I don’t get chance to use ThinApp (Thinstall) as much as I used to, but I’ve had a couple of conversations where people have asked me for the real benefits and downsides.

I’m not one for re-inventing the wheel, so here are links to the excellent articles written by 4sysops.

Advantages of Application Virtualisation

Disadvantages of Application Virtualisation

Outlines are below:

Advantages

• Application retirement simplified
• No installation required
• No more application conflicts
• No registry and system bloat
• Multiple runtime environments
• Multiple versions of the same application
• Deploy apps on unmanaged computers
• Simplified OS deployment
• Operating system independent

Disadvantages

• A new complexity layer
• Vendor might deny support
• Problematic apps
• Shell integration
• Bandwidth requirements
• Costs

As you can see valid points for both sides of the argument, I personally believe that the benefits far outweigh the negatives. The main stumbling block I see is that companies may struggle to justify allocating resource to this task alone.

Using a few different articles I managed to add a security banner at the request of a customer recently. The first article discusses which files to customise, the second article is the Message of the Day editor tool how to and finally Jase McCarty’s post that covered the whole process from start to finish.

Nice.

Duncan Epping of yellowbricks has written many excellent articles in his time, but I have recently needed to check the free disk space of VMFS volumes at regular intervals and Duncan came to the rescue.

Check this article for a script that will check the disk space of all VMFS volumes and format the results into a nice table. Then check this post to find out how to email it to yourself every day at 10am.

Really excellent stuff.