App Layering that you really need to watch!

Hi All, I wanted to share something with you. I have been given a chance to review FlexApp DIA which is a feature of ProfileUnity from Liquidware Labs. So what I did was videoed my findings. For those of you that didn’t know I used to work for LiquidwareLabs but now I’m a customer of theirs. I’d previously recorded videos found on my youtube channel demonstrating how to install ProfileUnity and how to capture applications installations using FlexApp UIA.

With FlexApp UIA you get policy controlled User Installed Applications which enables non-administrative users in non-persistent VDI environments the ability to browse to a centralized share and install applications which the corporate approves but does not necessarily want to connect to all users in a group at login. This gives the user back some control, improving the experience inside VDI. I suppose if you think about it no need for the admin to get involved.

FlexApp DIA is different again. This is where the administration team packages corporate applications into portable layers and deploys the application layers in a mix and match scenario vs building silos of VDI or XenApp images and pools.  Applications in FlexApp layers can be individual upgrades vs the need to update and recompose an entire image when only a single application needs updating.  FlexApp DIA also provides for drastically simplified desktop DR since FlexApp layers are as portable as copy, paste and import.  You can even decide how to best serve up your applications for performance reasons and choose the best storage path for each application weather NAS, SAN, VHD or VMDK, rather than baking all the storage IO into the main C: image.

When you see this video and how simple it is you’ll want to do it too. If I had to grade my experience seriously I would give it 10 out of 10 for simplicity, flexibility and compatibility. Now I focus on the application layering aspect of ProfileUnity but it’s much much more powerful and feature rich. What I could have shown is the control over the apps you have using the ProfileUnity policy management. Being able to manage how I assign those apps using environmental factors in my policy. That will be the next video I’m sure.  One mention I have to make is I recorded this using the beta and since then Liquidware Labs fixed the 1 issue I found that really didn’t not bother me at all which was the removal of an icon after application clean up. Anyway enough chatter watch and learn >