AppV_SelfService: A Tool for Automatic or Self-Service AppV 5 Publishing without servers
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Working With Citrix VDI-In-A-Box
When using Citrix VDI-In-A-Box for VDI pooled image deployments, AVSS makes for an ideal way to deliver virtual packages.
The big question is where to put the App-V Package store.
If your VDIB implementation is simple, then all of the Hypervisors used would be located together, and placement of the App-V packages on any convenient windows share is probably the most logical solution.
This would be the same answer we would suggest for XenDesktop, VMWare View, and most other VDI solutions as well.
But many deployments of VDIB are not really "Data Center" implementations. The Hypervisor with the VDIB appliance is used as a cookie cuttter copyable disk image that just requires a new name for the Hypervisor itself.
In such an implementation, our preference is to place the App-V Package Store on a Windows share right on the box.
When this is done, we want the VDI images to able to reference the host in order access the share. This is done differently on different hypervisors.
- Microsoft Hyper-V - This article shows how to locate the "PhysicalHostNameFullyQualified" using either the Windows Registry, PowerShell, WMI, or even querying SCVMM.
- VmWare ESX - This article documents the VSphere API to query the hostname, however this requires hard-coding the password information into a script in order to retrieve it.
- XenServer - Unknown at this time.
Of course, knowing the name/ip of the hypervisor might not be sufficient if the Hypervisor cannot mount a CIFS share. In that case, a creative solution to locate an additional Windows VM on that hypervisor that hosts the share would be needed.
Once you know where the share is located, the script would then set the AVSS registry setting for the UNC path. This should be done as part of a boot script before the service starts.
VBID persistent images do not roam between hypervisors. But since you want to start with a common image you still need the script to run the first time the user runs the VM.
Note: We are aware of an issue in VDIB 5.2.1 where there is an incompatibility between the App-V 5 client and the Perminent Virtual Disk feature. Presumably this was fixed in version 5.3, but we have not verified this yet..