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!

[Arne Johansen]

Just logged in to the Broadcom forum for the first time in years - a bit of nostalgia before we move completely away from Altiris to Workspace ONE UEM next year.
We've been using Altiris since the XP days, so it feels like the end of an era (and makes me feel old :P).
Hard to believe it's also been almost a decade since SEV was EOL.
Reading through the old SEV threads really brings back memories from when packaging, virtualization, and deployment were still fun - and felt cutting-edge.

SEV had something special: simple and elegant, especially alongside Altiris. Many of us spent years creating SWV packages.
To be fair, SEV wasn't always more stable than App-V - newer .NET versions and Office 2013/2016 pushed it hard, and it was often a challenge near the end for us.

Our migration path from SEV was App-V. We actually got it working really well with Altiris - even fully automated packaging in the end. But App-V's isolation model always felt like fighting the system just to let apps talk to each other.
Then came the usual Microsoft rollercoaster: App-V EOL set for Jan 2023, pushed to Apr 2026, and later quietly un-EOLed.

MSIX was supposed to be the next big thing - but honestly, it turned out even worse, imo. Without Tim Mangan keeping it alive with PSF, it would've had zero traction.

We're now moving to Workspace ONE and App Volumes to reuse our existing VDI packages - now that App Volumes finally supports physical machines as well.

SEV was easy to package with, but far from effortless. Like every virtualization platform, there was plenty to fix by hand - and as always, real help came mostly from this forum and the people you knew.
The real problem with all virtualization platforms - SEV, App-V, MSIX, even App Volumes - is the lack of real-world examples. Everyone protects their "unique" know-how, so too few practical solutions ever get shared.

Looking back, this forum and these tools shaped a big part of my professional journey.
We solved problems here that few outside this community ever understood - and that made it both challenging and rewarding.

R.I.P. SEV - one of the better ideas Symantec ever had.
R.I.P. Symantec.
It was fun while it lasted. See you on the flipside - and best of luck to everyone in the future. :)
And before someone says "this isn't an airport, you don't need to announce your departure" - fair enough, but after two decades of Altiris, it felt wrong to just ghost out. 😉

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