Share this post!

Meeting with a colleague earlier this week, I discovered that a significant rebranding/realignment occurred with one of our ecosystem partners, AppSense. Similar to Citrix’s acquisition of Xen, requiring a rebranding of all core products, our friends over at AppSense have finalized their branding initiative to classify three core product families, DesktopNow (Formerly AppSense Management Suite / AMS family includes Environment Manager, Application Manager, and Performance Manager), DataNow (Corporate/secured Dropbox solution), and MobileNow (Mobile Device Management / Mobile Application Management / Enterprise AppStore). While I won’t go into detail on what each of these product families will cover, I felt it was worth a review on the DesktopNow suite, since I hadn’t deployed the products for at least a year. Along with the rebranding, I have been encouraged to see if the overall deployment process has been significantly improved, removing many of the complications prone with 7.x.

With the understanding that my hands-on use of AMS has not included any 8.x releases, my hope is that this first glance/unboxing post is helpful, providing a guided installation, configuration and Environment Manager examples for those not experienced with AppSense. For this initial post, I won’t be covering database availability, load balancing, or any of the scalability tiers that would be required for a production deployment. This is simply to provide a guided installation for Proof of Concept VDI/SBC/Migration environments.

For easy reading, I’ve broken this blog post into four parts:

Part 1: AppSense DesktopNow Single Server Installation < YOU ARE HERE!
Part 2: AppSense DesktopNow Single Server Configuration
Part 3: Importing the Base Configuration
Part 4: Deploying the Client Communications Agent

After downloading the DesktopNow.zip file from AppSense, I’ll start the installation by launching Setup.exe:

010

Click Next:

020

Enter User Information and click Next:

030

Accept the license agreement and click Next:

040

Check the box to evaluate the product and click Next:

050

Select Enterprise and click Next:

060

Leave Management Center, Personalization Server, and Application Rights Discovery selected and click Next:

070

Select Remote SQL Instance and click Next:

080

Click Install All to automate the majority of the prerequisite installation:

090

Validate that all prerequisites except IIS completed successfully.

100

Launch Server Manager and select the Roles section. Click Add Roles:

110

Click Next:

120

Select Web Server (IIS) and click Next:

130

Click Next:

140

Under Application Development, select ASP.NET:

151

Click Add Required Role Services:

152

Scroll down and under Management Tools -> IIS 6 Management Compatibility check IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility. Once checked, click Next:

153

Click Install:

154

Click Close:

155

In Server Manager, select Features. Click Add Features:

156

Check Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS):

157

Click Add Required Role Services:

158

Click Next:

159

Click Next:

160

Click Next:

161

Click Install:

162

Click Close:

163

Back on the AppSense installer screen, click Refresh once IIS and BITS is installed:

164

Validate that all prerequisites have registered as Installed and click Next:

165

Leave the default installation path selected and click Next:

200

Review the installation summary and click Install:

210

Monitor the installation process. After several minutes, the installation should be complete:

220

Click Launch Management Server Configuration once the install has finished:

230

To continue reading, please choose from the following:

Part 1: AppSense DesktopNow Single Server Installation < YOU ARE HERE!
Part 2: AppSense DesktopNow Single Server Configuration
Part 3: Importing the Base Configuration
Part 4: Deploying the Client Communications Agent

If you have any questions, comments, or just want to leave feedback, please do so below. Thanks for reading!

–youngtech

Share this post!