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Nothing works without a profile

Profiling

Article from ADMIN 27/2015

By Falko Gräfe

In previous versions of App-V, using a profile management tool was nice but not essential. The tide has clearly turned with App-V version 5. We examine the profile management needs for different App-V 5 infrastructures.

In this article, I use the terms "Profile Management" and "UEM" (user environment management) to summarize tools that are able to transfer user configurations selectively from one machine or session to another and go beyond the capabilities of pure roaming profiles and folder redirection. The key word here is "selectively." Moreover, if such a solution can influence the user environment (e.g., connect drives or display application icons), it really deserves to be called profile management.

Configuration Data

Life was simple in the good old days of App-V 4: The App-V client stored virtually all configuration changes made while using an application in the (roaming) AppData folder in a .pkg file. The few exceptions were, in most cases, negligible but, in special cases, even more difficult to address.

With App-V 5, Microsoft is striving for greater expression of standards in application virtualization. This "same-as-local" approach justifies some of the great new features of App-V – in particular, significantly improved integration with the local operating system. On the other hand, this approach to classic application behavior brought some innovations that could have an unpleasant effect. App-V 5 changes initiated by the user are stored separately, rather than in the machine-global package cache (under ProgramData). Copy-on-write (COW) now takes care of this process, with a few fundamental exclusions. In particular, no copies of executable files are produced; therefore, they are, in effect, read-only. Some file types are considered "executable" and thus immutable [1]. Furthermore, additional registry and filesystem exclusions for client machines can also be defined.

It is necessary to distinguish between the filesystem and the registry for

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