Last week VMware announced
their acquisition of CloudVolumes. CloudVolumes are relatively new
start-up based out of California who specialize in Application Virtualization.
Now I know this doesn’t
sound like a ‘revolutionary’ acquisition by VMware because the term
‘Application Virtualization’ has been around for a number of years - AppV,
ThinApp, AppSense etc.
The differentiator for
CloudVolumes is the way in which they 'containerize' the application and then
present it back to the server or desktop (virtual or physical).
The majority of
Application Virtualization technologies today capture the application in a
‘container’ of some description and then stream it for consumption (in some
cases there is also a local mode option where the application can be copied down to the
consumer – this however can prove difficult to manage).
CloudVolumes takes a
different approach to this by instead capturing the application in a .VMDK or
.VHD format which can then be mounted directly into the server via the
CloudVolumes agent.
Architectural Overview:
NB: You can see the
various applications, plug-ins and even Windows Updates can be captured and
delivered via an AppStack – all without a reboot!
CloudVolumes in use:
- Install CloudVolumes
Manager Console which can be backed one or many VM’s for high availability.
This integrates with Active Directory to help map applications to groups of
users or computers and also vCenter or SCVMM for virtual workloads.
- Identify a server that
will be used as your “provisioning server” and install the CloudVolumes Agent –
this server will typically be a slim installation/image that will act as the
master for capturing applications.
- Identify the repository
that will be used for the application capture – this can be either a VMware
VMFS volume, Hyper-V volume or a DFS share. NB: DFS is typically used to move
applications between datacenters, more on this later!
- Initiate an “AppStack”
capture on the “provision server” (AppStack is the terminology used to describe
one or many application captured inside a .VMDK or .VHD)
- Complete the wizard driven
process and then assign the AppStack to your chosen Active Directory target –
user, computer or group.
- Select the preferred
application enablement option: instantaneous, after next logoff or after next
reboot – majority of the time you will use instantaneous which means the
AppStack (.vmdk) is mounted immediately and will appear inside the server or
desktop within milliseconds.
Key Considerations:
- Storage Read I/O
requirement – the AppStack (.vmdk) created is read-only meaning that multiple
reads are required when you assign the AppStack to multiple users or computers.
This is not deal breaker it just means that an SSD backed volume would be
required or better yet a Software-Defined-Storage approach such as VSAN
which means you don’t need an expensive storage array to facilitate the shared
SSD requirement.
- The volume where the
AppStack capture resides must be on shared storage that is common with the
cluster where the VM resides. This means that Application Streaming is avoided
and instead a direct ‘SCSI hot add mount’ is initiated – this is much more
efficient and scales well.
- Requirement for user
customizations or data? CloudVolumes has this covered too by enabling a
“Writable Volume” which can follow the user – think of this as a persistent
disk similar to that used in VMware View. With a writable volume you can use
floating pools of desktops.
- Already using ThinApp and
don’t want to re-capture the applications? CloudVolumes integrates with ThinApp
- How is it licensed today*?
Per user, per computer object or per terminal user (RDSH or Citrix based use of
the product) * = this may change
Virtual & Physical:
As mentioned above,
CloudVolumes works across both virtual and physical workloads – this achieved
using the .VHD AppStack capture format and then mounting to a Windows OS.
Taking it a step further, you can then use a Windows DFS share that has DFS
targets residing in different datacenter's to help provide a single consistent
AppStack that is truly portable. This diagram helps illustrate the use-case:
Horizon 6 with RDSH Application Publishing:
Cloud Volumes makes it easier to scale/manage either standalone RDSH farms or those integrated with Horizon WorkSpace.
Citrix XenApp:
Cloud Volumes makes it easier to scale/manage either Citrix XenApp farms.
Application ‘Bursting’ during peak periods:
With CloudVolumes you can
create a generic pool of servers with CloudVolumes pre-installed, when required
you simply assign the AppStack (you can also capture data or databases with the
application capture) and grow the fleet on demand:
Closing Comments:
You can find more information here and some great product demonstrations here. The key use case
for this technology is within a virtual desktop environment, but as you can see
above it has uses far beyond this – watch this space to see how it will integrate with
the wider VMware family of products.
