Welcome to this post where I like to discuss / promote VMware AppVolumes.
What is AppVolumes?
Most people will know, but if you are new and reading this post bacause of curiosity, AppVolumes is a Application Delivery Solution as per VMware.
The main benefit from VMware AppVolumes is that you can layer your applications on top of your operating system, giving you the ability to immediately deploy and update application near live in your environment (near live means when an application is running and is updated to a newer version, the application needs to be closed and started again).
But when it comes to flexibility, easiness and speeding up the application lifecycle process VMware AppVolumes is the product to use.
Is AppVolumes the golden egg for Application Delivery? Well, to be honest, no… but close!
Most preferable situation is always to have your applications in the Base image / Natively installed. But due to certain limitations (a few of the same applications but with a different version, i.e. Office 2013 & 2016 on the same VDI).
But also have the ability to disable application within a VDI, or doing an upgrade (or even downgrade) of an application in a VDI belongs to the possibilities.
Another advantage is to have applications being exchanged to other App Volumes environments. Image you as a service provider with 10 customers, all using Google Chrome. You can create 1 AppVolumes package which can be distributed to all those other environments instead of installing them again and again for all customers.
Installation is easy and straightforward, I will not cover the installation in this blog post as I want to highlight the advantages/disadvantages of AppVolumes in this post.
For AppVolumes to work, you will need the following:
- SQL Database (2014 ~ 2019)
- Webbrowser
- AppVolumes Manager (Windows 2016, 2019 or 2022)
- 4 CPU and 4GB of RAM
- AppVolumes Agent
- Hypervisor (minimum ESX & vCenter 6.5)
- Active Directory Functional Level 2003 or later
So in basic, you don’t need much to get started with AppVolumes!
You can have AppVolumes both in a typical on premises environment or in a VMware DaaS environment/VMware Horizon DaaS on Azure.
In the next blog I will discuss how to create an AppVolumes Package in the latter environment!