App-V Overview

This session was to give a brief overview of App-v, it's benefits and some demos.

Application deployments are costly (as we know), App-v enables a desktop virtualisation solution by virtualising applications. (This is often known as presentation virtualisation - think traditional Citrix, however this has evolved slightly and now MS and Citrix include app streaming too)

A couple of customer examples: One cut app deployment from 3 months to 3 days, another reduced packaging costs by 50% and finally one reduced the amount pf PC images they needed.

The App-v sequencer was demonstrated with the app packaged in a matter of minutes. Obviously this package can then be deployed to any hardware, quickly and managed centrally. You can choose to stream (allow user to start the app before it is installed locally) or just do the deployment - streaming would be great for a large app.

Obviously it all ties into the one infrastructure, one management product suite tools message and helps you become user centric.

The recent 4.6 release of App-v is 64bit on servers/apps/infrastructure - so making the best use of what you have in terms of performance, CPU/Ram usage. There are specific things that allow for better Office 2010 virtualisation. They have managed to create a shared cache for apps between VDI and Terminal Services saving on diskspace significantly - often you would have previously had a package for each. Best of all, each app operates independently, so an app crash does not take down the whole OS.

It is still a good product (as it was when it was Softricity Softgrid), and may well be worth some investigation, we would need to contrast this with our existing investment in Citrix technologies.