VM-Aware » Application Virtualisation

Virtualising Office 2007 In 30 Steps

Paul Shannon — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 11:39:51 +0000

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

Paul Shannon — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 10:30:20 +0000

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

Paul Shannon — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:19:29 +0000

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

Download a fully functional trial version here. I really love it and it is significantly cheaper than ThinApp or at least it is significantly cheaper than the old Thinstall prices.

Essential Application Virtualisation Comparison Chart

Paul Shannon — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:31:01 +0000

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!

Paul Shannon — Thu, 15 May 2008 12:48:28 +0000

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.