Operations Manager 2007 may not discover your App-V 4.5 Servers if installed on a 64-bit platform

If you have installed the Microsoft App-V Management Pack and are wondering why System Center Operations Manager 2007 has failed to detect and to monitor these servers as App-V Servers, then it may be because you have installed App-V 4.5 on an x64 system. 

This is due to the fact that the App-V 4.5 server is a 32-bit application, and so writes its information to the 32-bit area of the registry.  On an 64-bit machine, this means it writes its information to the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\SoftGrid\4.5 area of the registry, rather than HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SoftGrid\4.5.  This is a potential problem because OpsMgr uses the App-V registry keys to decide if a machine is indeed an App-V server.  Since the OpsMgr agent on an x64 server is a 64-bit program, it will look in the standard registry location for the App-V registry keys.

To work-around this problem, you should copy the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\SoftGrid\4.5 registry keys to the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SoftGrid\4.5 registry area so that the OpsMgr Agent will be able to find them.

Note: If you ever decide to uninstall App-V 4.5 from a server where this workaround was performed, be sure to delete this HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SoftGrid\4.5 key, otherwise OpsMgr may still think it's an App-V server.

Hope this helps,

Brian McDermott | System Center Escalation Engineer