Enabling computer based targeting in App-V 5.0

Happy New Year! I hope you all had a perfect holiday season, I definitely did but now I think it's time for my first post of 2013....

Now this is something that I have hardly heard anyone really talk about with App-V 5.0; the fact that we can now target machines instead of users when publishing packages when using full infrastructure deployment.

In this post I am going to publish a media player (VLC Player) to my client by targeting the machine not the user.

First thing to do is run the following command after you have added a publishing server to your client:

Get-AppvPublishingServer

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You will notice there is a GlobalRefreshEnabled and GlobalRefreshOnLogon setting, these two settings control whether we perform a machine wide refresh and also if it is triggered at logon. There are also two other settings below that which can be used to set periodic refreshes also.

So to start machine targeting to we need to run the following command on the client to enable global refresh and to trigger it at logon:

Set-AppvPublishingServer -ServerId 1 -GlobalRefreshEnabled 1 -GlobalRefreshOnLogon 1

We should now see the new settings have been applied:

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Now in Active Directory Users and Computers we need to create a security group and add our desired computer object into it, I’ve created a group called App-V Computers:

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Next we need to publish the application to the group we just created:

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Finally we need to log off and back onto the client to trigger a refresh and we will find we now have VLC Player published:

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If we hit the publishing server URL as a user to will noticed that VLC doesn’t appear in the list of applications, this is of course because the package is published to the machine:

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One last thing to note is that if you change the global refresh settings back to false the applications published to the machine will remain on the client, even after logging off and back on. We need to unpublish the package on the management server while the settings are still enabled on the client to successfully remove the package.

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