Posts Tagged ‘Application Virtualisation’

Virtualising Office 2007 In 30 Steps

Friday, August 8th, 2008

Brian Madden has created an article that walks you through using Microsoft’s SoftGrid product to sequence or virtualise Microsoft Office 2007 in 30 easy to follow steps.

It is worth a read even if you don’t own SoftGrid as the concepts can be applied to other Application Virtualisation products. I used the section about tweaking the virtual registry (step 24in ThinApp and it worked a treat.

Read it here. Thanks Brian!!

Application Virtualisation - Advantages & Disadvantages

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

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.

Xenocode Updates

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

Xenocode have released a new version of their Virtual Application Studio and it has some really great features now to rival VMware’s ThinApp including:

  • Deploy complex apps in a single executable
  • Stream with no infrastructure changes
  • Execute .NET and Java with no runtime
  • Run legacy applications on Vista
  • Execute on locked-down desktops
  • Completely user mode implementation
  • Leverage existing management tools (more…)

Essential Application Virtualisation Comparison Chart

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

Not much to say about this document apart from essential reading. Anybody remotely interested in application virtualisation needs to read this document.

Thanks to the guys at virtualfuture.info

Thinstall, XenApp… Ah, of course, ThinApp!

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

I stumbled across this interesting article over at the c1tr1xguru blog that talks about VMware’s fairly recent Thinstall acquisition undergoing a name change.

Thinstall has been in beta since VMware purchased Thinstall back in January this year under the guise of the Project North Star beta project.  This is now going to be called ThinApp when release to the general public.

It does seem like an interesting name given Citrix’s recent rebranding of Presentation Server to become XenApp, but I’m sure this never entered the head of VMware.