Hi... Sorry... I have been asked to come up to speed on App Volumes real quick so I hope someone won't mind entertaining my uneducated questions....
First... I understand that there are two basic types... an App Stack and a Writeable Volume....
So... number one... to create either one of these... can they be created outside of the normal environment that they would be used in (i.e. they would be imported later).
If if so, what would be the minimum requirements to create such a system that the AppStack and Writeable Volume could be exported from. I don't know maybe for like App-V you would call it a Sequencing workstation or traditionally a packaging workstation... is this possible?
Maybe this is not possible.... but what we are looking at having is a separate disconnected environment where AppStacks and Writeable Volumes would be created and then later imported in to the environment to be deployed to users.
Does this make any sense?
Thank you very much for any info you can provide!
Randy
Hey,
First off a small introduction might be a good idea (other than raeding installation documentation and user guides and stuff
)
What AppVolumes does is create a VMDK file which holds information and when logging in it attaches these VMDK to a running machine based on user or computer (depends were you attach it to).
When installaing it you copy 1 template VMDK for apps and 3 for writable volumes to your datastore. What you need at least to create appstacks is a VCenter where Appvolumes can talk to because it needs to attach the VMDK to a machine, a Windows 7 or 8 virtual machine within this VCenter to do the sequencing with and an Appvolumes manager to create the actual appstacks. It would not suggest using anything other than this to create appstacks. Appstacks are read only VMDK's (which are made read only by AppVolumes manager) and writable volumes are read write.
So if you would like to create Appstacks in a test environment and then use it in production just by copying the file it would be possible. Writable volumes i would just create at production because they are read/write. But for appstacks to be created you will need to have a fully functional AppVolumes environment.
If you have more questions feel free to ask
The more people in the community, the merrier ![]()
For reference if you have separate App Volume Manager environments for test and production and you need to copy AppStacks between to two installations there is a KB article:
VMware KB: Copying an AppStack to another App Volumes Manager instance
As indicated you need to create AppStacks with an App Volumes Manager environment. An AppStack is created by copying an existing template. This App Volumes template is a vmdk that has a partition on it that is formatted NTFS and contains certain files that allow us to identify and control the behavior of an AppStack. On the machine that you attach AppStacks to and on the provisioning machine (used for putting applications into an AppStack) there is an App Volumes agent. This recognizes when a disk is attached and if it is a App Volumes disk it does the concatenation magic. The agent has to talk to it's App Volumes Manager for some things including checking licensing at certain events.
