Altiris Software Virtualisation Solution 2.1

Installing and maintaining software is a trying business. Software patching always carries the risk of making something unstable. Upgrading a user to a newer version often means training needs to be given. Installing new software is its own risks such as incompatibilities with existing products or in the worse case scenario, preventing existing products from running.

One solution to the upgrade problem is to give the users a small period of overlap so that they can continue working with existing products while learning the new version. This only works where both versions can exist on the same computer and when you can be certain that uninstalling the old version later, will not cause problems with the new version.

One solution that IT departments have looked at is using virtual machines (VMs) to run different software products. While fine in principal it does require more resources on the local machine. The learning curve is much sharper than normal as the user now needs to understand how to work with multiple VMs and move data between them. This is one of the reasons why VM technology tends to be used mainly in the datacentre, by developers or by IT departments rather than users.

The principles of virtualisation, however, can still be used without the overhead of multiple VMs. Both Microsoft and Altiris have virtualisation solutions that work at the application rather than the operating system level.

With the recent release of Altiris Software Virtualisation Solution (SVS) 2.1, we took a close look at how this technology works and what it means for users and support teams.

Like many companies, Altiris has shifted to a web delivery model where you download the code as a trial and then purchase your licence key. Manuals are available from the Altiris website and Altiris has a separate SVS community site called Juice.

Having downloaded the code and acquired our licence key we started the installation. There are several prerequisites for SVS depending on how you intend to use it. These come in the form of other Altiris products but all is not lost. When you start the installation, if the prerequisites are not there, the installer appears to get them for you.

Running the installation utility immediately required another web connection while it downloaded the full set of code. This was relatively quick and it then unpacked the code and launched the main installer.

The first thing that the installer does is check your machine to see if it meets the installation requirements. If not, it will either give a warning or refuse to continue, depending on the severity of the failure.

An example of a severe problem is remote desktops. Many administrators use remote desktops to connect to their servers. If installing SVS via a remote desktop you must start it via the command line. If you do not, the installer will refuse to run.

One of the unexpected problems during install was the sudden demand of the installer for SQL Server. This was not one of the things that the installer checked for. As it is a prerequisite it would have helped if it were in the installation notes or discovered beforehand. We did try and point it at other databases that were present but it was SQL Server or nothing.

Once we had installed SQL Server we were able to proceed with the installation which eventually completed.

Once SVS 2.1 is installed, the most labour intensive tasks are deploying the agents (a one-off) and creating the Virtual Software Archive (VSA) files. These are the software packages that you will deploy to the client computers. In principal SVA are simple to create. You install the package onto a computer, capture the process and the files, wrap it up and deploy it.