There are many things to consider when managing applications?
How do you manage the lifecycle of your apps? How will you deliver the
application; offline, virtual or cloud? How many applications are not under your
jurisdiction? How big is your shadow IT problem?
AppVolumes enables you to simplify lifecycle management and
delivery. With AppVolumes you can build an AppStack which can be a single or
multiple applications delivered according to a user’s preset permissions. You
can make these AppStacks read only. This allows you to deploy a many-to-one
model. Many users sharing a single AppStack.
Grouping is very important when developing your AppStacks.
Performance is optimal when you limit yourself to 7-10 applications max within
an AppStack although more are supported. It is also important to have a clean
environment for creating your initial AppStack so that testing can be done
outside the deployed, production environment. This is typically referred to as
your Provisioning VM. You create a clean AppStack, attach it to your
Provisioning VM and deploy your application. When provisioning, the AppStack is
essentially in Read/Write mode. After installing the application you flip it to
Read-Only mode and it is essentially ready for deployment.
While you can apply an AppStack dynamically, it is considered a
best practice to do it at logon or on reboot so that the introduction of new
applications are applied in a control manner. If you plan properly for what information shall reside on a
Writable Volume they can be very useful. By default the Writable Volume size may
be large but you can easily adjust by following this blog post (http://myeuc.net/2015/02/12/custom-av/)
You should use ThinApp with AppVolumes. While AppStacks are a
delivery method, ThinApp is a packaging solution. A ThinApp packages redirects
any writes to an isolated container that runs in User mode. If multiple Users
launch the same ThinApp packages the memory blocks are shared.
VMware User Environment Manager "UEM" allows you to simply the
application of user settings and policies to your virtual desktops. Often these
settings are stored in multiple locations such as login scripts, GPOs and custom
application configuration files. UEM allows you to consolidate all these
settings through a single management console.
UEM does not change the way that Windows Folder redirection
works but it does give you a simpler way to manage redirection along with a
multitude of other user configuration items. As it does use Folder redirection
you have to either continue to use it or turn it off and have UEM manage the
process?
When the user logs in the Base Profile is loaded and then user
specific metadata and then application launch information. This is done in a
light touch, just in time way to ensure the login is efficient. When an
application closed the application settings are exported (This requires
DirectFlex to be enabled). It is a good idea to enable the backup option of UEM
so that you can quickly recover from any profile problems.
To transition from Persona you can enable UEM to run the logoff
script to collect information but not process it. Once the information is
collected you can turn off Persona and configure UEM as you would like. This is
covered in this KB article.
To deal with different application requirements, have a single
application with different configurations that are applied according to a
specific condition. For example an application that requires different language
support is a single application with different languages configured that are
applied according to a specific configuration in UEM.
Some helpful hints for common scenarios like OST files in
Outlook. You can redirect OST files to writable volumes using the UEM
configuration. This is a two-step process; one creating and assigning a writable
volume and then adjusting the location in UEM under the Outlook application.
You can solve many problems by combining AppVolumes, ThinApp
and UEM but careful planning is required. Test and validate each individual
solution before combining all the layers.
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