Best Practices for Packaging Applications

You can follow some best practices while packaging applications on virtual machines used for the packaging process.

• Ensure that you have local administrator rights for packaging.
• Perform only one packaging process in each virtual machine. However, you can perform packaging on multiple virtual machines at the same time.
• If the packaging virtual machine has a service pack, such as Service Pack 1, ensure that all virtual machines delivering applications are at the same or later service pack level.
• (Optional) For best performance, include application dependencies (such as Java, or .NET) in the same Package as the application.
• The packaging system must not have antivirus agents, VMware Horizon with View agent, or any other filter driver applications installed or enabled.
• When packaging an application, always install the application for all users.

  This practice ensures that the application is installed under Program Files rather than a single user profile and application icons are created in the All Users folder.

• Do not deliver applications that require a common SID to a pool or to virtual machines that have had Sysprep run on them.

  These cases must be used with VMware Horizon with View Composer or other similar OS cloning technologies that preserve the machine SID.

  Some application requirements and licensing models require that the virtual machine shares a common SID with the production virtual machine.

• Virtual machines used for packaging must have a snapshot dedicated to the state of a user's desktop.

  After packaging, virtual machines must have a clean snapshot that was made directly following the App Volumes agent installation. After the completion of packaging, the virtual machine reverts to a clean state, that is, the snapshot.