Enabling HTTP streaming in App-V 5.0

One thing I found that wasn't well documented for App-V 5.0 was how to enable and allow packages to be streamed over HTTP as opposed to SMB.  Turns out, it's a lot easier than I thought.  Whilst I continue to use SMB for streaming applications, in my initial testing, I didn't see any obvious improvement in streaming my packages using HTTP.  However, read on further to see how to allow HTTP streaming for App-V 5.0 packages.

In my current setup, I have 2 Windows 2012 App-V 5.0 servers.  Both are configured as a Management and Publishing server.  However, since I publish all of my applications into XenApp 6.5 using Powershell, the only purpose of these 2 servers is to provide a content share for the Shared Content Store for the client devices.  Content is accessed from the clients using a DFS Namespace.

Please leave your comments below if you've noticed any improvement in performance when using HTTP.


Enable HTTP Streaming

Open the IIS Management console from the server that is hosting the Content Store.

Right-click the 'Default Web Site' and select 'Add Virtual Directory...'.

Add and configure the virtual directory as required, using an account that has permissions to the physical path.  I didn't require any special permissions or account here, so this was pretty straight forward.

When complete, click on the newly created virtual directory.  In the right pane, double-click 'Directory Browsing' under IIS.  Enable directory browsing.

Go back to the root of the virtual directory.  Now double-click the 'MIME Types'.  Add a new MIME Type:

Recycle the 'Default Web Site' and that's it!  At the root of your newly created virtual directory/physical path, you should see a file 'web.config'.  From here you should be able to launch your browser and browse to http://appvserver/yourcontentstore.

When adding your App-V 5.0 package to the client device using powershell, instead of using the -path switch (which would usually require an SMB share), simply add the package with:

add-appvclientpackage -url "http://appvserver/yourcontentstore/package.appv"

Good luck!