmdlets.
Stop-ServerAppVPackage cmdlet is the reverse of Start-App-VPackage. It will stop all the processes belong to your package. This cmdlet takes the package name as input parameter.
Remove-ServerAppVPackage cmdlet basically does what the name implies. It removes the package and all of the registration associated with the package from your machine.
Backup-ServerAppVPackageState cmdlet backs up your package state*. As an example, this cmdlet is useful when you want to replace a machine that has a Server App-V package running on it. You can do a backup state operation on the machine and restore the state on your new machine so you don’t lose any data.
Restore-ServerAppVPackageState cmdlets uses the output from Backup-AppVPackageState and restores the generated state. The Backup-AppVPackageState and Restore-AppVPackageState cmdlet pair is useful when you want to move a package to a different machine.
Remove-ServerAppVPackageState cmdlet removes the associated state from the package. After running this cmdlet, your package will return back to its original condition. This is equivalent to running Remove-AppVPackage and Add-AppVPackage cmdlets.

*State: In the above cmdlet descriptions you heard ‘state’ a lot. So what’s it all about? State is basically the configuration changes and data that are accumulated as your virtual applications run. When you first add your Server App-V package to the system, it has no state. As the applications run and configured, something changes in the package. For example, any registry value, any changes to the existing file content, any new files added become part of the package state. Capturing state information is very important in package move scenarios because without this ability you would lose data when you move your package to a different machine. Server App-V gives you the ability to capture the state and move your package to a different machine by restoring the captured state in the new machine. SCVMM also uses Backup-AppVPackageState and Restore-AppVPackageState cmdlets behind the scenes to manage your packages in the VMM environment.

With this blog post we make an introduction to Server App-V Agent Cmdlets. In the next blog posts, our plan is to explain each cmdlet in detail by giving examples specific to each cmdlet. Stay tuned!

Emre Kanlikilicer – SDEII - Microsoft Server Application Virtualization

The System Center Blog Aggregator app is now available on Android

J.C. Hornbeck — Wed, 11 May 2011 13:19:39 GMT

A few weeks back I announced the System Center Blog Aggregator app for Windows Phone 7 and today I wanted to let you know that it was now available for all you Android users out there as well. I won’t go into all the details as you can read that at the link above, but here are a couple screen shots to give you an idea of what it looks like. It’s essentially the same app except for the addition of the Nexus SC blog and the blog for Microsoft Server Application Virtualization. Look for the original Windows Phone 7 app to be updated shortly.

After you load and start The System Center Blog Aggregator you see the main screen that defaults to loading the Nexus SC System Center site:

From there you simply click the list button and you’ll see the option for all of our other blogs:

From there you can select and read any blog you like. So there you have it, an app that allows you to follow our content quickly and easily right on your Android phone. If you have an Android phone you should load up The System Center Blog Aggregator and check it out. It’s free after all so what do you have to lose? You can find it here.

Enjoy!

J.C. Hornbeck | System Center Knowledge Engineer

Sequencing PetShop 4

Derrick Isoka — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 17:33:00 GMT

As a follow up to Emre’s article on how to create packages using the Server App-V Sequencer, we are providing step by step instructions on how to sequence and deploy PetShop 4. This is especially useful if you are new to the whole concept of virtualization and specifically Server App-V and we hope you find this useful in understand the sequencing and deployment process using Server App-V.

This blog article provides a great reference for installing the Sequencer if it is not already installed: http://blogs.technet.com/b/scvmm/archive/2011/04/18/creating-virtual-application-packages-with-microsoft-server-application-virtualization-sequencer.aspx . The IIS role and the IIS Management tools must be enabled, Sequencer run-time prerequisites, and MS Deploy (http://www.iis.net/download/WebDeploy) should be installed, as well.

Environment:

Ensure you have the Server App-V Sequencer installed on a Windows Server 2008 R2 Virtual Machine.

Tasks

The Petshop 4 Installers are available from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479071.aspx(same installer for x32 and x64 as well).

Critical:

If this is a new installation of the Sequencer, create a Snapshot to save the VM in a pristine state with just the Sequencer, web deploy and IIS role installed. If this VM has been used for sequencing previously, revert to Snapshot of the machine with just the Sequencer and IIS role installed.

1. Copy the Petshop 4 installation files to the Sequencing VM.

2. PetShop requires User Account Control (UAC) to be off. Turn off UAC and restart the machine before starting sequencing.

a. Click on CONTROL PANEL > SYSTEM AND SECURITY

b. Under "Action Center", click on "Change User Account Control Settings"

c. Move the slider to "Never Notify" and click OK.

d. Click YES on the security dialog.

e. Restart the machine.

3. Launch the Microsoft Application Virtualization Sequencer from START > MICROSOFT APPLICATION VIRTUALIZATION > MICROSOFT APPLICATION VIRTUALIZATION SEQUENCER. Instructions on installing the Server App-V Sequencer are here.

4. Select "Create a New Virtual Application Package"

5. Address any issues highlighted in the "Prepare Computer" phase.

a. Double-clicking a message will provide more details as well as a suggested resolution.

6. Click Next.

7. On the "Select Installer" screen, browse to the location of the Pet Shop installer, "Microsoft .NET Pet Shop 4.0.msi" and click OPEN.

8. Click Next

9. On the "Package Name" screen, type "Petshop 4" in the "Virtual Application Package Name" field.

a. This also creates a "Petshop 4" folder on the Q drive automatically.

10. Click Next.

11. The installation will start after a few moments.

12. Click RUN on the Security Warning that pops up.

13. The Setup Wizard for Pet Shop appears. Click Next.

14. Select "I agree" for the EULA and click Next.

15. Review the information for Pet Shop requirements and click Next.

16. Choose "Source Code Only" on the Installation Options screen and click Next. This option is selected with the assumption that existing databases, created later by a script will be used.

17. Change the installation folder to "Q:\Petshop 4" and click Next.

18. Click Next on the "Confirm Installation" screen.

19. Close the Internet Explorer page that opens when installation completes.

20. Click "Close" on the "Installation Complete" screen.

21. Minimize the Sequencer

Do Not:

Do not click on "I am finished installing." Monitoring is still occurring in this phase and additional actions are required.

22. Open an elevated Command Prompt

23. Change to "Q:\Petshop 4"

24. Type "build.bat"

a. Wait for all the actions to complete. "Press any key to continue…" will appear when the batch is finished.

25. From the same elevated Command Prompt session, run "DecryptWebConfig.bat"

a. "Press any key to continue…" will appear when the batch is complete.

26. In IIS manager, create a web site “Petshop4”

a. Click on Start>Administrative Tools>Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.

b. Right-Click on "Sites" and select "Add Web Site…"

c. Name the site "Petshop4"

d. Point the Physical Path to "Q:\Petshop 4\web"

e. Set the port to 8080, or whichever port you want to use in your environment.

f. Click OK.

27. From an Explorer window, copy the "Q:\DatabaseScripts" folder to a network share.

a. These scripts are useful for creating the database if it does not already exist.

28. Maximize the Sequencer.

29. Check "I am finished installing" and click Next.

30. On the Configure Software screen, click Next.

a. No First Use tasks need to be managed for PetShop4.

31. On the Completion screen you may receive information on additional actions before saving the package.

32. Deployment configuration entries should be captured at the end of sequencing with all connection strings and app settings.

33. Save the Package

34. Close the Sequencer

35. Copy the completed package to a server in a Development Environment to test.

Deploying PetShop 4 to a Development Environment with PowerShell 2.0

In a Production Environment, SCVMM 2012 is the sole method for deploying Server App-V Applications. For a Test Environment, PowerShell commands are used to deploy Server App-V Applications.

More Information:

For more information about deploying PetShop 4 with SCVMM 2012, see:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/m2/archive/2011/03/29/how-to-deploy-the-pet-shop-application-as-a-service-in-vmm.aspx . This article is also available as a Word document at the bottom of the posting.

Important:

For the purposes of this document, the SQL Server installation is on the same server as the SAV Agent. This is not required. The SQL Server can be remote.

Pre-requisites

Windows Server 2008 R2 Virtual Machine
SQL Server 2008 installation
IIS Server Role installed
- IIS Management tools
PowerShell 2.0
Local Administrator privileges
MS Deploy (Web Deploy 2.0)
- http://www.iis.net/download/webdeploy
Note:
- A best practice is to ensure that the sequencing machine and deployment machine are as identical as possible
- The manifest file will also have a list of the Windows Roles and Features captured on the sequencing workstation that were turned on prior to sequencing

Configuring SQL

1. Copy the PetShop 4 Database scripts created during sequencing from their network share to the Virtual Machine containing SQL.

2. From an elevated Command Prompt, run the "InstallDatabases.cmd". This will correctly setup the databases required for PetShop 4.

3. Four databases should be created in SQL: MSPetShop4, MSPetShop4Orders, MSPetShop4Profile, and MSPetShop4Services.

4. In the "SQL Server Management Studio", right-click the hostname. Select Properties.

5. Under Security, change the Server Authentication to "SQL Server and Windows Authentication Mode".

6. Click OK

7. The SQL Server may need to be restarted.

8. Right-Click on the Server hostname and select "Restart".

Important:

The "deploymentconfig.xml" file needs the correct password information. Search for "XML Notepad" on Bing for download information and use it for editing the XML file.

Installing the PowerShell Cmdlets

1. Browse to the "Cmdlets" folder in the SAV installation media.

a. …\x64\cmdlets\en-us for the US English version. Use the version most appropriate for your environment.

2. Double-click on "sav_cmdlets."

3. Accept the EULA and click "Install"

4. Accept the User Account Control (UAC) notification if one pops up by clicking "Yes."

5. Click OK on the notification that the installation was successful.

Installing the SAV Agent

1. Browse to the "x64" folder in the SAV installation media.

2. Double-click on "AgentSetup.exe" to begin installation.

3. Click "Yes" on UAC notification.

4. Click "Next" to begin the wizard.

5. Accept the EULA and click "Next."

6. Choose whether or not to opt-in for Microsoft Update and click "Next."

7. Install to the default path and click "Next."

8. The "Ready to Install" screen displays what will be installed. If they pre-requisite runtimes are not already installed, they will be included in the installation of the SAV Agent.

9. Click "Next".

10. After installation completes, click "Finish" to exit.

Editing the Deploymentconfig.xml file

The current "deploymentconfig.xml" for PetShop4 is missing password information for the databases created with the "InstallDatabases.cmd". The "Server" information may need to be changed, as well, if your SQL server is not local to the same machine as the deployment. Use a tool like XML Notepad 2007 to edit the XML without accidentally malforming the information. Change the server and password information needs in the SQLConnStrings.

1. In Explorer, copy the "deploymentconfig.xml" file, paste, and rename the file to "deploymentconfig-modified.xml".

2. In XML Notepad, Click CTRL+H to open Replace

a. Search for "password=" and replace with " password=pass@word1"

b. Click "Replace" NOT "Replace All"

c. Click "Find Next" until all instances of "password=" also have "pass@word1" associated.

3. Save "deploymentconfig-modified.xml"

Deployment Using Powershell

1. Run PowerShell as an Administrator.

2. Click "Yes" on the UAC warning to accept.

3. Verify the version of PowerShell by typing:

$host.version

a. The result should be:

4. Set the Execution Policy:

Set-ExecutionPolicy remotesigned

5. Select "Y" to allow the execution policy change.

6. Import the SAV Cmdlets module. This will have to be done on each usage of the SAV Cmdlets. This behavior does not persist.

Import-Module ServerAppVAgent

Tip:	Verify the SAV Agent is installed by typing "Get-ServerAppVAgent"

7. The order of the parameters used for adding an application is always the same. If the parameters are not specifically called out, this order matters. When parameters are specified, the order does not matter. As a best practice, follow this order:

a. Name

b. Manifest

c. SFT

d. Configuration

8. To add the application package (assumed to be in C:\packages\petshop4 for this document) type the following in PowerShell:

Add-ServerAppVPackage Petshop -manifest C:\packages\petshop4\petshop4_manifest.xml -sft c:\packages\petshop4\petshop4.sft -configuration c:\packages\petshop4\deploymentconfig-modified.xml

9. The following message will be displayed:

10. After the package is successfully added the package info will be displayed:

11. Open Internet Explorer

12. In the address bar, type http://localhost:8080

13. PetShop runs successfully:

Steve Bucci, SUPPORT ESCALATION ENGINEER

Creating Virtual Application Packages with Microsoft Server Application Virtualization Sequencer

Derrick Isoka — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 13:10:00 GMT

Server App-V's very own Emre Kanlikilicer recently posted a great introductory article on creating packages using the Server App-V Sequencer:

Microsoft SCVMM 2012 can manage Microsoft Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V) packages. In this blog post, we are going to explain what a Server App-V package means and how we can create Server App-V packages with Microsoft Server Application Virtualization Sequencer.

Prologue – What is Server Application Virtualization?

Server Application Virtualization is functionality that packages server applications into xcopyable images, which can then be easily and efficiently started and deployed without an installation process. This can all be accomplished without requiring changes to the application code. This virtualization process also separates the application and its associated state from the operating system thereby providing new approaches to deployment and management.

Server Application Virtualization is a core technology for the next generation of datacenter management capabilities from Microsoft, and is central to the service centric approach to management that will be enabled with System Center releases in 2012....

Continue reading here.

Enjoy!

Derrick Isoka, Program Manager, Server Application Virtualization.

Isolation and State Separation

Derrick Isoka — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 15:50:27 GMT

Isolation and State Separation are two very important concepts in the world of application virtualization, but we throw those terms around a lot without really explaining what we mean by them. I’m going to attempt to explain what those concepts mean to us and the roles they play with application virtualization. I will dive pretty deeply into some technical details to explain this, especially the isolation part, so hang on and let’s go for a ride.

Isolation

When we talk about isolation, we’re talking about hiding all of an application’s resources from everything else on the system. So for example, if the app has a file on disk, or a value in the registry, or a COM object registered, only processes running inside the app’s “bubble” (a.k.a. “virtual environment”) can see the file, value, COM object, etc.. This is a core feature of the desktop Application Virtualization product, but when we built the Server App-V product on top of the desktop product, we significantly relaxed this isolation. Apps do still run in a bubble, but the bubble is much more permeable.

One of the most significant changes from the desktop is that the application’s files on the file system drive (generally the Q: drive) are visible to everything else running on the system, as if the app were natively installed. They can be protected by file permissions just like any other app’s files, but there is no explicit hiding of these files as we do in the desktop product.

Another significant change is that we register more extensibility points in Server App-V than the desktop product does. In the desktop product, we only register file type associations and shortcuts. We still register those in Server App-V, though they are not as useful or common in server apps, but we have added more. We register NT services, IIS applications and sites, WMI components, and COM/COM+/DCOM objects with the appropriate components in the local system. To give a quick example, if an application includes an NT service, we register this service with the native Service Control Manager, so you can control the virtualized service just like you control natively-installed services (from the Services MMC snap-in or using PowerShell cmdlets like Start-Service and Stop-Service, for example). This also enables scenarios like the SCM automatically starting the virtualized service when the machine boots. I won’t dive any deeper into our integrations with the SCM, IIS, etc. in this post; suffice it to say that we expose a lot of stuff outside the bubble than we did on the desktop.

A third change we made to relax isolation is that we turned off the isolation of named objects (pipes, memory mapped files, mutexes, etc.). With Server App-V, if two applications are using any of these objects to communicate, the bubble won’t get in the way. For those of you very familiar with the desktop App-V product, this is similar to turning on ALLOW_LOCAL_INTERACTION on the desktop.

We have not completely removed all the isolation present in the desktop App-V product. One thing that we still isolate is the registry. Except for a handful of things we explicitly export (like service registrations), any registry keys and values that an app creates remain private to that app. We did not change this behavior from the desktop product.

File system mappings are also kept within an app’s bubble. As in the desktop App-V product, when an application expects to find a file on the C: drive but the file only exists under Q: (or whatever your system drive and the App-V file system drive are called), App-V redirects the application’s request on the fly, mapping a path like C:\Program Files\MyApp\foo.dll to Q:\MyPackage\VFS\CSIDL_PROGRAM_FILES\MyApp\foo.dll. These mappings are only available to processes running inside the bubble. Note that it’s only the mappings that are private—the actual files on Q: are accessible to all processes.

What does this set of isolation-related changes imply? Unlike the desktop product, if two applications cannot coexist natively on a single machine, they generally still won’t be able to coexist under Server App-V. And in fact, we decided not to support multi-tenancy at all for Server App-V 1.0, except in the case of IIS applications that can coexist natively.

Some of you might be wondering why we diverged from the desktop product like this. On the desktop, there are a lot of scenarios where strong isolation is helpful. Running apps side-by-side that would normally conflict is a very common App-V scenario in the desktop world. In fact, the initial uptake of App-V (way back before it was called App-V or owned by Microsoft) was largely driven by companies that wanted to be able to run conflicting apps together on Citrix servers rather than having separate “silos” to avoid conflicts, allowing them to have fewer total pieces of hardware to buy and manage. But when we looked at server apps in datacenters, we didn’t see as much value in the scenario. Outside of web apps, customers told us they generally run one app per VM, citing availability, performance, and security among other reasons.

On the flip side, isolation was hurting us because it meant that applications were hidden, not just from each other and from the OS but also from all the tools that have been built to manage them. So relaxing that isolation allows a lot of existing tooling to keep working without modification. When we weighed the pros and cons of app isolation in the datacenter, we decided that we’d be better off letting server apps be more integrated and visible, so we made the changes I described to turn off a lot of the isolation supported by desktop App-V.

That was a lot to digest, but as I mentioned at the top, there are actually two topics I wanted to cover together. This brings us to…

State Separation

State separation is a feature of both the desktop Application Virtualization product and Server App-V. “State” refers to any changes the application makes to the native system while it is running, like a log file it writes or a registry value it updates. So “state separation” means we’ve found a way to separate an application’s state from other things that are changing on the system, unrelated to the app. When an app (or something acting on its behalf, like a WMI provider) makes a change to a resource, we keep track of it. In Server App-V, we don’t always isolate it from other apps or from the OS—those other entities can see some of the changes that are made—but we do keep track.

Why is state separation important in the datacenter? When it’s time to move an app to a different machine, since we know what changes are part of the app’s state and which ones aren’t, we can lift up the app’s state and take it along! Separation of application state is a very powerful feature of Microsoft’s application virtualization products. It enables scenarios like a backup, a repair, a move to a patched OS, a move to different hardware, and some fundamental cloud management operations.

To give a more concrete example, let’s imagine I have a web app that implements a blog, or maybe a forum—something where people can post blocks of text and others can comment on them. Let’s call it a blorum . I virtualize my blorum and have it running on a server. But my blorum becomes immensely popular and I want to move it to a more powerful server. Without Server App-V, I could install the software on my new hardware, then scrape around the old machine and try to find whatever blog posts or forum discussions people created and somehow copy them all to the new machine. Maybe the blorum happens to support some kind of export/import functionality for this scenario… or maybe it doesn’t (uh oh). With Server App-V, I don’t have to worry. I back up the state of the blorum on the old machine, deploy the blorum to the new machine, and restore the state there. Server App-V figures out what was important to include in that backup/restore and what wasn’t—all the blog posts and forum discussions along with any configuration changes I made to the blorum come along to the new machine.

Parting Thoughts

Isolation, the ability to keep an app’s resources hidden from other apps and the system, is a great feature in the desktop App-V product, but we decided the cons outweighed the pros in the datacenter so it is mostly removed from Server App-V. State separation, however, is an incredibly important feature of Server App-V that allows you to back up, move, and restore an app’s state instead of having to start over when you deploy. I hope this article helps clarify those concepts and why we included one as a feature of Server App-V and not the other.

Eric Jewart, Principal Development Lead, Server App-V

What types of applications should I virtualize with Server Application Virtualization?

Gene Ferioli — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 15:32:00 GMT

Server App-V, a core feature of SCVMM 2012, was created with one purpose in mind: making deployment and management of datacenter applications dramatically simpler. Server App-V provides a predictable, repeatable and consistent deployment/management experience. Take your application, create an image of it using the Server App-V Sequencer, copy the image to your target machine and all you need to do is to deploy the package with a single command to get your application up and running!

Our goal is to support a wide range of server applications. As with Microsoft Application Virtualization for the desktop, there is not a list of applications that Server App-V will support. However, there are a number of architectural attributes that the initial release of this technology has been optimized for.

Most server applications need to communicate with other Windows components such as IIS Manager, Windows Service Manager, COM+ catalog and so on. Server App-V has been built to allow communication between the virtual application and native Windows components. In this post, we are going to look at what kind of applications are the best candidates to be virtualized and what kind of applications are not supported by the first version of Server App-V.

Before we begin, a quick note about OS support: Server App-V supports server OS platforms only. Both x86 (where applicable) and x64 versions of Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are supported. All editions are supported with one exception – The Server Core edition is supported for Windows Server 2008 R2 only.

Server App-V features for application virtualization support

IIS Server App-V supports applications that install web sites, virtual directories and application pools. With Server App-V, you can easily virtualize applications that create these components on IIS 6.0, IIS 7.0 and IIS 7.5.

Windows Services Many server applications install Windows services. With Server App-V, you can sequence an application which creates Windows services. When a virtual package is deployed to a server, you will see the same services in the Windows Service Control manager as you would see with a native installation of the application.

COM/DCOM/COM+ Server App-V Sequencer captures COM/DCOM/COM+ components created by the application installer. These components are registered during deployment time so that they can be consumed by other applications or processes. You can also see these components with tools such as dcomcnfg.

WMI Many datacenter applications create WMI components such as WMI providers or classes during the application installation. With a Server App-V virtualized package, you won’t miss any of these components when the package is deployed!

Local users and Groups Unlike desktop applications, it is common for datacenter applications to create local users or groups as part of the installation process. Many files also contain references to user or group security IDs to restrict access to certain users and groups. Server App-V is capable of capturing local users and groups created during sequencing of the application and recreating them at deployment time. Any references to the SIDs are also maintained automatically.

SSRS In Server App-V, we built a special component to handle the virtualization of applications that install SQL Services Reporting Services as part of the installation process. Therefore, if your application uses SSRS, you can use Server App-V to virtualize it!

The features listed above allow Server App-V to virtualize applications that interact with Windows OS through IIS, Windows Services, COM and so on. So, take a look at your application now. Does it need any of the features that we just mentioned? If so, it’s a great candidate for Server App-V. Give it a chance and you will see how Server App-V makes your life much easier. However, if your application doesn’t use any of the components listed above, it doesn’t mean that you cannot use Server App-V to virtualize your application. It just means that you can virtualize your application without using any special Server App-V feature that we described. Indeed, many application installers still deploy only a bunch of files and registry values and nothing more. These types of applications can easily be virtualized by Server App-V.

Special note:

Server App-V does not migrate server level IIS changes made by application installers. If an application installer changes a server level IIS setting, other applications running on the system will be affected by this change. Therefore, Server App-V leaves the responsibility of changing server-level settings to deployment administrators. However, don’t worry, Server App-V provides deployment configuration items to make this process very easy for you!

What types of applications are not supported by Server App-V?

Server App-V Beta does not support applications that install the following components:

Drivers If your application installs drivers, Server App-V won’t install the drivers on deployment machines. Some applications have drivers that are installable separately. If this is the case for your application, you can install the driver first and then sequence the application with Server App-V sequencer. Before you deploy the package, you should also install the driver to the deployment servers.

SharePoint Server App-V does not support virtualization of SharePoint or virtualization of an application that installs SharePoint as part of the installation process. If your application uses SharePoint, check if it can connect to an external SharePoint server. If so, you can virtualize the application without installing SharePoint during sequencing process.

SQL Server Server App-V Beta does not support SQL Server virtualization. If your application requires SQL server, you will need to point the installer to a previously deployed SQL server instance on another machine during sequencing time and update the deployment configuration information to point to an appropriate (again, previously deployed) instance at deployment time.

It is always difficult to draw a line between what applications can be virtualized and what applications can’t be virtualized. The Server App-V Sequencer is designed to report any issues that are encountered during sequencing process. Therefore, after your sequencing finishes, it’s always a good idea to check the Server App-V Sequencer report and verify that your package is functional with the Server App-V cmdlets; which we will cover in a separate blog post.

We are eager to hear about your experiences and get your feedback! If you have a candidate application, virtualize it with Server App-V. Tell us how we can we improve the experience and make your life even easier!

Emre Kanlikilicer

Software Design Engineer II, Server App-V

So, what is “Server App-V”, anyway?

Derrick Isoka — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 23:07:00 GMT

Look there, in the sky! It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! No, it’s Server App-V – and, if everything that’s being said about it is true, it’s going to make your applications fly in the clouds!

There has been a lot written about Server App-V and what it will do for you – especially around Windows Azure. While it’s mostly correct, some of it could be a little misleading. Also, there hasn’t been enough said about the primary problems that Server App-V was designed to solve. While we really appreciate all the wonderful press we’ve been getting, we do think that we need to spend a few minutes telling you what Server App-V is – and just as importantly – what it isn’t.

Server App-V is not a product you can buy off the shelves. It’s not even a product you can download from Microsoft’s Volume License site. Why? Because it’s not actually a stand-alone product in the first place. What it is, however, is a defining feature of a fantastic new product, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012, which will revolutionize the way you look at – and operate – your datacenter.

Here’s how.

As a company – as an industry, even – we’ve done a fair bit to reduce the cost of running a datacenter. Well, at least where hardware is concerned. Virtualization has helped consolidate many work-loads onto a few servers; thus reducing the amount of rack-space, power and cooling required in datacenters.

We haven’t done quite as well with software.

Even in a completely virtualized datacenter, every VM is an individual node that requires care and feeding where software is concerned – be it for installing or patching the OS; or deploying, configuring and updating applications.

A few years ago, Anders Vinberg, a Technical Fellow at Microsoft postulated that the way to solve this problem was to combine a “hardware” (VM & OS) image on the fly with an application image – and then deploy and service the datacenter by using these base images, rather than managing each individual machine.

VMM2012, which entered public Beta last week, is an implementation of this vision. Here are three key things that it does to enable the vision:

1) It lets you visualize your datacenter as a set of services rather than the underlying hardware that is necessary to host those services

2) It lets you create templates for these services that tie together the hardware (Hyper-V/ ESX/ Xen), OS and application (Server App-V/ Web Deploy/ SQL DAC) profiles that make up each service

3) It enables you to manage your services by managing these templates, rather than individual machines

Server App-V is the significant new piece of technology that enables this – because it’s the technology that enables you to create a portable application image in the first place. And, by tracking any changes that happen to the configuration state associated with that application, it allows VMM to “lift up” the application so that it can be moved to another machine – thus allowing VMM to automate OS patching.

We will cover details of how this is done in a future post.

In a nutshell, enabling this image composition and portability of applications is the primary value proposition of the Server App-V technology – and VMM2012 is the release vehicle for this solution.

So how does Windows Azure fit into all of this?

To be perfectly transparent, that is something that’s still being worked on actively by the Windows Azure and Server App-V teams. Our current thinking is that Server App-V will have a role to play in moving existing server applications from datacenters to Windows Azure without requiring the code to be re-written or re-compiled. To validate this idea, we have released a private Community Technical Preview (CTP) of a “Server App-V Packaging” tool that creates a Windows Azure package from a Server App-V package which can then be provisioned using the Windows Azure portal. The newly created Windows Azure package runs in a Windows Azure worker-role. Configuration state for the application is stored in a mounted Windows Azure drive, which can be re-attached to a new machine if the work-load needs to be moved by Windows Azure.

There are some important caveats to keep in mind about the use of this technology in Windows Azure:

1) This is a preview of technology, not a finished product

2) The release vehicle for this technology is in the process of being finalized. The eventual solution we ship will be aligned with the Windows Azure roadmap and delivery plan

3) This solution is, at present, only useful for applications that have been designed to scale-out. The reasons are two-fold:

a. Windows Azure needs to have the ability to move application work-loads across machines (at the very least, in the event of a hardware failure). This means that you cannot deploy a single instance of an application without the risk of a service outage

b. If you deploy multiple instances of an application that was not designed to scale-out, consecutive requests might go to different servers which might impact application functionality, particularly if the app stores state in memory across sessions

That said – the private (by invitation) CTP is available now for customers to try out. We are primarily working with customers who are planning a transition to Windows Azure but cannot move a small percentage of their apps because they cannot be re-written. If you fit this profile and want to be part of the CTP, please contact your Microsoft Account Representative.

Dilip Pai

Senior Test Lead, Microsoft

Welcome to Server Application Virtualization

Derrick Isoka — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 12:33:00 GMT

Easy as pie. Like taking candy from a baby. A walk in the park. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

You hear those phrases all the time. But how often do you hear them applied to installing server applications in a datacenter? Sure, maybe you have some web app that’s easy to set up, but I’m talking about multi-tier, 300-page-runbook, 17-DVDs-inserted-in-the-correct-order server apps. Applications that take days to install, and help from 11 different vendors to get right.

Our mission is to change that. Microsoft Server Application Virtualization [Server App-V] is designed to dramatically simplify deploying and managing applications in the datacenter. We give you the ability to package an app up and move it around like a single file, with its state kept separate from any machine it runs on so it remains portable. Combine this with System Center Virtual Machine Manager and you have a solution that lets you build out complex services in no time.

How do we do it? That’s a little too much for a single blog post, but stay tuned and we will tell you. We’ll use this blog to share product news, talk about features, and give you tips and tricks to get the most out of Server App-V.

Our whole team of engineers is lined up waiting to contribute content to this blog. We’ve been working on Server App-V for quite a while. Now that it’s been announced at MMS 2011, we have a lot to share. We’ll start with deep dives into our core functionality, and we’ll spice it up with walk-throughs showing how we sequenced different apps.

So what’s on your schedule this week? Got a big app to deploy? A reconfiguration you’ve been dreading? Stick around and before you know it, you’ll be heading home from work early on a Friday, leaving your datacenter happily humming along and thinking to yourself, “Wow, that was as easy as pie.”

Eric Jewart, Principal Development Lead, Server App-V