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I was going to post a thread about Microsoft UE-V, another semi esoteric component of MDOP, wondering if anyone was using it, but eh, why not shoot for a megathread? It's the year 20xx, rampant industry consolidation has brought tens of thousands of user workstations and environments under your direct responsibility. IT is in shambles due to rapid turnover and expansion. A project manager approaches, they heard from someone who told someone that you were a go to guy. You see, there's this project that is going live in two days, they've been testing it in a bubble and they need it pushed out to the rest of the organization. The install is pretty complex! You're already pretty busy. What do you do? Roll initiative. Hopefully this is operationalized by now for you and it's no biggie! If so, post! If not, read on! VDI You could install your app on a template VM, and update the pool to use the new template if it doesn't self provision
Serverside Hosted Apps
Application Packaging Package your app into a single MSI for deployment via SCCM, group policy, etc
Application Virtualization Package your app so the entire thing is containerized into a single package - to be deployed via VDI, XenApp, SCCM, or other methods!
Application Layering You can install your app in a VM to layer ontop of a template to use with Citrix provisioning or VDI. There are tradeoffs, but it's good for really tricky apps.
User Experience Roaming Allowing the users' app settings to follow with them from server to server, or desktop to desktop
Lots of other options in 20xx! What tools do you use, what are your experiences with the tools, positive and negative? I will try to occasionally update the OP with links to posts or add new products mentioned. SSH IT ZOMBIE fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Sep 9, 2016 |
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I would say my initial go to is usually App-V + SCCM or XenApp. I've had higher success rates with App-V over Thinapp, admittedly I haven't used Thinapp in 4 years. App-V can package services to a degree, has event driven install scripts, and is completely scriptable over Powershell. It's Microsoft tech on Microsoft tech, so I think it's generally a cut above other options. Later versions of XenApp, like 7.8, introduce native App-V support. We're on 6.x now, and scripted deployment and publishing. It works very well with provisioned Citrix servers, simply publish the .appv on startup. SCCM works well with App-V as well, very good at tracking supercedence and has native support. One thing for provisioning services to remember is to enable the streaming feature, don't cache so you don't blow out your ram disk. Streaming is also much faster for initial launches. Both Thinapp and App-V work fine for middleware as well - you can launch external processes inside the bubble, I think App-V's management is nicer. If that fails, or the app is not a good candidate for App-V - ie something that self updates often, can't write certain file types to the bubble like exes - thick provisioned Citrix servers work fine. Our VmWare VDI cluster is a disaster - on some version 4.0, and ESX 4.5 or something, on mostly dead hardware. I want to rebuild it, but I also don't want to touch it with a 20 foot pole or attempt an upgrade, I'd rather stand up a new VC and cluster, and cut the apps over by hand. If VDI was healthy, Horizon is pretty good, and they've added some really fast provisioning options in recent versions. Very few end users are using VDI anymore. I am just starting to look at Microsoft UE-V. Has anyone used it before? It seems pretty neat - can sync app configurations when users hop PCs or Citrix\Terminal Servers. On the terminal server side we have stuff scripted where we copy appdata for certain things, desktops we have nothing. UE-V seems like it works well out of the box, did some initial testing. Organization info: Healthcare - We have 16000 employees, deployment and packaging kinda ends up on multiple people, no one is really dedicated to it. One dedicated Citrix engineer supporting ~500 Citrix servers, a mixture of XenApp 5.5, 6.x, 7.8 in testing, provisioning and thick. I sort of help out with publishing apps, but not my primary role. SSH IT ZOMBIE fucked around with this message at 03:44 on Sep 9, 2016 |
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