App-V and Quest vWorkspace 7.2: What's an OSD file

Details
Category: App-V

Okay, not sure if this is an App-V thing, a Quest vWorkspace thing, and if it's just limited to one version of vWorkspace. I have my doubts about the latter, though/ I only had one example environment and that's:

  • App-V 4.6 SP1
  • Quest vWorkspace 7.2
  • Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS) in Windows Server 2008R2 SP1

What happens is that, if you publish an application using the "publish App-V application" button, everything seems to go okay. Hooray. Only when the user wants to actually use the app you'll be screamed at - beause the system will tell you tha tit has no clue what to do with an .osd application. In other words, there's no automatic file association between OSD files and the App-V client software. So if vWorkspace puts a shortcut to the .osd file in your users' environments your servers' OSs won't know what to do with them. Bummer.

There's two ways around that: publish the app by using App-V's sfttray.exe as the applicaiton's path and give the path to the osd file as an arguments. So, for an App-V application called BubbaKraut with osd file http://appverver/bubbakraut.osd you'd publish applicaiton xxx with arguments xxxx. Of course you'd also need to refer to the correct icons to make everything look nice and spiffy. This works great - but we want to use the nice little button Quest provided for us - and this way we can't. Hmm.

The second workaround is to make the operating system understand what it needs to do with an OSD file. The way to do that is by creating a file type association that tells Windows to open .osd files with sfttray.exe.

IT wouldn't be IT if thered be only one way of doing that... The most practical ones are to a) either import a .reg file into your servers' registry (only practical if you ha ve alimited amount of systems...) or b) to put the registry changes into a Group Policy preference. Personally, I prefer the second option - it prevents me from forgetting to put it in when I roll out new machines. But it's also less flexible if you want to play around with it for whatever reason. So - make your own choice.

The reg key you need to enter is:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\.osd]
@="osd_auto_file"</pre>
<pre>[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\osd_auto_file\shell\open\command]<br />@="\"C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Application Virtualization Client\\sfttray.exe\" \"%1\" %*"

Of course, you can also just download and apply this file.

If you choose to go down the GPO preference path - which makes sense if you got a bunch of servers to administer - you'll need to do open the respective group policy in the GPMC and open the Machine policy's Prefences node.

There you add the keys mentioned above -

<screenshots to follow>