We are now working with Liquidware and in particular their application isolation technology call FlexApp.
We have spent some time working the LiquidWare engineering team and put their technology to the test. BTW: Working with the LiquidWare team was great (thank you Thomas!)
The FlexApp isolation or layering technology is not like Microsoft’s App-V or MSIX as it effectively installs on the target machine as a file/directory/registry layer rather than a bubble.
LiquidWare describes their technology with the following:
“Liquidware’s FlexApp delivers applications across any Windows desktop environment without installing them. Apps follow the user from the data center or the cloud, even if they’ve logged onto a new desktop. FlexApp can be leveraged to quickly deploy applications with the need to modify base images.”
As part of this research, we focused on two components of the FlexApp technology:
- Application compatibility
- Conversion automation
This posting will focus on the compatibility profile of LiquidWare’s FlexApp technology.
We were able to convert a large number of applications to the FlexApp format using the UI interface. The Readiness team was then able to test those resultant packages against our 300,000 algorithmic assessments and extensive runtime tests.
As you can see from this chart, the FlexApp technology has the best application compatibility profile of all of the current virtualisation and layering vendors.
The only concern is that kernel mode drivers are not supported – but given the nature of the technology, this is completely understandable and expected.
Given these great compatibility statistics, the Readiness team has created a small of number of FlexApp Assessment checks to ensure that all applications are the right fit for this technology. This means that Readiness can now automatically assess and test for LiquidWare’s FlexApp as part of any application portfolio assessment effort.
You can find out more about FlexApp here.
Our next posting on Liquidware will focus on the automation engine – with the goal of integrating LiquidWare’s layering technology into the Readiness automated conversion engine.
