App-V: On Current Recommended Practices and how they Evolve . . . (a.k.a. - about that PVAD)

This morning, I was on a joint webinar with Flexera (https://learn.flexerasoftware.com/AR-WBNR-Microsoft-AppV-Best-Practices) on App-V best practices and I reminded many on the call why I always prefer to use the term "current recommended practices" as opposed to "best practices." Today I explained that I know longer insist on avoiding the use of the PVAD (Primary Virtual Application Directory) and sticking to strictly VFS sequences. True, I did make this recommendation nearly a year and a half ago (https://blogs.technet.com/b/gladiatormsft/archive/2014/08/25/app-v-5-installing-to-the-pvad-don-t-do-it-yes-i-said-it.aspx ) however, at the time, App-V 5.0 Service Pack 2 required VFS sequencing to ensure connection group convergence as well as a few others mentioned in the blog post. With the addition of the merged roots feature as well as the correction of issues with the convergence of environment variables, there is no longer any major reason to force packages to VFS sequences for the purposes of making connection groups work.

Some Applications Need the PVAD for Proper Functionality

As App-V 5.0 SP3 was released over a year ago and App-V 5.1 was released a few months back, it has become known that due to issues with pathing limits and other issues related to the App-V VFS subsystem and its native NTFS integration, there are some applications which still require the use of the PVAD. By this, I mean to actually expose the Primary Virtual Application Directory (PVAD) within the App-V sequencer and selecting that same directory during the installation of the application during the monitoring phase of the sequencer. You will find many examples of applications within the App-V community. While the number of applications requiring the use of the PVAD is a relatively small percentage, the applications that are affected represent a significant footprint that involve nearly every major enterprise organization's application library. For example, Office 2010 is one of those applications. In fact, if you were to look at the virtual file system structure of the App-V package generated by the ODT (Office Deployment Tool) you would also find that the flattened Office 2013 and Office 2016 packages are actually PVAD sequences.