SAS^® Drug Development Desktop Connection (SDDDC) has not been tested by SAS^® for usage in virtualized environments. This includes presentation (remote desktop) virtualization environments like these:

• Terminal Services in Windows Server 2003
• Terminal Services for Windows Server 2008
• Remote Desktop Services Windows Server 2008 R2
• Remote Desktop Services Windows Server 2012
• Remote Desktop Services Windows Server 2012 R2
• Citrix Presentation Server^TM 4.0
• Citrix Presentation Server^TM 4.5
• Citrix XenDesktop^TM 5.0 and higher

Consider the following when using the SDDDC client in a virtualized environment:

• Some configurations of virtualized environments delete profiles and temporary files on exit from the remote desktop session. This can produce unexpected results if the remote desktop session has been ended before all SDDDC transactions have been completed. Consider this example:

  A file and folder copy from a mapped SDDDC drive that takes five minutes to complete and the user exits after one minute.

  The results of this transaction are not known and have not been tested by SAS^®.

• A known limitation in moving and renaming files with the SDDDC client requires that move and rename transactions are monitored until completion.

  Black Board has said the following in their release notes:

  "When moving a file or folder via the command line, or when renaming or moving a file in Windows Explorer, it might take several seconds for the operation to be propagated to the server. Further operations that alter the state of that file or folder before the completion of the original operation might cause synchronization problems, possibly resulting in data loss. When using the command line to move a file or folder, or when using Windows Explorer to move or rename a file, please check the Status Monitor to ensure that the operation has been completed before performing additional operations that alter the state of that file or folder."

  This limitation has not been testing by SAS^® with virtualized environments.

• If the profile or temporary files are deleted on exit from the virtualized session, the SDDDC cache information is lost. The SDDDC application relies on a client side local cache to store files and reduce transactions with the server file system.

  Consider browsing a large folder tree in SAS Drug Development, the metadata about the folders is cached on the local virtualized session, and is lost on exit when temporary files are deleted.

  This removal of an SDDDC cache on exit from a remote desktop session in a virtualized environment has not been tested by SAS^®.

Note, there are no plans to fully test SDDDC installed and configured in presentation virtualized environments in future releases.

If an issue is found while virtualizing, it would be referred to the software maker for resolution. See this note for additional details:

Usage Note 57817: SAS® Drug Development Desktop Connection Client - Virtualization support

Also note, SAS^® provides limited deployment support for application virtualization for streaming environments.

See this link for the SAS^® official position on virtualization testing and support:

SAS® Product Support for Virtualization Environments

Operating System and Release Information