Server App-V: The New Lift and Shift for server applications

There is a lot of talk these days on application virtualisation, especially regarding Microsoft’s App-V desktop application virtualisation products. A little know server component has been in development for a number of years know. For a number of both technical and organisational issues, Microsoft’s Server App-V technology is just not getting real traction in today’s application migration and server migration programs.

If you have not heard about Microsoft’s Server App-V server-application virtualisation technology, you can read more here.
Quoting from Microsoft;

"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."

Possibly one of the reasons why Microsoft Server-App has not generated the broad level of interest and acceptance in IT, is that server based applications are less likely to packaged and included in automated deployment systems like Microsoft SCCM. In an effort to resolve some of these technical challenges, Microsoft has released a tool that allows for Remote Application Packaging and then conversion to the Server App-V format.

There are a number of packaging and deployment scenarios that this application packaging tool supports including;

• 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 will need an application compatibility tool for that.
• 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

This Microsoft tool does not support all packaging scenarios, but Microsoft has indicated full support for the following deployment scenarios (note: all the following required Server App-V Sequencer SP1 (build 4.9.37.2003))

>

All MSI based installers

The following Windows components:

• Windows services
• Registry
• File systems
• IIS
• Environment variables

You can download the tool here.

Is this the end of Application Compatibility?

Just a quick post today, and a great (re)start to the application compatibility conversation. As we have learned over the past (almost) seven years, application compatibility was a big challenge for organizations moving from Windows XP to Windows 7 and even now Windows 8.x

Watch Chris Jackson present his views on the "Last App-Compat Session" at TechEd 2013 in North America.



You can download the high-quality video here:

As always to you can tune into Chris Jackson's latest thinking at his blog: The App Compat Guy

Application Compatibility may not be quite as important as it was during the past few years due to all the "heavy lifting" required to get some pretty old applications on to Windows 7.  However, my current thinking is that application compatibility is now simply part of the application management "fabric" in most organisations and is part of the many challenges in getting applications to work.

You will hear more from me on this topic -soon....

October Patch Tuesday posting on Computer World

It looks like a massive Patch Tuesday update for this month, as we see updates from Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and Adobe.

You can read more about some of the details and concerns for each patch on my Computer World blog posting here:

Each month I post a review of the recent updates and the releases from Microsoft. You can find my other, past posting here: 

See you next Patch Tuesday!

Application Management Event 2014

I was worried that no one would show-up, but show up they did. The annual AppManagEvent 2014 Event (organised by PDS) in the Netherlands was a great success.

Fortunately, I was able to present on one of the technical break-out sessions on virtualization with summary of the past few years of application virtualization titled, "The Rise and Fall and Rise of Virtualization". 

Here are some quick photos from the session:

Greg Lambert presenting at the Application Management Event

We also had a stand at the exhibition, and had a chance to get some feedback on our cloud-based Assessment, Remediation and Conversion service.

Qompat Demos at Application Management Event

You can view the virtualization presentation via Slide Share here.

Overall, we had a great response to our planned products, services and pricing.

If you would like to find out more about how we can assist with your migration or business as usual application management efforts, please join our BETA program, listed below.

Join us at the AppManagement Event 2014

Join us the Application Management (and Packaging) Event.

I will be presenting one of the technical break-out sessions at the Application Packaging event in the Netherlands.

The delights and frustrations of technology are such that with each wave of progress, a new set of issues come to light. In this session, I will reflect on the early history and technical challenges encountered in the process of migrating desktop, and sometimes server environments, to virtualised platforms 

Time, October 9th, 13:40 – 14:20

It would be great to see you, and if you have time, please stop by the Qompat stand to see a demo.

Getting everyone on the Web to work: IE11 Compatibility on Windows Phone 8.1 Update

The two Program (co-program) Manager for the Microsoft Internet Explorer team recently released a pretty substantial blog posting on some of the compatibility challenges facing modern browsers today.  Pairing their posting with the release of Windows Phone 8.1 Update and the subsequent inclusion of IE 11 they mentioned some of deep technical challenges facing most web developers including;

• Faulty browser detection not recognising IE as a mobile browser and giving the desktop experience
• Using only old webkit-prefixed features that have been replaced by standards
• Using proprietary webkit-prefixed features for which there is no standard
• Using features that IE does not support with no graceful fall-back
• Running into interoperability bugs and implementation differences in IE

Some of the most important issues that they raise include sites not detecting that IE on the phone is a mobile browser and subsequently providing desktop content.

Here are two examples

The first image represents a desktop experience while on the right is the mobile view as expressed by IE 11 on Windows Phone 8.1 Update. 



In addition this issue, the IE group indicated that one of the larger browser compatibility issues is touch enabled devices. The new method of using Pointer Events offer significant performance and functional advantages for multi-funtion sites that use mice, pens touch and other pointer inputs. This is compared with the legacy Touch Events  which the IE11 team have endeavoured to support as well. Following from these significant challenges, Microsoft has decided not to support all of the web-kit and vendor pre-fixed API’s and looks pretty committed to helping developers migrate their existing web code bases through their community outreach program and collaborating with the Mozilla webcompat.com effort.

Microsoft believes that the Web should just work for everyone, but there still looks like a lot work is required by everyone to achieve that goal.

References:

The Mobile Web should just work for everyone
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/07/31/the-mobile-web-should-just-work-for-everyone.aspx

Server 2003 is new the Windows XP

As a grizzled veteran of many desktop migrations, I remember (all too well) the many pitfalls and challenges in migrating to Windows XP. Even worse, I also remember migrating to Windows 200. Which is really showing my age. Time to move on? No way. We are getting pretty good now at migrating desktops. We have automated workstation builds, large scale deployment platforms applications and we seem to get getting the update process working without causing major service outages with each month. 

Now it is time to focus on our server platforms. Microsoft has a rolling lifecycle policy that details when each platform will receive mainstream support, extended support and also details the final day of patches and bug-fixes to the specified platform. I have included an image from Microsoft’s support lifecycle web page that details the basic structure of how Microsoft supports its applications and development platforms.

As you can see from the chart below, for Microsoft’s Windows 2003 (R2) mainstream support has already ended. This means that though the platform will still receive security updates, Microsoft will no longer respond to feature requests. And, no more complimentary (free) support for Windows 2003.  Here are some of the details on the support lifecycle for Windows Server 2003.

Migrating to Windows 7 from Windows XP was a big problem with a host of associated technical and logistical challenges including;

• refresh of desktop hardware was required
• application compatibility issues were a significant technical challenge
• potential complications from a new, more restricted security model were possible
• a browser change (from IE6 to IE 7 or IE10) caused unforeseen migration issues

Now, with the current impetus to migrate from Windows 2003, we are again facing all these issues and the following additional challenges;

• hand-crafted server builds and application installations are difficult to replicate
• there is an increased business risk to higher numbers of users affected by server outages
• database and other server connections and dependencies are more likely and more complex
• older applications may no longer be supported
• cross-dependency issues are exacerbated on newer 64-bit platforms

And if Windows 2003 end-of-life support wasn't enough of an issue, the following other technologies will expire also on the same day (July 15th, 2015);

• Compute Cluster Pack: 14 July 2015
• Forefront Client Security: 14 July 2015
• Host Integration Server 2004: 13 January 2015 (I haven’t heard of this one inyears)
• Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2004 Enterprise Edition: 14 April 2015
• Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2004 Standard Edition: 14 October 2014
• Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005: 13 January 2015
• Systems Management Server 2003 and 2003 R2: 13 January 2015
• Virtual Server 2005 and Virtual Server 2005 R2: 13 January 2015

According to HP, over 11 million systems are currently running Windows server 2003. That’s over 25,000 servers that need to be migrated each day before extended support expires.

The time to start planning is now!