Altiris Software Virtualisation Solution 2.1

The reality is a little more complicated but, to give Altiris credit, not much more complicated. It's more about developing a process and approach that will ensure that you can deliver packages consistently. Anyone who has created deployment packages in Wise or Installshield, who has written their own MSI files, built Citrix packages or used products such as Ghost will understand how hard this can be if you do not use lots of small steps.

That is the key here, small steps along with a sample computer that allows you to replicate what you have done. Unlike other solutions however, that require you to have all your production systems mirror the reference computer or holds large numbers of reference computers, you are not tied to hardware elements.

All you need to do is install the SVS Agent and SVS Admin tool on the base computer and you can begin to capture software installations and package them into VSA files. Be careful. For best practice consider imaging your underlying OS and reinstalling it before every VSA capture. This ensures that there can be no issues over existing software and the application is installed fully.

The only problem we found with this approach was licensing the Altiris tools, so we quickly changed our base image to include the Altiris tools and the problem went away. We were also successful in doing VSA creation in a virtual machine which was a big bonus as it allowed us to create a single base VM and just copy it back when needed.

So just how easy was it to capture an application? Frighteningly easy! There are just 10 steps to capturing an application although the time taken to install the application still has to be factored in. You can keep the capture file running so that any configuration that needs to be done to the application, even if that means running the application, can be captured. This makes these settings inviolate as they are stored read-only. If you want to give the users control over how they configure their application let them configure it once they have it installed as a layer.

Deploying an application was equally easy. Applications are seen by the SVS agent as layers. You can export your VSA files to the network or make VSA files available through the Altiris Notification Server.

That is it. Finished. Application deployable to any machine with the SVS Agent installed. All a user needs to do is import the VSA file and then activate the layer. It really is so simple that a 10-year-old can use it to install Microsoft Office. When you no longer want the layer, you can deactivate the layer.

One of the big issues with software is handling regular updates, particular Microsoft products where critical security updates are often pushed to the desktop without extra testing. To prevent breaking any VSA file you should turn off automatic updates but then institute a patch process.

The patch process will load the master layer, import the patches and then save as a new VSA file. This way the patches are saved in the read-only area of the VSA file and not in the user area. The problem with them being in the user area is that activating and deactivating layers will clean up this space.

One of the really cool things added with SVS 2.1 is something called the SVS Logon Hook. This allows you to script what happens to layers when a user logs on or off. The big advantage of this is where shared computers are deployed such as in a hot desk environment.