How to install AppV 5.0 Beta --- Chapter 1

Microsoft App-V enables the administrator to deploy applications as services in real time. Here we are going to explain how to create an App-V deployment infrastructure.

The components we need to implement an App-V infrastructure deployment are the following:

A server acting as a Domain Controller.

An Application Virtualization Manager Server, with acts as a centralized location to manage the infrastructure for delivering virtual applications. This component needs a Microsoft SQL Server for its data store.

An Application Virtualization Publishing Server, which hosts the virtual application package for streaming.

An App-V Sequencer, used to transform applications into virtual applications.

And of course one or more App-V Clients. They retrieves virtual applications and publishes on the client.

It is recommend to use one server for each component, but for learning purpose you could use the same server for the Manage and the Publishing, but not for the Domain Controller.

You could use physical or virtual machines to those components, but in the case of the Sequencer it is recommend to use a virtual machine because you must install the applications and at the end of the sequence process you must uninstall to came back to the state before the application install. And for this purpose is very interesting to use snapshots and reverting it.

In our example we are going to work with all the components as virtual machines, and for this purpose we need two computers, one to hosts the virtual machines and one to manage those virtual machines.

The first one has a Windows Hyper-V Server 2011 which hosts four virtual machines, the Domain Controller, the Management & Publishing server, the sequencer, and a client to probe the App-V deployment.

The second one has a Windows 7 Enterprise with the Remote Server Administration Tools installed to manage the virtual machines hosts inside the Hyper-V Server.

So, the first thing we need to do is to install our computers with the Hyper V Server, and the Windows 7 Enterprise. In this one we need also the RSAT (Remote Server Administration Tool) installed to access de Hyper-V server to create the four Virtual Machines needed for our infrastructure. Two of those virtual machines installed with Windows 2008 Server R2, and the other two virtual machines with Windows 7 Pro.

In the next chapter we would prepare each virtual machine to be able to play the role assigned to it.