For those of you out there tasked with making legacy applications work on modern systems a new blog post at Todds World may be a life saver. Multi-core servers aren’t exactly news. However, the virtualization boom has encouraged a migration of processing into the datacenter. Additionally, some massive new hardware (and perhaps more importantly, affordable smaller hardware) available both inside the datacenter and on the desktop means there is a fair chance you will find yourself attempting to run some legacy applications on a multi-core box. The Todd’s World article outlines sound strategies for overcoming these hurdles in most environments. But what if you need to publish that application?

The following outline should help you create an application object within the Simplify Suite that will launch a chosen app with processor affinity.

1.) Create a script object. 
a.) Open Notepad 
b.) Enter the command to run your desired app. i.e. “start /affinity 1 notepad” *Tip* Use of %ProgramFiles%, %SystemRoot%, and %HomeDrive% can make these scripts more portable. 
c.) Save the Notepad as SomethingDescriptive.cmd. Save the file to a path on or accessible to the terminal server.

2.) Create a New Object in the Simplify Suite. 
a.) Name the Object Appropriately – aka. Notepad CPU 1 
b.) Change the Display Name to something familiar to the user – Notepad. 
c.) Point the Executable path to %SystemRoot%\System32\cmd.exe 
d.) Point the Working Directory to %SystemRoot%\System32\ 
e.) Point the Icon path to %SystemRoot%\System32\Notepad.exe (Your specific exe goes here.) 
f.) Enter the following Arguments. /q /c PathWhereYouSavedStep1\NotepadCPU1.cmd 

*Tip* 
You probably know that all scripts should be run with a /c switch, but had you considered adding /q to hide path information from the user? 
3.) Drag-n-Drop assign the Application Object you just created to the users as needed.

That’s it. You have not published an application with processor affinity. The security conscious among you may want to enable the “Use Arguments” option on the Signature tab. If Simplify Lockdown is enabled this will ensure that cmd.exe cannot be executed by the user.