Ghost Solution Suite

What alternatives are there to AutoInstall for 64bit applications.

We are just going to windows 7 64bit and starting to install 64bit applications and wanted to use AI snapshot and builder to replicate the installation of the applications.

This would be for an O/S that is already built and we want to add to it later.

Is there anything in Ghost Solution Suite, from Symantec or other applications that accomplish the same or similar capability?

Thanks

I don't know of any vendor doing much with 64-bit capture-type repackaging (as opposed to repackaging by wrangling the existing vendor-supplied MSIs various ways, and leaving aside the application virtualizers for a moment). EdT summarised the overall situation pretty well in this thread elsewhere on Connect.

While the learning curve is more like a cliff, really the most practical approach for 64-bit applications right now is wrangling MSIs various ways; Wise Package Studio is still one of the best tools around for that and can make it a LOT easier, although opinions vary as to how long it will remain that way. Given that you have a particular set of applications in mind, it's probably worth spending time on the AppDeploy.com forums since that's the best collection of reasonably independent advice on the subject in general.

Exactly how worthwhile 64-bit application capture tools are is an interesting question; I do think they do have a really important practical place. But they would be a difficult sell for any vendor that doesn't have an established management framework, especially with the big marketing and investment dollars going into app virtualization products like SVS and App-V which can and do promise the earth (and rainbows! and unicorns!).

As a historical note, for what it's worth I actually had mapped out a plan to replace AutoInstall (it had to be a ground-up replacement as there were too many fundamental design mistakes in AI as it was) to get 64-bit capability amongst many other things, and we were executing on it pretty well with it probably becoming visible in the next release after GSS 3.0 - this wasn't yet a PM-level feature (which meant no GUI tools until it became one), but rather something I'd arranged as an organic evolution so that we'd have application packages we'd be able to deploy in the preOSes (starting with the the management client itself, since we'd really needed THAT ability for a long time) which we'd open up and expose the scripts for once we'd dog-fooded all the new code, particularly the script interpreter I'd written for the management system - tasks as actual scripts being something I had wanted to do right from day one in 1998 when I started writing it - to a level we were confident in.

It's a pity the rug got pulled out from us on all that, but we *did* try.

I agree with Nigel in that the repackaging tool manufacturers have dragged their heels in providing 64 bit capture capability.  I believe that functionality may now be available in the latest Flexera Adminstudio, but it is not a cheap product if you only do occasional packaging work. The free 64 bit capture tool regshot-2.0.1.70.rar can be downloaded from a site in Russia, but of course there are no guarantees that there isn't a hidden payload so running in an isolated VM would be sensible.

Given that the majority of 64 bit apps are already in MSI format, you would not be repackaging these anyway, as capturing MSI files is a recipe for endless issues. However, the free MSI editor from Microsoft  (ORCA 4.5) can enable generation of transform files without too many issues, as long as you know what you are doing with MSI tables.

If you have VMs to work with, grabbing a trial version of Adminstudio and testing it in a VM for its capture capabilities is quite straightforward. 

Nigel also mentioned SVS which is now called Symantec Workspace Virtualisation, for which a 64 bit version is in beta. The 32 bit version included a capture tool for generating the virtual layers, so it is possible that the 64 bit version will also include such a tool - hopefully with full 64 bit capture capability. Although this is not a full solution, the layers can be examined with the layer editor tool and thus enable you to examine all the files and registry keys captured into the layer(s).

The Appdeploy site is well worth exploring and the discussion forums are a good place to gather input from other packaging engineers.