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A colleague of mine, Volker Kleiner (owner of App-V.info) , posted a German article on Softgrider.de about how to install the App-V 4.5 Management Server onto Windows Server 8 Beta. Why… well, because it just doesn’t work out-of-the-box. During installation, you’d get an Error 25100 or Error 25122. For Windows 2008, a solution is described at MS KB2212140, but that doesn’t work on Win8: To prepare the machine, you need to “convert” it into a “GUI less” server instance and convert it back afterwards. This is the (loose) English translation of that article…
Microsoft’s Application Virtualization Client 4.5 and 4.6 settings essentially are controlled by Registry values. A while back, Microsoft published an ADM Template to control some of these settings. Login Consultants then published an add-on ADM Template that controls the seetings that Microsoft did not implement.
Now, Login Consultants offers an new, full ADMX Template that uses the more current XML based way of manipulating software settings by Group Policy Objects (GPOs). Furthermore, the new ADMX contains all relevant settings to control App-V Clients, so admins don’t have to deal with two different templates any longer. However, there are som considerations…
Different versions of Microsoft’s App-V Sequencer used to have the habit of generating non-unique (but duplicate) package GUIDs under certain circumstances. This seemed to appear if the Sequencer Software was launched before a snapshot was taken of the VM. Tim Mangan and Nicke Källen found out that a similar issue occurs (under certain circumstances) when using the new template feature of App-V SP1. However, I never faced nor heard about duplicate GUIDs in practice… And the reason might be the VM’s state while taking the snapshot.
In order to create a persistent state of the Sequencer Workstation for App-V Sequencing, it is recommended to either use Virtual Machine Snapshots or some Hard Disk Imaging Technologies. The reason for creating such a persistent state is that Sequencing always should be performed from a “clean” workstation and imaging or using snapshots are two very fast ways to accomplish this.
The Common Sense about that persistent image is that it should reflect the “Core (Client) Image” to certain extends and also it should not have any background services active that negatively influence the sequencing process. Microsoft’s Sequencing Guide whitepaper describes that more detailed.
But what about the Sequencer Software itself: should it be installed before the image gets created – or should it be installed each time after the image has been reverted?
In the past, there was an easy answer to that question. It was caused by a special behaviour (you may call it a bug) of the Sequencer Software – and this answer was: Do not install the Sequencer before creating the image. Essentially, the reason for this advice was that the Sequencer sometimes generated equal Package GUIDs (instead of random GUIDs) – it did not do that always, but explaining that would be out-of-scope here. Therefore, the Sequencer software usually was not installed before creating the image…
The App-V Client comes with the Registry Value “FileSize” in the “AppFS” key that indicates to control the App-V client’s cache size. This is not the case.
Instead, there might be a difference between the FileSize Registry value on the one hand and the actual maximum value and the value shown in the App-V Client Management Console on the other hand.
To adjust the maximum cache size using centrally controlled methods you have to initialize/flush the App-V cache or to use Microsoft’s App-V Cache Resizer Resource Kit tool.
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