Thinapp for VI admins - Communities Roundtable #15 podcast
Today on the Roundtable, our guest was Travis Sales to talk about VMware Thinapp. The Roundtable crew are all experienced VI admins (and user moderators on the VMware Communities), so they know their way around ESX and VC, but nobody on the call today had used Thinapp. So this was a good opportunity to cut through straight to the technology ask Travis how we should be approaching application virtualization.
As always, listen by clicking on the right or by downloading the (compressed & normalized & ID3) mp3. (1:03).
- Most interesting factoid: Thinstall got their start putting games into a 'virtual bubble' to prevent piracy.
- Most unsurprising answer: Best practices for deploying Thinapp-packaged applications? It depends.
- Site I didn't know existed: Thindownload
Other links you can use:
- VMware Thinapp product page
- Thinapp Data sheet
- Thinapp Reviewer's guide
- Thinapp Documentation
- Thinapp Community
- Professional Services offerings
- Download info
- 60-day Thinapp eval
- Thinstall and WINE - blog entry comparing the two by Thinstall founder Jonathan Clark
- Podcast from Brian Madden: A Conversation with VMware's Ed Albanese and Jonathan Clark about Thinstall/ThinApp
- Leave the Laptop Behind - long article from Randall Kennedy at InfoWorld both explaining application virtualization as well as taking you through his setup:
Using a combination of ThinApp and VMware Workstation 6.5 Beta, I was able to construct a comprehensive mobile workspace that served my requirements for productivity, development, and online research. Included in the mix was Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 (the Express Editions), Firefox 3.01, and Windows Live Writer ...
All of these applications were stored together in a single folder structure on a 250GB Western Digital portable USB hard disk. Total space consumed: 2.5GB. (Try that with a VM!) Launching the applications was a simple matter of navigating to the correct folder and double-clicking the program's icon. No other setup was required, and the initial application load time was uniformly excellent – certainly faster than launching a full-blown VM and light-years ahead of installing the applications locally.
Next week, we are having our first ever call-in "Ask the Experts" show. You can join us live on the call, on the chat, or send in your question via email or private message in the Communities. More info in a bit, but mark off on your calendar next Wednesday, September 3, at a new time: Noon Pacific/ 3pm Eastern / 8pm British. We also plan to do at least one live show at VMworld.
I've used this when it was in Beta and without looking to in depth managed to virtualise my companies most complicated trading application and ran it from a USB key. Much to the amazement of everyone I showed, I then used the new executable to execute the app over Citrix without having to install it on Citrix.
I also used it to run Office 2007 alongside office 2000 for a while on my own PC. few small issues with it knowing which outlook version to use but amazed at what was possible without having to dig to deeply into the documentation.
I can see big uses for this product in the future.
Posted by: C Stewart | August 28, 2008 at 06:17 AM