Microsoft Application Virtualization Dashboard

Published: March 15, 2010

About the Application Virtualization Dashboard

The Microsoft® Application Virtualization Dashboard helps you monitor virtualized software applications across your organization. The dashboard’s built-in charts, gauges, and tables let you track any APP-V dataset in near-real time, so you can easily stay on top of the usage, health, and compliance of all your virtualized applications.

The App-V Dashboard is designed and built on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 as the application platform by using Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5/4.6.  

Key Benefits

Benefits of the dashboard include:

• Actionable information out of the box. The dashboard comes with a wide range of valuable, built-in reports like top 5 applications used, top 5 users, applications never used, application usage for a specific user, system utilization, and many more.
• Near-real-time access to key information. The graphical dashboard lets customers view any App-V dataset in near-real time.
• Easy to build and configure. The dashboard’s wizard-based tools let customers easily create new dashboards in minutes. 
• Easy to customize. The dashboard can easily be customized to meet the needs of different departments and other groups. Any data set in the Microsoft Application Virtualization database can be presented on the dashboard, in chart, gauge, and table formats.  
• Flexible & interactive. Users can easily filter data and create ad hoc, custom views. Filters allow users to quickly drill down from high-level to more specific data.

Microsoft Application Virtualization Dashboard

Today, I am happy to announce immediate availability of Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) 4.6 Beta. At TechEd EMEA we announced our commitment to ship the next version of App-V in H1 2010.  In March of this year, as part of the MDOP 2009 launch, we indicated that the development of App-V 4.6 was underway.  Today, we have reached a major milestone and are a step closer to our goal.

This will be the first version of App-V to support both x64 and x86 Windows platforms.  The primary focus of this release is to enable App-V to take advantage of 64-bit Windows platforms including Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.  We’ve also made some improvements in the App-V Sequencer such as simplifying the workflow for creating virtual applications and adding the ability to sequence true 64-bit applications, a first to market!  For customers running Windows XP or Windows Vista, you can also use App-V 4.6 Beta and take advantage of the support for Office 2010, 64-bit platform support and additional features in the release.

The Official MDOP Blog : App-V 4.6 Public Beta now available for download!

1. Deploy the Windows 7 OS in an automated, repeatable pattern
2. Reduce the headache of application deployment by using a combination of Windows Application Virtualization (App-V) and Windows Presentation Virtualization (Terminal Services)
3. Create a new AD Structure so that we can change the way we deploy group policy
4. Use the new User Migration utility to migrate user settings while keeping the files local to the pc (no more copying to the network and back down when the image is complete)
5. Leave Citrix. The value add of Citrix has been reduced with each new Microsoft release as you get more and more of the functionality built-in to Windows.
6. Deploy DirectAccess on Server 2008 R2 to manage clients remotely and provide a consistent experience.
7. Deploy Forefront Sterling

So far, we are focusing our initial efforts around a consistent experience for IT Administrators, as this is our first test group. Here is the scenario I envision:

1. Our image administrator makes enhancements to the base image of the OS.
2. I boot my laptop (or desktop up) and the user migration tool runs and partitions a space for all of my local settings and files
3. The new image is put on the computer
4. The computer is joined to the domain
5. The computer uses group policy to configure OS Settings and Preferences, and deploy a minimum number of apps (I am mainly thinking infrastructure type apps here, like the App-V client of Forefront Client Security)
6. App-V is used to stream down any app that I might run while disconnected (Like Visio, or VLC Media Player)
7. All of my administrator consoles and applications are delivered as TS RemoteApps with icons on the Start Menu. Any app that would be useless to me when disconnected from the network (Like AD Users and Computers or Group Policy Manager) would be published as a seamless TS RemoteApp
8. One off software that I installed manually would need to be re-installed manually, but all of these setup files would already be on my computer because I would have migrated the installation source from the old pc.

Once we are happy with the IT Administrator First Install Experience and the IT Administrator Rebuild Experience, we will focus our efforts on the end user experiences.