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.

Application Virtualisation & Streaming

I've attended a whole bunch of sessions covering different aspects of this topic, so I'll try to summarise my thoughts now we're done.

Firstly, the App Virtualisation product finally gives the Microsoft management suite proper user-targetting for software distribution, which it has always lacked. The main business benefit of the product is reducing the need for regression testing of different applications (i.e. conflict solver no longer required!). There is a secondary benefit in allowing previously incompatible applications co-exist, thus increasing flexibility/agility. This would be a great solution for COMPASS running Office 2007 alongside previous versions of Office.

The streaming aspect might be useful to deploy to users with limited connectivity, and there is clear potential to use this deployment mode to enable centralisation along with NGN V2. Lots more work to do here but also some big opportunities.

In summary App Virtualisation is something that should definitely be on our roadmap, but it's not going be a solution for everything.

The 5 pieces of MDOP

This session was a quick runthrough of the 5 (soon to be 6) products that are available through MDOP (Microsoft Desktop Optimisation Pack)

I guess the first thing to note is that MDOP is only available to customers that buy Software Assurance, which is Microsoft's version of the maintenance contract. It looks like relatively good value and seems to be the resting place of products that Microsoft have recently acquired

Desktop Error Monitoring is the first product, which allows a company to collect all the Dr. Watson error events from the desktops that are sent to Microsoft and analyse them. This works well with the second tool which is branded DaRT (Diagnostic and Recovery Tool) which you may have heard of as Winternals prior to Microsoft buying it. This allows centralised diagnosis of blue screen type events, and recovery in software related crashes. Useful where desksiders aren't available!

Advanced Group Policy Management isn't particularly relevant to us today, but when we start using Active Directory for our desktops this could well be critical, as it allows auditing and workflow for any policy changes. Seems to me that this should be in the core product though...

Asset Inventory Service (AIS) is a 'cloud based' inventory service that could be really useful for those hard to reach devices (salesforce laptops!), although when I spoke to the product manager he seemed a bit stumped on how you'd actually get the client onto the machines in the first place. Seems like a fairly large oversight to me! This product used to be known as AssetMetrics

Last and most interesting of all was Application Virtualisation (formerly SoftGrid), which is the application virtualisation technology. Loads more to discuss in up and coming sessions so I'll just say that this product is aimed at Application to Application isolation, and doesn't address Application to Operating System isolation, which is where the sixth product will come in (Enterprise Desktop Virtualisation, formerly Kidaro)