Application Virtualization Explorer now with App-V 5 support!

Yes, it’s finally here.

As we have promised for some time now, our Application Virtualization Explorer (AVE) product is now out with a new major release which supports App-V 5.0 packages (up to and including SP1, SP2 (beta) is not yet officially supported).

And yes, we did promise a beta a while ago, but then slightly changed our course and decided that it’s more important to get the App-V 5 support as quickly as possible to all of you who depend and love to use AVE in your daily job, and thus skipped the whole beta phase completely.

It has been a long and hard work to get it to this stage, but I’m sure you are going to love new AVE as we did little bit of “reimagination” of our own for the interface. As the new App-V 5.0 package departs so much from the old – legacy or classic, whichever way you want to put it – App-V packages we decided that it’s simply not possible to use the same layout and interface as AVE has used up until now to best represent App-V 5 package’s contents. To this end, we unified all the different views into one single content tree so that you can see both the filesystem and registry, as well as virtual applications and all the possible application extensions as one package. So no more tabbing back and forth the different aspects of a package (unless you want of course: you can now open any part of the content tree in a new tab, as many times as you want).

For the legacy App-V packages, you still have the existing familiar interface as before, as the App-V 5 package capabilities have been split into a separate executable and the old AVE functionality continues to live in a separate executable. Just be aware of that now for “new” AVE executable, you actually need to run it elevated (i.e. as administrator) since the underlying functionality do need to have enough privileges on the system to call some of the Windows APIs we need to use.

Licensing and editions

Another major change we decided to do with this release is to look back into all the feedback, and the use scenarios for the AVE that we have seen our customer to have. And we also did realize that lot of organisations out there might not be using the old App-V 4.X at all, but rather begin their app virtualization at the clean slate, and thus might not have need for all the 4.X specific stuff we have in the existing product.

To facilitate this, we made a decision to “split up” AVE into three different editions that are targeted better to varying audience we have:

1. Application Virtualization Explorer Professional – this is the product edition that we have had so far, and it still continues to exists as the most complete version of AVE in our offerings. It has the support for all the old App-V packages, just like before, and now with 3.0 release has gained a full App-V 5.0 support, meaning both reading, creating and writing App-V 5.0 packages.All of our existing AVE customers that have the active maintenance & support, will automatically be able to download and use this 3.0 version.
2. Application Virtualization Explorer – this is a new AVE edition that will support all of App-V 5.0 functionality that the Pro version has, but it will not have any of the “legacy” App-V support in it. In other words, if you are looking to do stuff only with the App-V 5.0 you probably would want to go with this edition.
3. Application Virtualization Explorer Express – this also a new edition of AVE, which is meant for reviewing and inspecting the App-V 5.0 packages only i.e. you cannot save out App-V packages and obviously there is no support for legacy App-V packages. Think of it as a read-only version of the AVE.

We do hope that having these three different editions makes it easier for you to acquire just the functionality you are interested in, and make our product more worthwhile for maybe those of you who have not purchased it before for whatever reason. Oh, and did I mention that the lower editions also have a little bit lower pricepoint as well?

In addition to expanding the variety of the version available, we have changed the licensing of AVE (all editions) back to the original per user licensing model. You may remember that originally AVE had per named user licensing terms, which were changed into per machine a couple of years ago. But since it seems to be the quite the norm to have user -based licensing in lots of software products nowadays, we also have switched AVE back into per user (but not named) licensing model. For those of you who have a license(s) under per machine licensing terms can continue to renew the maintenance as per machine and use the product in such manner, but all the new purchases of AVE, effective immediately, are licensed under per user licensing terms.

One, hopefully pleasant, side-effect of change to per user licensing term is that usage in Terminal Server / RDS is now covered by the per user model and there is no longer a need for a separate multi-user AVE license if you wish to run the product in your TS / Citrix / vWorkspace / whatever multi-user solution.

For the availability of these new product editions

As of now, if you go ahead and download the trial or purchase a version of AVE from our webpage, you will get the Professional edition. We will be updating and adding information about new AVE versions (AVE and AVE Express) as soon as possible, but in the meanwhile you can order manually from us by sending email to sales@gridmetric.com.

What do we support?

Given that the Microsoft has changed the supportability of the older Windows version since, well, when we started to sell AVE originally, it has been necessary for us to review the platform support for AVE as well. Some of the considerations for changing these has to do with API availability in different Windows versions; if it were just for us, we would have loved to continue to support even those old Windows versions (although you really should consider moving into Windows 7 if you still have 12 years old OS in use…).

To put it short and concretely, starting from AVE 3.0 the officially supported Windows versions are as follows:

• Minimum supported operating system is Windows 7 SP1; newest supported operating system Windows 8 / Server 2012.
• May work in older versions (“Classic AVE” all the way back to XP, 5.0 functionality in Vista), but we absolutely take no responsibility if you do run it like that
• .NET Framework minimum 2.0 SP2, but will work in any of the newer one
• Both 32-bit and 64-bit version of the previously mentioned operating systems are supported; and like discussed in this blog before, we do not support or recommend saving out App-V packages from mixed bitness environment (i.e. package bitness differs from OS bitness). Especially for VFS mappings, this may mess up with the references even in the new 5.0 packages.

Hopefully you all going to love the new AVE as we do, and of course we always welcome those suggestions, bug reports, and other feedback items so that we can make our products even better than they are now, and to serve you better!

Be seeing you!