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Managing User Installed Applications & User Profile using VMware App Volumes

Introduction to VMware Writable Volumes

In one of the earlier post to the series, we talked about App Stack and its advantages. AppStacks are read-only volumes containing applications or can also be referred them as application containers. You can combine your organization’s core applications into a single AppStack making the AppStack easy to assign to Active Directory users. Using AppStacks you can easily provision the application which should be available across the organization or a set of users but what about the non-standard application which user want to install. In case of a non-persistent desktop, all user installed application & user profile data will be lost once user logoff from the virtual desktop.

Using Writable Volumes, you can configure per-user volumes where users can install and configure their own applications and keep the data that is specific to their profile. You can assign a Writable Volume to a specific user and which will become available to the user from any machine. A Writable Volume can contain data such as application settings, user profile, licensing information, configuration files, and user-installed applications. In case needed, you can create, import, edit, expand, and disable Writable Volumes using App Volumes Manager. Designing your environment for Writable Volumes require special consideration as Writable Volumes requires both Read & Write I/O.

 

Procedure

In this post, I will be demonstrating the steps to create a writable volume for saving user-installed applications and user data.

  1. Login to VMware App Volume Admin Console.
  2. Click on Create under Volumes –> Writable.

Search for the user & Choose the Destination Storage & Source Template

Choose appropriate option.

You can see the Writable volume created for the selected user.

Conclusion

This concludes the process of creating a Writable Volume for the user to save all the user installed applications as well as the user profile data. Next, I will be demonstrating the common administrative tasks you might need to perform in a VMware App Volume environment. Hope this will be informative for you. Thanks for Reading !!!. Be social and share if you find worth sharing it.