---
# source: src/content/solutions/en/omnissa/horizon/omnissa-app-volumes.md
# route:  /en/solutions/omnissa/horizon/omnissa-app-volumes/
title: App Volumes
tags: [modern-workplace, virtualization]
vendors: [omnissa]
summary: Applications arrive as containers that attach at logon instead of being baked into the image. One master image instead of one per department.
photoNeed: "A Horizon or Workspace ONE session in use: a virtual desktop on a real screen, or a thin client on a real desk"
stub: false
draft: false
kind: product
addon: false
vendorName: Omnissa App Volumes
status: current
practice: >
  Draft, not yet reviewed. The work in an App Volumes project is packaging, not installing. We budget for the applications that resist it, because every estate has four or five, and finding them in week eight is what makes the project late.
practiceReview: true
---

## What it is

App Volumes delivers applications as virtual containers rather than as installations. A
package holds one application or several. It is assigned to a person or to a machine, and
it is there the moment they sign in, without having been installed into the image.

## How it works

The App Volumes Manager is the console and the bookkeeping: it holds the packages and the
writable volumes, it talks to vCenter for the virtual machines, and it keeps every
assignment in a SQL database.

At logon the packages assigned to that person are attached to their profile and the
applications in them are immediately available. If the person has a writable volume, that
attaches too, and it is where their own data and settings live. At logoff both detach and
nothing of them remains on the machine.

## What it is for

Cutting the number of master images. An estate that installs every application into the
image ends up with an image per department, and then maintains all of them on patch
Tuesday. With App Volumes there is one image and a catalogue of packages, and updating an
application means updating a package rather than rebuilding a desktop.

The second use is licensing. An application that only forty people are licensed for is
assigned to forty people, instead of sitting installed on nine hundred desktops and being
counted there.

## What to watch

Not every application packages cleanly. Drivers, kernel-level components and anything that
insists on writing to the same path at install time are the usual arguments. Find those
before the design, not after the pilot: the ones that resist are also the ones the business
cannot do without.