As we look at profile management & profile delivery solutions available today in the market, and the pains that come with managing roaming profiles with folder redirection, we can see that there is clearly room to introduce simplicity in this space. Managing users’ workspaces at scale, in the cloud, or on-premises requires more simplicity and centralized management. A simple solution should not require you to bring up lots of SQL servers or manage the full stack without any flexibility for changes. A centralized solution should bring with it the separation of concerns between the various components that make up a user’s profile.
With simplicity, centralization and reliability in mind, we wanted to give our customers some directional guidance on how we will approach customer needs for profile management and delivery with VMware App Volumes.
- Consolidating profile storage on writable volumes using the UIA+Profile template rather than 3 template options available today. Customers can leverage just one template to persist user installed apps or user profiles or both.
- Removing the virtualization layer between the user’s profile and its storage on the writable disk to provide a faster and more reliable user experience.
- Introducing caching of user data to provide faster resilient access to application data like .OST files with the flexibility to back up the data to your preferred storage infrastructure.
- Integrating with VMware User Environment Manager to granularly manage the profiles delivered through writable volumes.
Ultimately, customers can use App Volumes as a delivery mechanism that provides snap-on persistence for profiles and user installed apps leveraging writable volumes. User Environment Manager provides the added capabilities of a robust policy engine providing application specific personalization and environment management. This means that customers who want to inject policy and personalization based on contextual awareness and dynamic policy settings can do so with complete precision. The capabilities of App Volumes and User Environment Manager will continue to help our customers meet the modern day challenges to managing user workspaces across physical, virtual & cloud environments.
For more updates on App Volumes and User Environment Manager, please visit us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or discuss in our Communities. And visit our Hands on Labs here to try App Volumes and User Environment Manager yourself!
