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ThinApped VMware View Clients – a Zero-install solution

Looking around the various VDI forums, there's usually some discussion of VDI clients that don't require any additional plug-ins, add-ons or installation of any kind on the end user device – a zero-install solution. While this discussion is usually focused on access via web browsers, I've recently been playing with ThinApp to deliver a zero-install VMware View client.

At the risk of this sounding overly like a sales pitch, I was pretty impressed by the elegance of this solution; I was able to easily pull my thinApped View client from the web, network share and USB drive and launch a Remote Desktop using PCoIP on pretty much any Windows device with a simple double click. Maybe not as quick as double clicking on Firefox, but pretty close.

Are there any downsides? I found application launch time to be a little longer than achieved with a traditionally installed client. Also, USB redirection and virtual printing aren't supported, but then these problems plague web clients too. The main benefit I see is that I get away from the install/update hassles, but keep the performance, bandwidth and user experience benefits associated with PCoIP.

As a final note, I would add that I found the process associated with creating a ThinApped version of the View Client to be extremely straightforward and it took me less than 15 minutes.