Some interesting pieces of information are starting to trickle out about Citrix’s upcoming release of Feature pack 2 for XenApp.

Harry Labana is writing about a new feature being developed for this release known as “VM hosted apps”. Seamless applications beyond Terminal Services, does it help?

What this means is that Citrix is going to be giving you the ability to publish applications which are actually being delivered from a windows xp/vista/7 hosted virtual machine, and not from a server 2003/2008 .

What does this gain you.  For instance you have an application that does NOT work on server 200x, or will not legally be able to be delivered on server 2003, or supported.  You now have a way of delivering the application and having all the same advantages you have when using XenApp,  Centralized, secured, seamless, dynamic.

I think this is awesome. This is a serious competitive advantage that addresses a real pain point in server based application delivery.

Where it is going to get cloudy/confusing is the use case for full blown desktop virtualization (XenDesktop), and the use case for vm hosted APPs.  Is this going to start to eat into the licensing sales for XenDesktop?

I am super excited to get this in and start testing…..

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I was recently assigned a case by another engineer.  The problem was that a user on XenApp was not able to use an application that they were previously able to. The user would get a generic “Access Denied” by the application which was a .net application published on XenApp. The Administrator account WAS able to run the application

After discussing it further with the engineer who worked on it previously it appears that an update was done to the application prior to this issue arising.

The first thing we tried was to temporarily escalate the permission level of a test user.  We granted a user local administrator rights as a temporary test. The user received the same error.  At this point we knew it was nothing to do with the usual folder/file/registry permissions error since the user still could not access the application.

At this point I turned to an old favorite RegMon from Microsoft.

With Regmon running I was able to launch the application as the user up to the point they were denied access. I reviewed the Regmon log and came across the following:

Why was the user trying to access a dll in another users profile?  I copied that dll “scrrun.dll” to c:\windows

i then registered teh dll using regsvr32 c:\windows\scrrun.dll

Once the dll was registered I then had the normal user test the application. The user was able to access the application=Success!

The moral of the story was that the other administrator applied the update to the application without doing a change user/install.  I bet he wont do that again!

Scott

I was working with a customer cloning XenApp servers running under XenServer.  We were using XenAppPrep to prepare the images for cloning, then using Newsid to change the SID and the server name.

Newsid was crashing about halfway through the process when it got to the registry key for “IMA”.  The process would simply disappear with a DR Watson in the event log. After some quick googling i came across some links that spoke of the issue on 64 bit windows but not on 32 bit.

I did some additional research on Citrix and came up with the following article

This article made perfect sense.

We ran at from the command prompt to launch newsid and it ran successfully.  I have never run across this with Newsid before so I am curious why this happened. Hopefully it saves someone else some time.