Virtually Jason

So, I don’t know anything about database administration. One of my customers is primarily an Oracle shop, which is fine for most things VMware (even if VMware’s Oracle documentation isn’t quite up to the standards set by their SQL documents). View Composer 2.7 however, has a very specific version of Oracle 11g R2 that it’s looking for (11.2.0.1 Patch 5, to be exact). I’ve never in my life applied patches to an Oracle client (and prior to working with this customer, I’d never installed the Oracle client at all!), and boy could they learn a thing or two from Microsoft… or VMware… or Symantec… or just about anyone else who has ever sold software, ever. I used to complain about the experience of browsing HP’s or Dell’s website, looking for firmware or drivers. Dell has implemented a nice work around with their service tags so that you will hopefully never need to actually navigate the site. HP’s site is indexed by google, so once again you’ll hopefully never need to actually brows...

A customer recently asked me to deploy Microsoft Office 2010 (KMS Licensed) to their 64 bit Windows 7 VDI desktops and so, after a little work, I was able to get a working ThinApp package. As an added difficulty, we are using a Floating Pool and so have redirected the users’ %appdata% to a file share on an SMB2 NAS device (so we’ve disabled SMB2 in Windows 7 until a ThinApp release where this doesn’t cause issues). Here are the steps that I followed, mostly taken from the excellent blog entry that VMware put together (http://blogs.vmware.com/thinapp/2011/02/quick-start-guide-for-deploying-office-2010-using-thinapp-461.html). I began this procedure with ThinApp 4.6.1, moved to 4.6.2 and have now run it with 4.7. 1) Prepare a clean capture machine. I use 32 bit Windows XP for my capture machine and have come across licensing issues when capturing on Windows 7 32 bit. 2) Perform the prescan 3) Install Microsoft Office, selecting a Custom Install and (people recommend ensur...