App Layering spanning all VDI platforms

“ProfileUnity with FlexApp has been verified as Citrix Ready, which means our joint XenApp and XenDesktop customers benefit from this application layering support with a streamlined way to deliver applications without the need to modify base images,” said Siddharth Rabindran, Senior Manager, Citrix Ready at Citrix. “When coupled with ProfileUnity’s User Environment Management features, customers have additional options in managing profiles, delivering printers, managing application rights, and many other user policies on a granular basis.”

ProfileUnity is the only complete and full-featured User Management Solution to support all Windows desktop types – combining User Environment Management and Application Layering in one integrated, easy-to-manage product. FlexApp Application Layering has been verified as Citrix Ready for XenApp app delivery and XenDesktop VDI, and also supports Microsoft RDSH, and VMware.

The enhanced FlexApp feature introduces a new file system driver approach to layering that seamlessly and instantly delivers applications. The new approach significantly reduces logon times, simplifies application delivery, and dramatically reduces the need to modify base images in desktop and server-based computing environments. Applications can be assigned to machines or any user(s) or group(s) based on policies or conditions by using more than 300 built-in, context-aware filters.

Even complex applications, such as those with file system drivers and services, can be easily virtualized with FlexApp, dramatically improving upon older application isolation technologies such as Microsoft® App-V and VMware® ThinApp. In addition to existing VHD support, FlexApp now includes options to provision applications onto FlexDisk VMDKs, which benefit customers who have VMware ESX hosts by leveraging fast VMFS storage. A single desktop can support as many as 58 VMDKs with ProfileUnity, more than any other layering solution.

Mark Lockwood, Gartner Analyst wrote, "Application layering, although a relatively new technology, promises to eliminate the VDI application delivery dichotomy: the need for fully integrated, natively installed applications versus the need to abstract those applications in order to take full advantage of VDI technology. Layering produces the best user experience of the methods compared in this research while also providing excellentmanagement flexibility."

The following significant updates are also included in the latest version:

Introducing ProfileDisk
ProfileDisk is new with the release of ProfileUnity v6.5. ProfileDisk is a VHD or VMDK data disk designated for a specific user’s profile. ProfileDisk dramatically speeds user logon times by seamlessly mounting the entire user profile from disk, supplying the benefits of native profile performance with instant delivery of a user profile. When coupled with ProfileUnity’s longstanding granular profile Portability features, customers can enjoy the best of both worlds – a lightning fast profile with the ability to granularly manage the profile when needed, as well as options to roam across Windows OS versions.

Highly Available – Highly Scalable
Customers leveraging ProfileUnity’s new support of VMDKs will also benefit from its inherent design to deliver highly-available environments. ProfileUnity v6.5 includes exclusive point-and-click clustering, removing the requirement for network load balancers or external database clusters. ProfileUnity provides all software needed to create a highly-available cluster with just the click of a mouse. The design features a unique and efficient pull architecture – meaning workload information is pulled from the cluster and then processed in contrast to older industry methods where the information is blindly sent to a service that subsequently can hang or go down.

“By extending our FlexApp features to additional desktop types, administrators gain a powerful new solution to deliver applications without affecting the base image of a desktop,” said Jason Mattox, CTO, Liquidware Labs. “FlexApp’s latest design can deliver some of most difficult to virtualize applications, which gives it a significant edge over other application virtualization solutions. Many customers will also benefit from our added support of VMDKs which can boost performance by avoiding network line speeds and interruptions associated with VHDs.”