As with inventory of regular applications, Asset Management has two strategies to discover and inventory virtual applications:

The Signature Scanner supports application virtualization from the virtual application images discovery, for example, a ThinApp executable or App-V.sft file, available on the Agent systems.

In the MDB, virtual application images are associated with software releases and patches that the image is known to contain. This information is used to provide a full inventory of both the virtual application images and virtual applications that are contained within them.

Because the end user creates virtual application images, the CA Content team cannot provide software definitions for recognizing virtual application images. Therefore, the DSM administrator has to create these virtual application image definitions. This process is automatic when a virtual application package is registered with the software delivery library. Recognition information for virtual application image definitions can also be automatically discovered when manually creating a custom definition.

Association of a virtual application image with its contents is an important manual task. When a virtual application image definition is created, the definition is placed in an unsealed state, and the content of the image is undefined. Associate the image with the regular releases through copying and pasting from the existing CA provided or custom-created software definitions. Wherever possible, use a CA provided software definition, as you can query for instances of a particular application regardless of the installation type.

Once the known software has been associated with the virtual application image, the image definition can be sealed. This action instantly updates the software inventory to reflect the new association between image and releases. Any computer with a discovered instance of the image displays the discovered virtual releases in its inventory.

If you want to modify the contents, the virtual application image definition can be unsealed again. When unsealed, the existing associations between image and releases remain active until the image definition is re-sealed or the changes are discarded.

The DSM administrator uses ThinApp to create a virtual application image of Microsoft Office.

If the virtual application is deployed using Software Delivery, the Virtual Application Package Registration Wizard is used. 

After registration, the administrator is prompted to create a virtual application image definition. If the Software Delivery library is not used, the administrator could use the Create New Virtual Application Image Definition dialog to register the virtual application image.

The DSM administrator chooses a suitable name for the image definition, such as “Microsoft-TA."

Next, the administrator browses the Software Definitions tree node to find the CA provided definitions for Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. Using copy-and-paste, these existing release definitions are associated with the newly created virtual application image definition. Once all the known contents have been associated with the virtual application image definition, the DSM administrator seals the image.

The software inventory for a system with the package provisioned would now contain a staged virtual application image of “Microsoft-TA,” and standalone virtual releases of Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel. The virtual releases are special instances of existing releases that you can query and report on beside regular instances of the same applications.

Add a new main container for ThinApp patches and upgrades to work. Do not replace the original.exe. When the original is run, newer containers are searched and the newest one is used instead, completely disregarding its own contents.

For example, given the following ThinApp packages:

Since the original ThinApp package always runs the latest upgrade (unless the upgrade packages are removed from that directory), the signature scan only detects the latest version of the ThinApp package.

As the end user packages the virtual applications, most virtual applications in an environment are known to the DSM administrator. So appropriate software definitions can be created. However, images can be missed, or introduced from a foreign source.

The Signature Scanner can report virtual application images that are discovered but do not match any known software definitions. This capability is disabled by default, enable this capability in the Signature Scanner configuration, which is accessible from the Collect Tasks node in the DSM Explorer.

Unknown virtual application images are reported in the Agent, Software, Unknown subnode under each computer that is listed in the DSM Explorer. The virtualization technology of the package is reported. If DSM administrator determines the discovered unknown virtual application image, a virtual application image definition for the image can be automatically created. If not, the DSM administrator can take corrective action to investigate the unknown package further.

The Heuristic Scanner can be configured to identify virtual application images and the virtual applications that are contained within them. The Heuristic Scanner automatically associates the virtual applications with the virtual application images that contain them.

You can select the virtual application technologies to detect in the Heuristic Scanner configuration dialog. Querying the App-V Client detects the Microsoft App-V applications. ThinApp Virtual Applications are detected during the Start menu and Desktop scan. If ThinApp heuristic detection is enabled, enable the Start menu and Desktop scans.

We recommend using the Signature Scanner to inventory virtual application images, unless you already use the Heuristic Scanner as the primary source of software inventory in your enterprise.