I’m still on PowerFuse 2008 – Should I upgrade?

From the get-to-the-choppa dept. The short answer to the title question is: YES! If you’re still on PowerFuse 2008, this would be a great time to consider upgrading. Although RES Software does not currently not enforce an end-of-life policy for the 2008 product, you would do well to consider the advantages of upgrading. The effective policy is as long as there is a viable number of customers who utilizes a given version, that version is supported, however new features will not be added to that version. As many of these questions usually end up in my inbox anyway, I have written this piece to cover some of the most common reservations and concerns that the few remaining PF2008 customers may have. It is my ambition to dispell some of the misconceptions about an upgrade from PowerFuse 2008.

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Eli Khnaser on User Workspace Virtualization

From the Community Hero dept: Thursday this week, my good buddy Eli over at Artemis in Windy City, posted an excellent article on RES Workspace Manager and VDX. Go have a look at the article right here. Keep up the great work man!

New technote: Cause and Effect in WM

From the technote-R-us dept. This article is made as a handy reference to what happens at what time  in the RES Workspace Manager product. It has been one of the items which many people spend a long time figuring out: When you change something in WM, when does it actually take effect in the user’s session? In this article I will attempt to explain why you have this learning curve, as well as providing a reference chart for your future convenience.

If you are new to Workspace Management, hopefully this should save you some time, although bear in mind that the provided chart may not be 112% accurate as I’ve cranked it out off the top of my head. Nevertheless I hope you find it usefull.

<<< Click here to view the article!

Workspace eBook

From the old hats dept. Okay, so this is not exactly hot off the press, as it’s been sitting there for a while. However I thought I’d make you aware of this ebook, if you haven’t stubled over it already. A while back a friend of RES Software, Mr. Greg Shields of Denver, Colorado has written an interesting e-book called The Shortcut Guide to User Workspace Management.

Go check it out here

Dynamic Desktops – A reference for the rest of us

The purpose of this article is to give you a technical (sorta) primer on the reasoning to look into the RES Dynamic Desktop Studio. This is the combo of the two flagship products of RES Software; Workspace Manager and Automation Manager, which, if I may emphasize: is freely available for download and evaluation from RESsoftware.com, unlike the practice of certain other vendors, ha! The article is a collection of thoughts and views that I often share with course participants during training, so I hope they may be useful or at least interesting for you too. Finally it is my ambition with some examples at the end to set you well on the shortest path to use the RES products for the benefit of yourself and your organization.

Even though the RES products are very logical and stuctured to work with, the first steps with any product that’s new to you, can be a challenge. It’s kinda like getting into a new car model you haven’t driven before. You need to spend a few moments familiarizing yourself with the vehicle, find the knobs for seat adjustment, mirrors etc. You already know what you want to do, but need to figure out how it’s done in the product at hand. With the RES products it’s the same deal, albeit there are slightly more knobs, dials and levers to get aquainted with.

So, where are you at now?

For the purpose of continuity, I will presume that you are at least half way through the stage where you’re considering RES Workspace Manager and/or RES Automation Manager as the right way going forward for you. Suffice to say, if you are merely looking for a quick fix or point solution to deal with one problem, the pletora of features which are to be found under the hood of both Workspace Manager and Automation Manager, may seem overwhelming at first. I trust you’ll see where I’m comming from in the following rant:

We all know the type: The overworked and underpaid IT guy (believe me, been there, done that). In this role, due to the never-ending workload we tended on the daily to look for hand-to-mouth solutions: quick fixes to quell current pains and put out fires, hoping in futility that we eventually could get on with dealing with all the other crap that’s piling up on our desks. We rarely get the opportunity to pause, step back and look at what may be wrong with the big picture. Usually something major has to break before that happens, some heads may even roll and only then we may get a brief window of opportunity to obtain a fresh perspective on how we manage our IT.

If that scenario sounds all too familiar, it is imperative to seize those rare oportunities to ask the questions: Are we doing this right? And are we using the right tools for the job?

The tools of the trade

My favorite analogy here is: Okay, so you’re a carpenter. You need to bang a nail into the wall but you can’t find your hammer. Right, a screwdriver handle can do as a hammer in a pinch. Job done. Next day you’ve got 20 nails to hammer in. You’re probably better off getting a new hammer at this point. The week after, somebody asks you to hammer in 2000 nails into a new house. This is where you want to consider a nailgun. The morale of the story is twofold:

1. There’s no magic-bullet-product that will make all your pains go away
2. Use the right tool for the right job.

At this point you might stop to think; “Well that’s a load of BS, because I’ve got a swiss army knife, a LM SuperTool or some other multi-thingamagoo that let’s me do many things with one tool!”. Yep and those are indeed great tools which all belong in any well equipped carpenters toolbox. No argument there. See below.

To make my point: On my planet, The RES Dynamic Desktop Studio is a Swiss Army Nailgun! Complete with lasersight and extra powerpack! :-) Yeah, let me explain that: It’s specialized for the purposes of Workspace and Automation Management, yet contains all items necessary to accomodate pretty much any kind of Windows environment it may encounter. Hence, it’s not a point solution. There are however a few certain things you cannot do with the Dynamic Desktop Studio, where you would need an old fashioned “hammer”. An example is currenty bare metal deployment/PXE boot. Per design RES doesn’t currently do this, as there are dozens of products out there (of which several are free) that does this very well. RES Software focuses on producing the best specialized tool around to deal with the challenges of the Dynamic Desktop.

Policies, policies policies

When adapting a new tool like this, something which may work against us, is the fact that for the last 15+ years we’ve been schooled in the Art of Windows; that the main way to manage Windows centrally is through our friends; the Policies. The main challenge with policies is that conceptually they are all over the place. There’s very little structure. Sure, if you do nothing but manage policies all day long, I guess you might disagree as you eventually got it all figured out. The rest of us may have considerable challenge juggeling loopback policies, gpresults, inherritance and a load of other interesting things. Besides that, in one policy template you may have settings for both the computer and the user, which can be applied seperatly. Finally, there’s the way policies are applied. I believe MS tells us that a policy should be applied after max 15 minutes after logon, and will be re-applied every 90 minutes or so. But hey, they come standard out of the box and you can do a lot with them. So why look elsewhere?

Well, I can only give you a subjective answer to that. In short, policies were never my weapon of choice. It was my feeling that I had to jump through way too many burning hoops to actually reach the goal I was trying to accomplish in the first place. Second, policies could only bring us so far. Exhibit A: Hiding driveletters was a royal pain in the butt as one usually had to hack the policy template .adm file in order to get the desired results. Also it’s far from all apps that can be controlled with policies.

The alternatives

These are the two primary reasons why I started using RES products back in the day. The major differentiator, which in my humble opinion makes the RES Dynamic Desktop Studio great, is a clear and sound technical strategy behind the products:

One product is all about the users and their needs in their workspace. Everything from configuration, security and performance, to documentation and much much more. All in ONE console. The other product is similar only as it’s strictly dedicated to dealing with all things system: Computers, Servers, AD, Databases and many other things.

As with all significant tasks before you, it is very important that you sit down for a minute and think about what you actually want to do specifically. And of all those wonderful things, what do you want to do first. If you have no clue, RES suggests in the getting-started guide that you follow the steps of Desktop Transformation:

1. Install the desktop sampler and collect some data,
2. Import this data into the workspace designer and start laying out some ground rules.
3. Finally you use the Workspace Model feature to enable those rules one at a time until you have a managed workspace.

That’s all fine and good, but it may not necessarily apply to our current scenario or expectations, as we may have other initial purposes which we want the product to serve. Desktop Transformation is a great way to get things started though as it will allow you to scope out the state of things and gather intelligence before you do anything else. However, let’s have a look at the scenarios which we may run in to. I’ve organized these under statements which you may perhaps be able to identify with, in no particular order. With the

Initial purpose #1: “We want to manage our profiles“. This is one of my favorites – First of all, we need to qualify the above statement a bit. First of all, what kind of profiles are you using, what’s your perceived problem, and how & why do you want to manage it in the first place? The most common reasons is obviously profile bloat and/or corruption, which there has been written countless articles about on the net already. The way the RES Workspace Manager addresses these issues is NOT to manage the profile. The profile itself is actually quite uninteresting from the workspace’s point of view is merely a container/storage object. What’s interesting and necessary to deal with are the actual settings within it. Erwin, Paulina and the rest of the gang over at the RES Support blog have written a series of great articles on the usage of Zero Profiling technology. I suggest you check them out here. At a later stage it is my ambition that myself or somebody else writes a Zero-profiling 101 article with some simple 1-2-3 how-to’s to follow.

Initial purpose #2: “We want to merge local apps with a remote desktop“. This is a classic case of need for the Virtual Desktop Extender aka VDX, which RES Software holds a patent on. If you haven’t heard about it before, it’s the ability to do “reverse seamless windows“, i.e. making a locally running rich application seem like it’s embedded inside a remote desktop. I have previously written an article, available here, which explains in detail how to set up a VDX demo that will knock your socks off!

Initial purpose #3: “We want to migrate our XP workstations to Windows 7/VDI”. The need for migrating away from Windows XP will become more and more pressing as time goes on. We can be damn sure this isn’t something that will go away. For this purpose you really need to consider the Desktop Transformation described above. The more you know about the existing environment, the easier it will be to re create that within the managed context of the Workspace Manager. Second Zero Profiling technology is your friend as it will allow you to carry settings across the  respective OS platforms in realtime.

Initial purpose #4: “We want to lock down our user environments to a varying degree“. Not all environments needs the same degree of lockdown. At the most restrictive end of the scale, we find the Server Based Computing environments (TS, Citrix) which is essentially an environment where both the HKLM registry and the OS/file system is shared among multiple users. Suffice to say if such a system is left unmanaged and not secured properly, you will eventually run into trouble. The RES Workspace Manager has 5 independent security subsystems which will enable you to control exactly what is allowed in terms of process launches, filesystem, filetypes/folders, sessions, removable disks and network security. The beauty of using these security systems is that you won’t break anything as they are applied as a seperate layer on top of what you’re already using. That means that there is no tatooing of NTFS or similar, which you may encounter using a traditional lockdown methodology. I’ve written a primer on working with the RES Security model. The article is available here. The last thing I want to add to the discussion about security lockdown. Remember to look at the Workspace Models located under the Setup node in Workspace Manager. Using the PlusMenu at the top, you can make exceptions for given environment, so for example your workstations aren’t locked down as hard as your TS/Citrix servers.

Initial purpose #5: “We want to get rid of all the scripting“. Who can blame you?! That’s why I looked at the RES products back in the day, in the first place. The best place to start is to take the bull by the horns. Print out a hardcopy of your loginscript (this is where a good old matrix printer with fanfold paper would be a blessing :) Pick out all the easy wins, meaning go after implementing all the easy stuff first. Start with drivemappings for example. There are usually a ton of “IF MEMBER OF <some group> THEN MAP X: to \\Server\share. Those are easy-peasy to configure in the Workspace Manager in the Composition|Files and Folders|Drive and Port mappings section. Start there and work your way trough your reghacks (use Composition|Other|User registry),  file copying (use Composition|Other|Execute command, custom resources or Automation Manager Integration) and whatever else your login script does.  Keep your eyes peeled on this topic as I will bring something interesting up here right after xmas.

Initial purpose #6: “We want try out the RES products, where do we start?”. First of all – We wouldn’t have it any other way! The more potential customers kicking the tires and taking the products for a spin, the more folks to potentially join the extended RES family. Installing the software is the easy part, as there’s a nice and easy-to-follow quickstart guide available for download here. After that the fun starts. However you really gotta have a sense of what you want to try out. As we discussed at the begnning of this article, that can be tough if you are new to the product and don’t know what it can do. A colleague and I are currently writing our own “guided tour” article based on experience in the field, which may help you with this. Stay tuned for an article update on this!

There are plenty of other initial purposes besides the 6 listed above, especially when we dive into the abilities of RES Automation Manager. However with the above article I hope to have given you a little bit better understanding of what RES Software does and why we do it.

Zen and the Art of Usage Tracking

From the revamed slidedeck division. If you are new to this blog, you may have missed a posting that I did almost two years ago, called Zen and the Art of PowerTrace. This article was about how to get the most out of the advanced tracking module (known back then as PowerTrace), built into the Enterprise version of the RES Workspace Manager.

With the help of my good friend Sascha Maier, I was back then able to create a slide-deck using real-world screenshots of a live customer environment with thousands of users, showing you the true power of Usage Tracking unleashed. Not an easy feat to replicate in a lab environment, I’m sure you’ll agree. As RES recently changed product names, logos etc. I thougth this would be a great time to re-introduce the revamped slide-deck with updated terminology and graphics.

If you are new to RES products: This slidedeck will teach you how to get the most out of Usage Tracking, which is an extensive logging apparatus, essentially linking all the user does in a session, what apps are being used for how long, on what devices, online/offline status, resource consumption, and much much more. Usage Tracking will answer the following and many other questions:

• What’s going on right now?
• What did a certain user do at a certain time?
• Who’s been doing things they’re not supposed to do?
• Who’s been editing a certain [type of] docment in a given department?
• Web activity of a user or department
• What’s the Top-10 usage of applications and websites?
• What’s the daily maximum users on my terminal servers?

If you are a Veteran Workspacer, throw out the old PowerTrace slide deck and click below to download the updated presentation. Note: The screenshots still say PowerTrace here and there. Eventually I’ll get around to grabbing new screenshots when the viewer changes someday.

In either case, be sure to read the speakernotes section of the Powerpoint presentation as it contains the entire talk track and a lot of useful information about the capabilities of this system. In addition to this presentation, be sure to read article RG007 on the sizing of the Usage Tracking Database and RG02D about splitting the Usage tracking log data away from the Workspace Manager 2011 configuration datastore.

Click on the slidedeck on the right to download:

New technote: Splitting the WM2011 datastore

From the Technotes-R-Us dept. A new article has been added to the Technote Library. This time we’re popping the lid off good things to come, namely WorkSpace Manager 2011. In this article we will be looking specifically at a feature which may positively impact the way you set up your datastore infrastructure to cater for Workspace Managere 2011, namely the ability to move log data out of the primary datastore and move it to a secondary datastore.

If you’re new to RES products, here’s the deal: Speaking in reference to the architechture, there is no such thing as a Workspace Manager server. However a SQL DBMS of your choice is used to store things in. This database up until now, stored everything – including all the logs and the detailed user activity tracking module, called Usage Tracking. The resulting dataset has the potential to become quite massive.

By offering the ability to split the logs and Usage Tracking off to a secondary datastore, things are kept much more manageable. Depending of course of what you’ve put in there it is very rare to see the configuration part of a Workspace Manager datastore exceed 100 Meg, which for a regular DBMS is small potatoes. The logging (and especially usage tracking can generate Gigs worth of logs. This may be within your operating specs that you indeed want detailed logs and statistics, so now you will have the option of storing these things somewhere else.

Finally, please note that the described functionality is not available in PowerFuse 2010. It will be available January 2011 in the new Workspace Manager release.

To read the article RG02D, click here.

The new look of RES Software

Hot off the press: As previously announced, wonderful things are happening over at RES. Today 5pm CET, RES Software has changed the website, logo and messaging, but that’s not all. Product names and categorizations have changed too! More below. There are many other significant changes underway, which will be revealed over the course of this week. To help you make sense of it all, here is a quick breakdown on what’s going on so far:

• New website. Have a look at the new RESsoftware.com, which is live now.
• New logo. Gone is the old blue-white-black. You can view the new shaded logo in all it’s glory by clicking on the miniature in the upper left corner of this article.
• New product suite: As of today, all the current products are considered part of ONE  suite, called the RES Dynamic Desktop Studio. See the illustration on the right.
• The product now formerly known as RES PowerFuse will from today be known as the RES Workspace Manager, part of the Dynamic Desktop Stuido.
• RES Wisdom will from today be known as the RES Automation Manager. also part of the suite
• Orchestra aka Orchestraton Pack for Wisdom is now known as the Service Orchestration Module in the Automation Manager.
• The Workspace Extender aka Subscriber will from today be known as the Virtual Desktop Extender, or VDX.
• VDX will be available as a stand-alone product from January 2011.

All this information and more is available in the New RES FAQ, available here.

As mentioned there will be made more, important announcements during this week, so keep an eye out for them here at the ‘Guru. In the meantime, you can see what the  new names and logo’s for the components of the Dynamic Desktop Studio will look like. Click on the individual components to jump to the corresponding product page.

Now, if you will excuse me, I’ve got 50.000 entries in the RESpedia to edit.. :-)

Which feature is in what product?

Note: This article is obsolete per Febuary 14th 2011, with the release of Workspace Manager 2011, where the product flavors have changed. Please refer to a newer article (which hasn’t been written yet, or look at the corp. website)

One of the most often asked questions we still get asked in the field after 2 years of PowerFuse 2008 is this one: “So is feature X in product Y?” Nothing wrong with that. RES decided for the 2008 series to break up the PowerFuse product in different flavors, where the main differentiators are: max. number of supported concurrent users, featureset and of course the cost. Since we’re mostly into the technical stuff here on the ‘Guru, let’s stick to the features, shall we? :-) PowerFuse 2008 comes in 4 flavors at the moment. There is currently no indication that this mix will change for 2010, although it’s not known yet how the new features in 2010 will be divided among the variants.

• PowerFuse Express. This is a free version of the software, limited at 100 CCU’s and about 20% of the featureset (hey, you get what you pay for :-) This version will essentially help you get started with getting rid of your existing login scripts.
• PowerFuse MyWorkSpace edition. MWS was developed to address certain needs in overseas markets. MWS edition does not have the Security (appguard etc), Reliability (cpushield and so on), Integration (Citrix, Wisdom, etc) subsystems available, but the pricing is very affordable.
• PowerFuse Standard edition. Standard is very similar to MWS, except that we throw in a few more features. AppGuard and Removable Disk security within the security subsystem. Second it contains CPUshield and Instant Logoff in reliability. Filters and instant reports are also enabled. Finally it includes all integration options except Citrix integration.
• PowerFuse Enterprise edition. This is the Grand Enchilada with everything including the kitchensink, blender and matching steak knives :) Enterprise gives you the full range of User Workspace Management power at your fingertips in one easy to manage console.
• Platinum Edition. Yeah, so Citrix invented the idea of lobbing everything into one license and we are graciously following suit :) Platinum is not really a product, but it’s a bundeling offer which is currently includes both PowerFuse Enterprise edition and RES Wisdom. For more information about this and pricing informatiom, contact your local RES folks.

In order to help you get a better overview of what feature is in which PowerFuse edition, I’ve dug out a comparison chart out of the corp website. It shows a breakdown of what features are in there, what the benefits are and a checbox field for all 4 editions:

Click here to download the chart:

If you are new to the RES multiverse, perhaps comming from the SCCM side of things, it can sometimes be a bit confusing to figure out if a certain desired functionality is to be found in Wisdom or in PowerFuse. To help you find your way quicker, here’s a set of rule-of-thumbs for you:

• If the functionality you want has to do with the computer itself, it’s Wisdom you want.  Examples of this is rebooting, installing software, printerdrivers, modifying the contens of the system drives, setting HKLM registry settings
• If it has to do with anything within the users session, such as exposing shortcuts to installed software, mapping to printerqueues, modifying the contens of the profile or homedirectory, or setting HKCU registrysettings – then it’s PowerFuse you want to be looking at.

Where things may become a bit iffy for some, is when they discover Wisdom’s ability to provision users, and most go; “Hey, but that’s something to do with the user, why is it in Wisdom then? There is actually a perfectly good explanation for this. Creating a user is something which needs to be done on a Domain Controller, i.e. it’s not something happening within the user’s session. Basically adding a user to AD is essentially just adding a record to some database, a task which RES Wisdom is also perfectly capable of.

Second, PowerFuse has the capability to fire off a Wisdom job, based on user actions or simply event driven (logon, application launch, etc). This is actually an extremely cool feature which enables you to realize install-on-demand scenarios, as the logged in user does not have to be a local admin! Bear in mind however, that PowerFuse is not about application virtualization like App-V. The concept of PowerFuse+Wisdom integration may seem to somewhat blur the line in terms of which RES product does what. It is however quite simple when you look at it top-down: PowerFuse sits with the user in the session “layer”. PowerFuse knows how to talk to Wisdom below, which on-demand then executes machine tasks on behalf of the user in the “os” layer beneath.

To sum things up, the key difference is that Wisdom doesn’t care if the user is logged on or not, even if the target computer is turned on – as we support WOL. PowerFuse on the other hand, springs to life the moment the user initiates a session and stays with him and manages the environment until session end.

Building a PowerFuse installation offline

This article adresses the need of being able to build corporate laptops in the field. Imagine that an employee is stuck in the middle of nowhere without network access, and for one reason or another, the poor guy needs to rebuild his laptop.  If you have PowerFuse in the mix, the challenge is to ensure that a machine which is rebuilt offline, has a cached copy of the PowerFuse datastore so it can operate.

There are many well-known ways of doing the OS-rebuild. You can either put a rebuild partition on the machine, or perhaps have a rebuild system on a DVD etc. It is however out of scope for this article to cover that part, as you probably already know how to do bare metal builds already, second RES Wisdom doesn’t do bare-metal builds anyway.

Go read this article to get the scoop on offline builds with PowerFuse