In the mid of preparing on my next presentation session, i have play around with App-V 5 together with Windows Server 2012 VDI. Let have a quick look on how do i set up and preparing my demo environment
Introduction
What's App-V 5? It is a application virtualization and streaming solution from Microsoft and mainly use in desktop environment.
To setup App-V, there are 3 component that you need to setup
a) App-V Management Server
I just installed the entire component App-V into a single VM. With App-V 5, .RTSP is gone. Now use SMB and HTTP streaming. To manage it, you now have new management console. No longer use MMC snap-in. Now purely web based and using Silverlight
b) App-V Sequencer
Use Hyper-V Server and create a clean guest operating system, disable Windows Defender, disable Windows Search and create a snapshot. You need to create a snapshot so you can revert to clean operating system before sequence an app. After sequence an app, remember to revert the snapshot
Now with App-V 5, you no longer have Q Drive, package format SFT is gone and so are OSD and ICO files. Now everything stored in a new .AppV file format. In order the view the content, you can rename .appv to .zip.
If you’ve previous App-V format, it would not work in App-V 5. You need to convert to new format.
Some guidelines on what type application that you cannot sequence
- Office plug-in
- Device driver
- Middleware
- Path hard coding application
- Auto update application
- COM+
- COM DLL
- Licensing policies. App which tie to MAC address, dongles, etc
c) App-V Client
The supported client operating system is Windows 7 and Windows 8. Now, how about older version of client operating system? Well, App-V cannot support the above OS. If you would like to support older operating system, you need to use App-V 4.6.
During preparation of my client base template (Windows 7 and 8), i need to install App-V client into the base template and configure some setting before sysprep the VM for VDI Collection creation
a) Point App-V client to communicate to App-V Publishing server to get the app-v package
| Set-ExecutionPolicy remotesigned |
Note:- App-V Publishing server is Red-AppVMGMT01 and is using port 82. Please take note on the port number that you configure during the installation or you can refer the port from IIS.
b) Configure Shared Content Store Mode using Powershell. With Shared Content Store Mode enabled, allowing you to make the best use of expensive disk resources without changing the way you get your job done.
| set-appvclientconfiguration -sharedcontentstoremode 1 |
or using registry. Set
| HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\AppV\Client\Streaming\SharedContentStoreMode=1 |
App-V 5 client has completely revamped client (Modern UI), programmable using Powershell. Here is how App-V 5 Client new interface look like:-
Some virtual app that i’ve prepared for my session:
Alright, this is how simple to use App-V 5 and the demo set has ready for next week, Microsoft Techday 2012, Malaysia event.
