View and ThinApp

[JoeShmoe]

Guys

Im new to VDI and although I have a good understanding of View and ThinApp seperately I need to understand if/how they work together

Osetnsibly we would like to be able to have a small number of gold image builds (i.e. officd worker, home worker, 3rd party etc). These builds would contain the OS and the base applications(i.e office, outlook etc)

Using linked clones/NetApp we'd like to deliver desktops based off these clones via View

We would then further subdivide the customer groupings by department. i.e.HR, Marketing, Payroll etc and stream apps onto each of these images based on the user profile (i.e attribtute(s) in AD). In this way the Marketing users get their apps streamed onto their VDI desktop, HR theirs etc

What I need to know is can this be done today and are the tools (View/ThinApp) welll enough intergrated to provide the configuration/management tools to make this possible? Is this good practice, is anyone doing it in production and how does it perform? How many ThinApp servers you need and what size?

Ideally we want to use linked clones to minimise the storage footrpint and not have to manage tens or hundreds of builds. What we want is standard builds deleivered off the storage array and specific apps streamed on top. Sounds great but are tools in place to allow us to do all this?

[Lee_Collison]

To give a simple answer do the products work together, yes. ThinApp will work a couple different ways you can have just a short cut to the executable and have it run from a file share, integrate it into your base image using a virtual registry and file structure and you can do app streaming, but this will defeat you purpose to keep master image small as streaming will download the blocks of data reqiured start the application and then blocks reqiured to run different components of the application.

ThinApp can run a lot of applications, but not all applications can or should be virtualized and they will degrade in performance. You can deploy the virtual applications a few ways, 3rd Party management programs (such as AppSense), Group Policies using VBScripts and by creating a shortcut on the desktop and putting all applications in a folder. That is just 3 ways, and I will bet many people have other ways of deploying the applications. By reading your post it seems you may be fimiliar with App-V from Microsoft, if that is so I would not really compare these two products as they really deliver the applications differently. App-V only does Application Streaming so you lose your thin storage.

Lee

[JoeShmoe]

Thanks Lee

Where you say the following

"integrate it into your

base image using a virtual registry and file structure and you can do

app streaming, but this will defeat you purpose to keep master image

small as streaming will download the blocks of data reqiured start the

application and then blocks reqiured to run different components of the

application"

Would this only affect the linked clones and not the master? Given it does I assume it does increase the size of the clone differential thus increasing the overall footprint? But then I guess you get the benefit of application virtualisation as opposed to mutliple larger master images?

If you run all apps off a central fileshare (i.e storage mount point) via a desktop folder, I assume this executes the app locally (i.e no local registry settings via local install). The concern I would have there is performance, same as with standard SBC?

Rgds

Paul N

[Jae_Ellers]

You've got the right idea. Find the most common denominator base image and then thinapp everything else you can.

With thinapp you can limit execution. So you can set the thinapp to only allow use by the a certain AD group. You can create an msi file as part of the thinapp build. With group policy you can turn around and push this msi file to the users of the AD group. This will then register the app and allow it to run properly on login.

Here are some how-to's on the AD deployment option

http://virtualfuture.info/2008/11/howto-deploy-thinapp-applications-with-active-directory/

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Group-Policy-Deploy-Applications.html

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302430

Another typical option is to deploy the apps with login scripts that are tailored to deliver the proper apps to the proper user groups.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

http://blog.mr-vm.com

http://www.vmprofessional.com

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

[JoeShmoe]

Thanks Jae

In your experience how does this impact the storage footprint on the linked clones?

[Jae_Ellers]

Everything you thinapp & distribute by other means, even just file shares & ACLs come out of the base image. If you run the thinapps from a fileshare and the .msi is only for thinreg and shortcuts you're talking a few kB/app for the deltas.

Since I posted AD links, here's some newish links using login scripts:

http://blogs.vmware.com/thinapp/2008/10/thinapp-thinreg.html

http://blogs.vmware.com/thinapp/2009/10/thinreg-recursive-folder-script.htm

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

http://blog.mr-vm.com

http://www.vmprofessional.com

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-