Recently I had the need to do a quick and dirty fix of a couple of virtual applications that had been deployed to users in an environment that uses App-V with SCCM integration. Applications are advertised to users based upon AD Security Group membership and are configured to download and execute, rather than stream from a DP.

Without going into the reasons behind why this can happen (that’s another post) – I’ll demonstrate how to quickly resolve the error and get the user back up and running. Before proceeding make sure you have got SCCM Client Center

A error of this kind would be seen by the user when attempting to launch the broken application, e.g. ;

1. Find the package ID of the affected virtual application
2. Connect to the users SCCM cache (%windir%\system32\CCM\cache) and see if the source files for the affected application are still there (use the package ID to find the folder)
3. If the cached package is still there, load SCCM client center, navigate to Agent Actions > Cache and delete the package from here (this will ensure it is not orphaned)
4. From within Client Center > Client Actions run a Download & Apply User (or machine) policy
5. On the affected machine, restart the SMS Agent Host Service (or reboot)
6. From within Client Center > Advertisements, re-run the advertisement for the failed virtual application

You should now see the application begin to download into the SCCM cache, and once complete the package should register itself with the App-V client and once again be functional.

If this fails your App-V cache may be corrupt. To resolve this you can use SFTMIME which is a tool contained within the App-V client installation directory. The following command can be used to clear all applications from within the cache;

• sftmime.exe remove obj:app /global /complete

Please note, this command will remove all applications from the App-V client, and the user running the command must have administrative permissions.

A full reference for SFTMIME can be found here;

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc817090.aspx

Thanks,
SteveH

Hi There,

During testing of a SHIM to fix an application, I accidentally deleted the SDB file from C:\Windows\AppPatch\Custom, rather than using the sdbinst -u <guid> command to uninstall properly. Whilst attempting to re-run this command I was hit with the following error;

This error was preventing me from using sdbinst to reinstall the SHIM.

The solution is pretty simple – there are two locations in the registry that need removing;

• HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\<GUID>.sdb
• HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\InstalledSDB\<GUID>

Delete these and you will then be able to re-import your custom SHIM.

Thanks
SteveH

Hi There,

Whilst working on a bare-metal build for a Hyper-V host (based on HP blades with iLO 3) today using SCVMM 2012 and Host Profiles I came across the following error;

An out of band operation (IPMI) for the BMC <FQDN> failed

The obvious first line of troubleshooting is to check the IP address of the iLO connection was working (and that we had typed it right). This checked out, so the next check was to make sure the account we are using to access iLO has the necessary permissions to the host, and to check that IPMI commands are being accepted by iLO. This checked out as well and left us stumped!

After some further troubleshooting, we decided to re-create the account we had access to in iLO. We were not using the default ‘Administrator’ account, rather another delegated account that had been created for us.

We deleted this account, and re-created it using the same username/password to be greeted with an error along the lines of the username we are selecting has over 16 characters and therefore cannot be used to send IPMI commands….. however can still be created…..hmmm!

So let’s try shortening the account name, which we did, then changed the run-as account in SCVMM, re-ran the job and as if by magic our hosts started to boot

Cheers
SteveH

Hi there,

The above message pops up from time to time when attempting to remotely administer a Hyper-V server from another machine, particularly if the machine you are attempting to access is in another domain or in a workgroup.

First things first, make sure all of the config is correct on the Hyper-V server itself to allow remote administration. Use the excellent HVRemote for that

What usually catches me out after that is the fact that Hyper-V manager is not expecting a FQDN, it is hostname/shortname ONLY! Use the hosts file if you are having DNS issues.

Cheers
SteveH

Hi There,

The February 2012 update to the VDI Smackdown Whitepaper has just been released, it’s a great read if you want to weigh up to the pros and cons of the various virtual desktop technologies…

The overall goal of the white paper is share information about:

• Application and Desktop Delivery Solutions
• Explain the different Desktop Virtualization concepts
• Explain the pros and cons of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
• Describe the different Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) vendors and solutions
• Compare the features of the various VDI solutions

Read more HERE!

Cheers,
SteveH

Whilst tidying up one of our VMM 2012 environments earlier I was having trouble removing a service template that had been created, the following error was appearing when I was hitting delete;

As far as I could see I had deleted any related service deployments and could see no services or VMs on any of the host clusters. I also tried removing the Service via the Powershell command; Remove-SCService

The fix was staring me in the face on the Service Template screen – if you highlight the template, and look in the ‘General Information’ section at the bottom you will see a ‘Services:    <Service Name>‘ which is a hyperlink. Clicking this took me to one of my Host Groups and the Service was hidden away in here.

I deleted this, and was then able to remove the Service Template

Recently I was implementing a new PKI on a customer’s site.

They had a single forest with 6 child domains, some of the domains dated back to 2000 and so the “Cert Publisher’s” group was defined as a Global Group.
We need to add the computer account of the issuing CA’s to the Cert Publisher’s group in each child domain and so need the group to be a “domain local” group scope.
I used the following script to complete this as it is not possible to change within the gui of “Active Directory Users and Computers”

Set grp = GetObject(“LDAP://CN=Cert Publishers,CN=Users,DC=sub,DC=example,DC=com”)
grp.Put “groupType”,”-2147483640″
grp.SetInfo
grp.Put “groupType”,”-2147483644″
grp.SetInfo
Changing the DC=sub for each domain

Save the above in a .vbs file and run within an elevated command prompt.

Regards,
RichardK

The following TechNet Wiki links contains a number of very useful tools for Hyper-V, some of my favourites;

• Core Configurator 2.0 – makes configuring Server Core or Hyper-V Server much easier
• Disk2VHD – for creating VHDs from physical disks – very useful for the new Host Profile feature in VMM 2012
• Wim2VHD – in a similar vein to the above, if you have already captured your Server image to a .WIM, this tool will convert it to a VHD
• nvspcrub – useful tool to remove virtual network configuration from the management partition

Many more tools can be found at the following LINK

Cheers
SteveH