App Volumes 3.0

[jsinclair]

Any word on the official release? I saw a VMware article that mentioned March 14th, but that must have not been anything official.

[JHT_Seattle]

I don't have a date, but this isn't going to be an update like the earlier releases have been... It's been written as an appliance now, so it's a 1.0 release of a 3.0 product, really.  It requires a complete redeploy and rebuild of all stacks, from what I know.  There will be an upgrade path from something like 2.11.0 or 2.12.0 to 3.x, but that's not likely coming until Q3/Q4. 

It's not enough to deter me from standing it up and taking a look at it, but with 2.10.0 our AppVolumes environment is finally (mostly) stable, and I'm happy to let it breathe a little bit.

[jsinclair]

Wow..so here I sit waiting again. I've been trying to deploy this for 6+ months but keep getting held up because of new releases. First it was Office 365, now I'm not sure if I want to go through the trouble of building an environment just to tear it down again. I'm also waiting for Office 365 w/ 2016 support...will that be coming soon?

[JHT_Seattle]

You won't lose anything by deploying 2.10.0 now and letting the 3.x branch work through some early-adopter kinks, I promise you that!  At the point where migration is viable in 6 months or so you'll have had so much more flexibility and effort saved by having App Volumes in your service than if you didn't, I'm certain.  Or just deploy the 3.x version side-by-side and doing point any clients to it.  That gives you time to build stacks in parallel, get familiar with the new paradigm and UI, so when Horizon v7.1 or 7.2 comes along and integrates into the same Astro UI as what the App Volumes 3.x appliance does (and the future vROps for Horizon as well), you'll be that much closer to nirvana.  Expect things to break, expect to open some cases, expect to wait for development to release patches.  See?  It's not all sugar in the Kool-Aid I'm drinking.

As for O365 w/2016, that's still in the First Release branch, if I'm not mistaken, so 2013 is still the currently widely supported version.  I know there's posts on getting that in a stack without any problems, too.  That said, I would just follow the same recipe for 2016 and see how it works.  They're not very different from what I can see (I've used both with O365).

[jsinclair]

That sounds exciting, I just don't want to get into another position where I have to start over again. It's been difficult just redoing our old multi-pool environment with tons of ThinApps and Persona management. We did try Office 2016 on 365, but there was a major bug where it would not open office documents in email attachments through Outlook. If you tried to open an attached pptx, xlsx, or docx, it would crash. I posted about it but was told 2016 isn't supported so we scrapped the idea and went to 2013, which has been working well. However, we have requests for 2016 due to the better SharePoint integration. It's like we can never catchup. So 3.x will probably be later this year if I'm hearing you correctly? Will there be any updates to 2.x ?

[JHT_Seattle]

3.x should be any day now, but migrating from the 2.x platform to 3.x will be supported with an update later in the year.  The 2.x platform should still get a couple of updates, I believe.  My guess is bug fixes and compatibility improvements; I'm not expecting features from 3.x to be back-ported or developed in parallel for the 2.x branch.

[jsinclair]

Ah..well that makes sense then. We haven't really built much on the 2.x environment, so it might make sense to just redo everything on 3.x. We only have a couple desktops running and mine is one of them. Most of the app stacks we have built need to be redone anyways. Thanks for the help!

[Ray_handels]

I heard yesterday that official release would be 17th Of March so I will be downloading it in a sec and check and see what goes .

And yes, there is no upgrade path now from 2.9/2.10 to 3.0. We either have to wait for 3.1 or an update on the 2 parts. The console has been remodified "just a tad" .

If anyone is interested I am willing to share some test results after we gave it a test run here ..

Now to get my hands on that thing..

[sappomannoz]

Really? I'm not able to find the 3.0 release

[Ray_handels]

Yeah i know. I also heard that you need to take some effort to get it.. Working on it right now. Apparently people in the States also need to sleep...

Sleep is waaaaay to overrated ...

[Ray_handels]

Update. Seems to be postponed for a few days.. Man I really wanted to play with it... Hopefully i can find some spare time next week..

[jsinclair]

I think my browser refresh was about every 10 seconds yesterday. However, I do see that UEM 9 was released.

[sappomannoz]

Hey,

does someone know if 2012R2 is supported for deployment of the management? In that case I could start preparing the new environment.

[Ray_handels]

Euh, well.. How do i put it..

No, Server 2012R2 is not supported, nor is 2008, 2003 or any Windows platform.

The new manager is an appliance with it's own onborad database..

I'm not quite sure what to think of it yet but hey. At least it is easy to implement. And for as far as my knowledge goes you will still be able to use a centralized database.. Not 100% sure on that one though..

[jsinclair]

That's awesome..however, App Volumes was the only thing left that required me to upgrade my SQL 2008 server to 2014. At least Microsoft got their money already...ugh.

[sappomannoz]

My current setup is with a load balancer, so i hope there is some kind of possibility to use an external DB or to sync the data. But I do like the appliance approach

[JHT_Seattle]

Get used to the appliances, my friend!  It's all going that way, and soon... the only piece of the Horizon puzzle that's holding out is the Connection Server, and I can't imagine it'll stay that way for very long.

I asked some questions about load balancing the AppVol appliances the way we do now with the Windows-based install and didn't get clear answers.  I think that's kind of the way it goes with this product, though.  Moving targets, you know.  If it's not possible with 3.0, expect it to come at some point, as VMware is definitely looking to integrate LTM functionality into their products.  Log Insight introduced it with the 3.3.0 release, it was demo'd for vCenter at VMworld 2015, too.  For an internal facing app like App Vol it'd be perfect to not have to go through the enterprise bureaucracy I have to now to get LTM configured. 

[lvanek]

O365 Pro Plus works inside of App Stacks 2.10. i got a Microsoft engineer to tell me the secrets the other day to get it to work

[jvvovf]

VMware App Volumes 3.0 Release Notes

Migration – Migrating AppStacks from App Volumes 2.x to 3.0 is not supported in this release.

Bummer - we now have to repack our 80 appstacks?

[Ray_handels]

Or you have to wait for 3.1 which most probably will have some sort of migration path.. At least that's my guess (and what I've heard here and there)