How exciting—a new version of VMware App Volumes, and it’s not even holiday season!
I know what you’re thinking: You’re all excited, you’ve ripped open the gift wrap and now you’re staring at this box mouthing, “What is it?”
In the words of Senior Product Manager Jeff Ulatoski, it’s a way for “IT to reduce operating expenses (OpEx) by delivering apps in real time.” Translated, that means that this a way to make sure that the right applications are on the right users’ desktops, at the right time.
The original way to do this was to install the apps for everyone to use. This of course meant either machine bloat or managing multiple corporate images designed for specific people or departments.
Neither approach was scalable, and so “layering” was invented. Layering was a way of ripping apart the operating system (OS) so that like-minded components could be managed independently from each other. Unfortunately, this static approach led to confusion, incompatibilities and huge management complexities.
VMware App Volumes: The leading solution to enable you to simplify Windows lifecycle management with real-time application delivery. Eliminate the pain in application packaging and reduce the number of images you manage by up to 70%. Learn more here.
App Volumes is the new way. It’s part of VMware’s Just-in-Time Management Platform (JMP). App Volumes allows you to build and deliver a base OS to your user, and then have their specific applications dynamically loaded at the point of use. It’s user-centric, efficient and cloud-ready. It’s all very “next-generation.”
We’ve spent a huge amount of effort on this release making sure that the core (security, performance, scalability, etc.) is exactly what you’d expect from us. However, that doesn’t make for good blog copy, so let me tell you about a few of the features we also added.
Imagine a world where you sign in to your desktop, and your apps are dynamically added. In many examples I’ve seen, it’s mind-blowing to see hundreds of apps loaded in mere seconds, but there’s always that one app that doesn’t load. Some of your apps require so many system resources that it’s just not practical to load them at login time. (Looking at you, healthcare industry.)
So in this release, you can attach an AppStack at both user login and at machine startup. There are people out there that just jumped for joy. Trust me.
Other things we’ve done are updated the system to support Windows Server 2016 and Office 2016 and even included some basic license management. You can read the full release notes here, but why not just download it and kick the tires?
We were going to make a serious video about all this goodness but, instead, decided to ambush Jeff, nightly news-style. The look on his face when we burst into the room is priceless.
