VMware App Volumes 2.12

VMware Official Links for App Volumes 2.12

Release Notes
Software Download

What's New in This Release

The latest release of App Volumes includes many enhancements that improve end user login times, security, Microsoft Office support, and Windows 10 support.

Performance improvements for faster user login and application launch

• Optimized handling of application registry hives by not blocking end-user login.
• Addressed a bug that caused the App Volumes agent to scan Appstacks and Writable Volumes before the Windows explorer shell is available.

Integration with Active Directory

• You can manage application and writable volumes assignments across multiple Active Directory domains and forests.
• You can add multiple domain controllers that App Volumes Manager leverages to query Active Directory users, computers, groups, and OUs.
• You can move and retain application and writable volumes assignments even when Active Directory objects are moved out of an OU or Group.

Security Enhancements

• By default, communication between App Volumes Manager and agent occurs over HTTPS. The App Volumes Manager is installed with a port number of 443. See KB 2148178 for more information.
• By default, certificate validation is required for all communication between the App Volumes Manager and vSphere. See the SSL section in the App Volumes User Guide for detailed information.
• Ruby version in App Volumes Manager is upgraded to 2.2.4.

Support for Delivering Office 365 (Office 2016) Applications Through AppStacks

You can deliver Office 365 (Office 2016) applications through AppStacks. See KB 2146035 for detailed information.

Support for Windows 10 Anniversary Update (AU) build 1607

You can now deliver applications, user-installed applications, and profiles through AppStacks and Writable Volumes to Windows 10 version 1607 (Windows 10 Anniversary Update) on Current Branch, Current Branch for Business and Long-term Service Branch. Windows 10 version 1511 is not supported with App Volumes 2.12. See KB 2148177 for more information.

Tech Preview Features

See the following VMware Knowledge Base articles to learn about the Tech Preview features that are included with App Volumes 2.12.

• Centralized Log Collection - You can redirect logs from all App Volumes Managers and agents to a central location. This helps in uploading the logs more easily to VMWare Support and also makes troubleshooting easier. See KB 2148180 for more information.
• Read-only Administrator - A read-only administrator can only log in to App Volumes Manager and view the App Volumes configuration details but cannot make any modifications. See KB 2147984 for more information.
• Asynchronous Mounting - You can configure asynchronous mounting of AppStacks on App Volumes Manager to improve scalability. See KB 2147985 for more information.
Note - The Tech Preview features and capabilities are not supported for production deployment, rather they are available as a preview of potential upcoming innovations to test in a lab or UAT environment. You can provide feedback to improve these features through VMWare Communities.

Miscellaneous

AppVolumes Manager Nginx supports TLSv1.0

The App Volumes Manager 2.12 continues to allow communication using TLSv1.0. However, future releases of App Volumes Manager will not support TLSv1.0 which will affect older agents (App Volumes 2.11 and earlier).

Resolved Issues:

• Assignments were not honored when the organizational unit (OU) or group membership of users or computers was changed.
• App Volumes agent would scan Appstacks and Writable Volumes before the Windows explorer shell was available.
• When a user logs in to the virtual machine and AppStacks are attached, the Windows Start menu and search menu fail to launch. This is specific to Windows 10.
• When you use special characters such as “%” or “\” for a storage name, the storage list incorrectly displays “%25” and “%5c” for the names in places such as the Default Storage Location list on the Storage tab.
• Microsoft Office 2016 applications become unresponsive after a few minutes of being launched on Windows 10 with Writable Volume attached.
• AppVolumes now enables users to handle Alternate Data Stream.
• Java fails to render with Microsoft Office AppStack attached.
• Login to App Volumes Manager fails if the user name contains space.
• App Volumes Manager occasionally goes in to a deadlock state after aborting a query which is running slow.
• If a file from the system volume is deleted when a writable volume  is attached, App Volumes Manager returns false success instead of "Access_Denied".
• Users who are from the same forest but in an alternate domain as the domain configured in App Volumes Manager are unable to login.
• svservice aborts when connecting to App Volumes Manager after HttpInitializeRequest:WinHttpSendRequest failed (error 12175).
• Windows 10 Start button and Cortana become unresponsive when WritableVolume is attached after recomposing the floating pool.
• If you select "Delayed creation of Writable Volume" when creating Writable Volumes for a nested group, App Volumes Manager creates WritableVolumes immediately for all the users in parent groups. Only Writable Volumes creation for users at the deepest group level is delayed.
• A VM with an Appstack attached fails to report the correct VM state to VMware Horizon View
• When a user is moved to another organizational unit (OU), the AppStacks or WritableVolume assigned to him is no longer available to him when he logs in to the VM.
• FlexEngine.exe is invoked by the allvolattached_shellstarted.bat file. In previous releases of App Volumes, users had to update the batch file separately to ensure that UEM did not throw an error when invoking FlexEngine.exe with App Volumes. With App Volumes 2.12, the batch file has been updated to invoke FlexEngine.exe with –UEMRefreshShortcuts. FlexEngine.exe is invoked after the user logs in and all volumes have been attached.