Maybe one of the biggest loss of mine when I switched from PC to Mac, was the Microsoft Visio is not available for any other platform than Windows OS. Now, I’m not a big fan of Microsoft products, but I have to admit that they have some good products, and one of this is Visio. Like it or not, more than 75% of the network diagrams that I get are in VSD format, which we all know (or we should) is a closed proprietary format and cannot be imported in any other products until now.
I have no problem in drawing new diagrams in NeoOffice (as example) but, what should I do with the ones that I receive and I have to modify. Of course that before I use the solution below, I tried others like ConceptDraw or Omnigraffle, which are also good products and which promise that they can import a format called VDX in which Visio can export diagrams. I don’t know if only for me but most VDX files exported from Visio, looked not so nice when opened in another product. Lines where not aligned, some objects where moved, and so on. The final draw was looking nice, but not as expected and ready to work on it. And then again, I cannot call, e-mail everybody that send me a Visio diagram and say “well, you see, cannot you just export it to VDX…” so that I can check. It’s not professional and it’s a headache. On the other hand I really like my Mac, so I struggled my brains to find a solution.
The easiest one, it’s to have on a Mac or Linux, dual boot or a virtual Windows OS with Visio installed on it. Called me a freak, but I didn’t invest in a Mac to havea Windows running on it. In not saying anything about Linux which is open source and see Windows as it’s worst nightmare.
I decided to use something called Application Virtualization, which can deliver on your screen only the user interface of the software that you open. The solution is not new and I’m not the “genius” who think of it, but it’s the best that fit me as I can open any software (in our case Visio) over any network (including Internet) and compared with remote desktop solutions, proved to be more faster. What do you need for this to work properly?
First, you need a Windows Server OS available somewhere online, if you plan to have access to this applications when you are on the move. There are multiple solution. You can host one yourself at home if you have a 24/7 running machine (you can run it even on a virtual machine), maybe you have access to one at your company or maybe you can afford a VPS. As you don’t need so much power take the cheapest VPS with Windows Server (I saw some starting at 18$ / month). OK, this are some ideas, the important thing is to have one available.
Next, you need this Windows Server to have IIS and Terminal Services enabled as this is mandatory for the next step.
This step was the hard part. I needed some Application Virtualization software capable to stream application to any environment (mac, linux, windows) and to have affordable price or , unexpected, free. I found some out there in the Internet, but mostly were able to stream virtual application only to Windows platforms or they where doing something else that Application Virtualization. One product that immediately appeared was XenApp from Citrix. I used this in the past, and I know that it is reliable good product. But you can get it as trial only for 30 days and it was quite hard for me to achieve a working installation. Well, I’m not an expert in Citrix applications, so I assume that this is my fault, otherwise a great product but not for me.
I keeped searching and I found the X2 products webpage.
When I saw there Free download, I was thinking immediately about Trial free download. I was right, the download of the product has a trial of 30 days. But then digging a little bit deeper, I saw that after this 30 days, you can still use the product free of charge, the only limitation is that you have to stick to 3 concurrent connections and one server (so you cannot use the LoadBalancer feature). I don’t care about LoadBalancer as I only have one server, and anyhow I’m the only person using it. The 3 concurrent connections is enough for 1-2 users with decent usage. I think is fair that if you use this for your productive environment and want more support and resources to pay for them.
I registered, got the free license immediately and started installation on a VPS with Windows 2003 Server. The installation was quite easy and configuration as well due to existing documentation their site. Just read and follow the instructions and you will end with a working software.
After the installation is finished, all you have to do is to provision the software that you want to be able to access over the network, directly on your screen. Also if you want to have the full virtualized desktop, X2 is capable to provide this.
Since a short screencast can show more than 1000 words, please have a look below, where I’ll try to show you the major benefits of this software and how you can manage it to obtain the desired result:
I know that this is not the easiest way to do it, and maybe some of you just prefer to use a virtual machine or dual boot, but as I said this fits most to me and maybe you can use the same solution to solve your problems with other Windows based software, not only Visio. Regarding Visio, the best would be that Microsoft open the VSD format or release a Mac version. For Linux, I don’t think that they even consider such a possibility.
Now and then, especially when you expect less, the network crashes or encounter an issue and then you had to troubleshoot. Sometime the problem is right there, you can see it and it’s easy to fix, but in other cases you’ll have to put an eye in the packets that are traveling through it and search deeper for the solution. When it comes to network sniffing or packet capturing or whatever you want to call it, I believe that the name 
