In November 2020, we showed you how you use Access Capture, our automated application packaging and testing solution, to automate your MSIX and app attach creation in order to accelerate your application modernization journey, and with it, enable your Modern Desktop including Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD).
Today, we are thrilled to show you how you can also use Access Capture to automate your VMware App Volumes creation process. App Volumes refers to a set of application and user management solutions that run on VMware Horizon, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, and RDSH virtual environments.
App Volumes – A Short Cut To Windows Virtual Desktop?
Before I show you how to create an App Volumes package in Access Capture, I want to point out something very important to consider when it comes to your app management strategy: As you probably know, App-Volumes is almost exactly the same technology as Microsoft’s app attach but App-Volumes has been around longer and app attach is a bit smarter, smaller in size, and quicker compared to App-Volumes.
However, one pre-requisite for creating an app attach (and therefore to utilizing Windows Virtual Desktop) is that in order to create an app attach you will need to have one or several MSIX as input. This means you will most likely convert your existing MSI applications first into MSIX apps.
This is NOT the case for VMWare’s App Volumes! The output is a *.VHD file. For App Volumes, the input can be one or many MSI, MSIX, or other files, while the output can be VMWare’s *.VMDK or Microsoft’s *.VHD file. While this is not confirmed by either vendor, this means, you would be able to shortcut your Windows Virtual Desktop journey by skipping the MSIX conversion step and creating App Volumes instead as you could use the *.VHD output to directly jump onto WVD. In any case, the result is an autonomous, containerized, modernized application package ready to be side-loaded onto a virtual machine.
How To Automate Your App Volume Creation
The easiest way to show you how it is done by actually showing you. So I created this short video for you.
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Conclusion
There is no question that App Volumes enables you to deliver your applications faster, simplify your app management, and therefore drastically reduce your IT spend (VMWare claims up to 70%!).
By automating this process and standardizing it on a repeatable and centralized process with Access Capture, you ensure that your outputs are secure, stable, and robust app packages. You also empower your non-technical application owners to completely independently do what they need to do using self-service while always ensuring IT policy compliance, version control, and license management.
