Departmental apps with RES Automation Manager

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When working in Enterprise or even multi tenancy environments we would still like to maintain a single image for our entire infrastructure. This will ensure a lower TCO and have a simple and easy to use platform to maintain.

When we started working on our cloud desktop offering the “Qwise Nebula Worqspace” over a year ago we ran into issues with applications that don’t like App-V but were very keen on managing only one Provisioning Services image . As we were already working with RES Automation Manager the first thing to look at was the functionality offered by Automation Manager (AM) and we found a solution for this! I will tell you how and when this helps in this article!

RES AM makes it possible to schedule projects bases on a couple of triggers and one of those triggers is after next boot or even better yet after every boot. These projects may consist of whatever module that AM has available. This means that we can perform silent installations after every boot which is great for stateless Provisioning Services images!

This means that we solved the application installation issue and we succeeded in a one image platform or doesn’t it?
What you need to remember is that we work with stateless images which means that each time a target restarts it reverts to a clean state and changes are gone! This solution will therefore only work when you are working with applications that do not require a reboot!

Luckily for us we haven’t yet ran into these kind of customer applications so we are still working with only one single image. If we do run into issues in the future we end up with more images, but then we can also duplicate the Automation Manager RunBook we used for the first image and only add a customer project! Want to know more about this? Let me know and I might just show you more on this!

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  1. Patrick KaakPatrick Kaak02-03-2012

    If you use stateless images, than the installation should not run to long after every boot. As the possibility exists that users are already logging into the image before the setup has finished. You could end up with some strange behaviour.

    You could also use RES WM for this. Implement all programs in the image and block/unblock them by using RES WM and AD groups. But it could be that the images are getting too big for that…..

    • Barry SchifferBarry Schiffer02-03-2012

      You are right and i should have mentioned that! Next to the reboot we also look at installation time, If longer then xx minutes –> separate image.
      We actually stop the IMA service after boot and start it when the “post boot” job is finished.

      The Workspace Manager option is less relevant in my opinion because of the image size, conflicting apss but also image updates etc etc.

      Thanks m8

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