Now that SEV is EOL, which virtualization product will you be migrating to?

[SK]

Hello all,

 

As you may or may not alread know, Symantec have decided to EOL their SEV products:- https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.INFO4060.html

 

As SEV customers will receive hotfixes until January 2018 and support until July 2018, three choices will need to be made between now and then: 

 

1.  Do you continue to use SEV after July 2018 as it provides the functionality you require and company policy allows EOL products to remain in place? 

2.  Do you switch to a different virtualization vendor?  If so, which vendor? 

3.  Do you revert back to deploying base installations? 

 

If you choose option 2, how will you migrate from SWV to that vendor? 

Obvously, for those cutomers that have used a package product that first creates a package project before a required package is created (MSI, App-V, SWV, Thin-App) this should be quite easy as you can simply load the relevant project and then compile a SWV/Thin-App package. 

[Edward Tippelt]

Realistically, the only choice is going to be Microsoft. One of the reasons why Symantec have canned the product is that Microsoft are making ongoing changes to their Windows 10 operating system which would mean having to rewrite the filter driver each time. Those of you on Windows 10 build 1607 should soon have a version of SWV that actually works on this build, but Microsoft have made Symantec aware of their long term plans for Win 10 and this makes the development overheads for SWV too high.  It would be fair to assume that Microsoft wants the virtualisation space all to itself and is making sure that third parties can only keep up if they have enough dev funds available for what might not be a big market in real terms.  It's nothing we haven't seen before from Microsoft.

[Laurence Shackleton]

Sad news indeed. Thanks for posting or I wouldn't have known.

Since our licenses for this product were included with Altiris/CMS that's yet another blow to the value of the suite. No Remote control and now no Software Virtualization - and since they splintered off the non-SMP based Deployment Server product to GSS we're now paying extra for that too.

Looks like Numecent / Software2 etc are forging on - I'd say those are the better way forward over MS's own tools - at least until their tech catches up. Their offerings are certainly costly however.

 

[A.J]

R.I.P.

Very good productstack that have served us well for several years now, will be deeply missed.

And thanks for the info, i know RES and other integrators have similar problems with Windows 10 1607.

If the LTSB (Long time Service branch) had been a recommended offering from MS, at least big company’s would have had a decent choice moving over to 10 with all those xpf packages, and more time adapting over to new technology like appv.

The new ms patching regime is good from a security perspective, but messy for testing programs, but feature upgrades is something I would like to choose when I want.

Bottom line, repackaging and testing several 100 applications will be costly no matter what technology your company choose to replace SEV with.

Moreover, I really would like to know the reason that ms still does not release more than office as an appv package. 

 

 

[Joseph_Carson]

That is a sad day.  Correct, agree with EdT that the only choice moving forward is microsoft for this however it still lacks much of the capabilities that SEV had.

 

[Fernando Romano]

"This is a sad day.". I couldn't agree more with these quotes.

And one more solution leaving the ITMS.

Barcode Solution, PcAnywhere and now SEV. Where Altiris will be in five years from now?

Obviously I will give a try to few new virtualization tools, but probably, I think most of all will move on to App-V by Microsoft because it's easy to use, integrate, deploy, etc.

I wish you luck, guys!