Brian Kelly, one of SoftGrid tech guru's, recently put together a really cool SoftGrid operations guide that covers day-to-day procedures for managing and operating the SoftGrid infrastructure. Here's part 1:

Introduction: This document is a draft for a SoftGrid Operations Guide for the Microsoft Virtual Application infrastructure. It provides day-to-day procedures for managing and operating the SoftGrid infrastructure.

2 Application Management Procedures: This section provides procedures for application packaging, deployment and updates.

2.1 Candidates for Virtualization: Thousands of applications have been sequenced so it is likely that your applications can be sequenced. However, some traits in an application can make it unsuitable or unable to be completely virtualized. For SoftGrid 4.1/4.2 these traits include:

· Applications that install and rely on a system-level driver, i.e. an application that installs a print driver or a USB device driver. It may be possible to separate and install, the driver portion of this application locally on the client system, allowing the other components of the application to be virtualized.

· Applications that install boot-time services.

· Applications that use COM+.

· Applications that require MAPI virtualization. For information on SoftGrid and Microsoft Office, see the following article:
939796 Prescriptive guidance for sequencing 2007 Office programs in Microsoft SoftGrid http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;939796

· Applications that use COM DLL surrogate virtualization, i.e. DLL’s that run in Dllhost.exe.

· Applications with licensing enforcement tied to the machine, e.g. the license is tied to the system’s MAC address. Branding may need to be done on each client.

It may still be possible to virtualize such applications if these components can be extracted and installed locally. We recommend you test the applications thoroughly to ensure they meet the expected level of functionality.

Full Guide

SoftGrid, Guide, Manual, Microsoft Application Virtualization