School District Uses Virtualization to 'Kid-Proof' 10,000 Student PCs
You can read an excerpt of the article here:
The small IT staff of the Kent School District in Kent, Wash., has discovered a way to nearly kid-proof the thousands of notebook PCs it’s phasing in for all grade levels.
The district uses the notebooks simply as a repository for groups of applications that are virtualized using the Microsoft Application Virtualization software (formerly SoftGrid). Each application is packaged with Microsoft’s virtual runtime, stored on a server, and then downloaded to a notebook or desktop PC when a student logs on and clicks the corresponding icon. On a notebook, the package runs in a protective virtual “bubble,” instead of actually being installed on the PC.
That means district IT staff largely avoid the plague of application conflicts, changes, DLL snafus, and all the other software-based problems that are routine for large laptop deployments. Because the PCs share a common, standard Windows XP software image, spares can be stored at every school. If a student’s laptop stops working for any reason, he or she can swap it for a spare, fire it up, download the virtualized application set and get back to work.
Sidestepping the typical hardware and software support burden is critical to the district’s ambitious goal of equipping all students in grades 7-12 with a laptop PC that could be taken home. But to truly realize the notebook’s potential, district officials realized they also had to revamp the curriculum to make use of it, and train and support teachers to exploit both. The expanded laptop program got under way with an extensive pilot in September 2005.
Click to see: Diagram of Kent Schools use of virtualization
Currently there are about 10,000 computers for 27,000 students in 40 buildings spread over 72 square miles just south of Seattle. Of those machines, 3,000 are notebooks, the rest desktops. The district will be adding up to 2,500 notebooks per year until it reaches the target goal of 15,000 for the upper grades, says Thuan Nguyen, the district’s director of information technology. All are currently running Windows XP, but the district will be shifting to Vista in 2009.
So, one of these I gave a presentation about Softgrid in an MDOP session, and one of the presents asked me the following question:
“So, if we have an Administrator’s console to enable the streaming of the applications to the clients, why do we need SCCM 2007 (former SMS)?”
Obviously, I knew that Softgrid would have an integration with SCCM, but I didn’t know what kind. But after doing some research, I found that this integration is arriving in the summer of 2008 and has some of the following features:
· Distribution Points are enabled to stream virtual applications to clients
· SCCM clients are configured to interact with the SoftGrid client to evaluate policy
· SCCM administrators use the SCCM Administrator Console to create virtual application packages and send them to distribution points
· SCCM Advertisements are used to deliver applications to clients
Hopefully the amount of features will increase, but after seeing these features, my question is… why are needing now the Softgrid’s console if we have SCCM?
As seen here the team from Login Consultants released a new version of their OSD editor and Softgrid Migration Tools to support Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5. There’s a brief overview lifted from there website and a download link below.
Login Consultants releases updated versions of the SoftGrid OSD Editor and SoftGrid Migration Tool to support the upcoming version of Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 (formerly SoftGrid) which is now still in beta.
New in the SoftGrid OSD Editor 2.1, besides some minor fixes, is the ability to support and manage Dynamic Suiting Composition in OSD files. This is a new feature of SoftGrid 4.5 which allows interaction between different virtualized applications which run in their own “sandboxed†environment. The SoftGrid Migration Tool (SGMT) 1.1 has also been updated to work with SoftGrid 4.5. This version of the SGMT also supports new features of the latest SoftGrid Sequencer version, like the ability to set type of Compression, Block Size and save a Virtual Application in Microsoft Installer (MSI) format.
The SoftGrid OSD Editor 2.1 and the SoftGrid Migration Tool 1.1 can be downloaded through our downloads section.
Some things to do when finishing installing Softgrid.
As long as you keep these things in mind your journey with Microsoft Application Virtual should be smooth sailing.
Who knows the one of the main steps till the application’s publish is the sequencing phase? In simple words, sequencing is the taks of monitoring, capturing and create the project of one app so that the same can be distributed in a virtualized way by Softgrid. What I’m about to post today is how to sequence Office 2007 with some details for the pt-PT version. These are the steps and best practices to do it.
Step 1: Be aware of all the possible problems that you can face distributing virtualized apps to desktops or servers with Operating System with a different language pack.
Article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935684/en-us
Step 2: Be aware of the best practices of sequencing. They must be applied for any app, not only for Office 2007.
Article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932137/en-us
Step 3: Know how to customize the instalation of Office 2007 so that the sequencing occurs with success.
Article: http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/8faae8a0-a12c-4f7b-839c-24a66a531bb51033.mspx?mfr=true
Passo 4: See how you should procede during the sequencing of Office 2007.
Article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939796/en-us
Probably for the US-English version, those steps should be enough.
But for the pt-PT version of Office 2007, we have to do some adjustments on the OSD archives for each product that may present some problems in their publishment. How to do that?
Step A: If some Office 2007 app was not correctly published (the icon didn’t appear in the desktop or start menu), check the archive SFTLOG.TXT (Ex. %ProgramFiles%SoftricitySoftgrid).
Step B: Look for flaws in the construction of the OSD (XML Parsing Failure) of the app that was not published with success. The error code is useful to find a solution.
Step C: The flaws caused but invalid characters in the OSD archive or not supporting codification of the archive can be adjusted only by the edition of the OSD archive of the app with problems.
Articles: KB938625, KB930709 e KB931245.
Note: For the error 00E01005-00000016, try the procedure KB931245 before any other.
Please let me know if this was useful for you.
