All about application delivery

There are two main ways how to manage updates on your Med-V images. The one is the old style – you just manage your image with the exitsting infrastructure. You use WSUS and SCCM or whatever  for software deployment and patch management. The second way is the med-v way. You update image and put it into your med-v infrastructure. Then the differences are transfered via trimtransfer to the end devices.  At the first glance I would say – use the existing environement. By this you dont need to change your processes and you dont need to build a second infrastructure ( well – this is the opinion from business perspective and not from the technical guy who thinks – yeah let me play with the new stuff). The question is, if the end users can handle this. Imagine a patch management on a virtual machine where you normally just see one application and not the full desktop. What would the user do if something will ask him to reboot. Or if the reboot is forced while the user works in the virtual application.  He will probably turn off all his apps and not the virtual one and will reboot his physical device. So I think using the traditinol way will give some additional headaches on the end user site.  So probably the new way is not the worsest one.

In Med-V you can define an IIS based image repository server.  A client checks if the image on the central place changed and if yes it downloads the changes vie trimtransfer. This means, that only differences to the image are downloaded and trimtransfer will also check on block level if certain blocks are already on the target machine – this saves a lot of bandwidth.

But what will happen if the user on the virtual machine that is updated will for example change somehting in an application? This will be normally stored in his profile on the virtual machine. Or if the user accidentially saves a file to the virtual hard disk. The data would be gone! Med-V will reset the local image to its default. So if you want to use a central image management solution you have to care, that no living data is on the virtual Windows XP.  You need for example a roaming profile for the virtual machine – well better use FlexProfiles I would say but this is another story.