What's so great about App-V? [closed]

You've pretty much hit the nail on the head with your very thorough critical analysis. There are certain apps that work in all your scenarios and other that just don't play well.

I'm not sure that your comment that streaming content gives no feedback is accurate, there is a status bar that shows initial launch progress and a confuration option to background stream the rest of the package silently.

Full disclosure, I haven't used it in a few years (was using in pre 4.0 days when it was softgrid up to about 4.6) bit I'm looking to start testing it again soon.

I was using it in a reasonably large education institution and found a few things that were useful that you haven't mentioned.

We had a very large range of applications that users could want to access from any desktop, using App-v meant that we did not need to deploy these in advance meaning core image size is massively reduced which speeds up image deployment time.

The inherent concurrent use limit meant that we could licence some applications that were to costly as a site licence but allow them to be accessed anywhere.

Applications could be resequenced for updates etc and be immediately available on any machine.

TL;DR It has some great benefits but it's not the holy grail.

Firstly, I agree 100% with you.

Secondly, I work only with SBC (Citrix, but RDS would be the same). We host multiple small (1-50 users) customers on large servers, up to 100 user per server (yes I know, no it's not my call).

App-V is great for one thing for us. Hosting several totally separate customers who have the same application (a lot do because we are a big actor in one industry) that does not support more than one installation per computer. App-V makes it at all possible, where without App-V (or similar virtualization) it would not be.

That said we have had a hell of a time wrangling with App-V throughout, and many of its promises fall flat. Application management is horrible. Updating the packages is actually impossible in many cases and we need to roll new applications for new versions, making deploying them even more work. And don't get me started on the Sequencer or bugs in streaming that can happen. It also takes a lot of time to get a recipe right for a complex application, and you might need a deeper understanding of it than otherwise.

We try NOT to use App-V for application we can install without it simply because it is easier, faster and simpler to troubleshoot and maintain.

As for answering your question and concluding: It lets us do something that should be impossible, but at a cost.