By Michael K. Campbell
Following on the heels of a previous tip, Microsoft SoftGrid General Troubleshooting is a great lab that provides great insights into SoftGrid troubleshooting. Taken together, these two labs represent one of the best quick-starts into application virtualization with Microsoft SoftGrid. In fact, I wish that I had known about these resources when I started learning about SoftGrid – as they would have saved me hours of time trying to figure things out on my own and setting up my own testing environments.
Designed primarily for administrators who are just getting started with application virtualization with SoftGrid, this Lab starts off with a labcast that provides a brief recap of what SoftGrid is and then leaps right into an overview of some of the best practices for using SoftGrid.
TIP: While the labcast doesn't directly state it, following best practices (and accompanying explanations) outlined in this labcast can represent a great way to hopefully avoid needing to troubleshoot in a number of cases.
Once the best practices overview is complete, the introductory labcast then turns its attention to a technical overview of some of SoftGrid’s limitations. This is a hugely valuable section of the labcast – as it helps provide a lot of context around what you need to know about SoftGrid from a troubleshooting standpoint.
The labcast also outlines a ‘best practices’ flow, or approach to troubleshooting.
By following this flow, administrators can frequently identify simple issues and problems while learning a bit more about the sequencing process in general. Then, in the case of simple issues, administrators can simply apply fixes, or re-sequence applications as needed.
Of course, in many cases, troubleshooting is obviously going to require a bit more effort – and the best way to direct that effort is what this lab is all about. A big key, therefore, in troubleshooting, is setting up a viable environment that lets you view what’s going on – something the introductory labcast outlines in the form of using logging resources along with some great tools (which you’ll end up using yourself in the lab):
The labcast also provides some insight into some of the most common sources of problems before turning its attention to an overview of the lab.
The lab itself is very well set up and throws you up against a couple of problems immediately.
In my mind, not only does the lab do a great job in showing you how to solve some ‘actual’ problems – but it really does a great job in showing administrators just what kinds of tools and techniques are at their disposal when it comes to solving real-world problems they might run into. For example, to solve the first problem this lab throws at you, you’ll end up ‘injecting’ a highly-privileged command-prompt into the start-up of your sequenced application. Doing so lets you get around the fact that end-users on client machines don’t have direct access to locations that would be needed during troubleshooting.
Frankly, if for nothing else, being able to see how to ‘inject’ your own debugging code and processes into a sequenced application makes this lab totally worth it. But that’s just one of the things this lab has to offer. Other things that it addresses includes how to re-sequence applications to correct problems (meaning that this lab provides a start-to-finish approach to troubleshooting), as well as examples of how to remove features and functionality that might end up being ‘confusing’ to typical end-users.
All in all, the lab is well worth the time it takes to complete (most users should be able to complete it in 40 minutes or less), and provides a great overview of some of the tools and techniques available for troubleshooting applications. As such, I can heartily recommend Microsoft SoftGrid General Troubleshooting to anyone who is either interested in learning more about application virtualization with SoftGrid in general, or to anyone who is looking to troubleshoot their own applications.