When to ThinApp???

[MHGoff]

Hi.

I have a question regarding designing a  linked clone system.  If all of your desktops are going to have an application, say Office for example, which is the preferred method of setup?  Should I install office on the "parent" for all of the linked clones, or should I create a thin app for office?  In my own mind I would think for performance I would want the application in the parent, is this wrong?  I have several applications that all of my users will need, so I am thinking of just adding them to the parent instead of making thin apps for these applications.  What are the pros and cons of this?

Thanks,

Mike

[Pankaj11]

Hi,

I think you should ThinApp your applicaitons, if you want to leverage the benefits like :

- separating applications from the Guest OS and

- isolating them from each other.

- in VMware View there is proper integration and management through the View Manager console for ThinApped applications.

ThinApp applications can be packaged and stored on a network file share in what we call a repository and these repositories can be imported into View Manager. Once there, applications can be assigned to selected individual desktops or designated pools of desktops.

Also, you can think about whether you want to stream them or not i.e. you can choose to have them streamed via a "shortcut" or have the ThinApp’ed EXE/MSI deployed locally onto the VM. (ThinApp gives you more options as compared to a native installation). The MSI method gives a much better performance then running from a network share as it is right there on the target desktop.

Hope this helps.

Thanks.

[Squidly_Man]

That is a great question.  And there are usually two schools of thoughts: Virtualize just your pain points or virtualize all apps in hopes of making a truly dynamic desktop where the apps are modular.

There is nothing wrong with either method except when one or the other causes you more work than necessary to achieve your IT goals.

I am more of a "virtualize your pain points" kind of person so I typically recommend virtualizing apps to resolve the following:

App Conflicts, App Deployment and App Update issues/struggles, App Support issues, and when legacy apps such as IE6 are needed on newer systems.

Outside of these 5 areas, virtualization of applications (in my opinion) tends to be more work and effort than the gain received...so having a valid business case for virtualizing the app is key.  If the app is something which everyone gets (such as an Office suite), is it easier to place this in the Desktop Gold image?  Especially when MS Office gets its updates through the same mechanisms as the Windows OS?

Many have found it's often enough to just solve the painful app issues, allowing the move of IT resources to more pressing matters and obtaining a flexible AND stable environment since there are no longer app conflicts between native and virtual apps and updates are not as big an issue.

My 2 cents...