Manage user profiles with Writable Volumes

With the release of VMware App Volumes 2.15, you now have a profile_only template available for writable volumes. As the name suggests this template will only capture the user profile. Using this type of writable volume is something you definitely should look into when you are not using a User Environment Management solution and/or you’re […]

(re)Use your SCCM packages to “automate” AppStacks

In my previous blog I described how you can group your applications and divide them into different kinds of AppStacks. When you use these AppStacks, some of them can become fairly large because of the amount of applications that are used at a department. It’s also possible that two or more departments use the same application, […]

App Volumes: Error in creating database.yml file

This week I ran into a problem when I was upgrading an App Volumes Manager from version 2.14 to 2.14.2. During the setup I got an error saying the creation of the “database.yml” file failed, but after clicking OK the setup of the manager continued and eventually completed “successfully”. After launching the App Volumes manager […]

How you can group your applications for App Volumes

Because it’s best practice to not have more than 10 AppStacks attached per target system, you need to group your applications. At the customer* where I’m working we grouped the applications by using a “Funnel” and dividing them into 3 different kinds of AppStacks, as you can see in the picture below. *We use Horizon View 7.5, […]

Create a custom writeable volume for specifically the Outlook OST and Search Indexes

In my previous post I covered how VMware DEM can redirect the OST file and Search Indexes to a User Installed Application (UIA) writable volume. Because it’s still a UIA writable volume, any user with administrative rights can (ab)use these rights and install any application onto his/her own writable volume or the writable volume of […]

App Volumes and OST files

With the release of App Volumes 2.14 VMware now supports Cached Exchange Mode and Windows Search Indexing on writable volumes. This means that when you use a User Installed Applications (UIA) only writable volume, the Microsoft Outlook and Windows Search indexes are now saved along with the Outlook OST file to the user’s Writable Volume if […]

Synchronize AppStacks in a multi-site deployment

At my customer we recently installed App Volumes 2.14 in a in a multi-site deployment. Because the vSAN storages on both sites can’t directly communicate with each other, we need to set up storage replication to synchronize the AppStacks. In this blog I will cover how to configure Storage Groups in the App Volumes Manager. To […]