App-V -vs- ThinApp

The issue of whether to go App-V or ThinApp has always been a difficult question to answer, and should be based on your own investigations through a POC of both products. Both products offer excellent virtualisation capabilities and I can't fault either for that, it's more a case of how Microsoft and VMWare implement it.

I was introduced to application virtualization when I saw a demo of SVS at the end of 2005 and it made perfect sense that that is the way to go. But I didn't like the product itself, so I thought to myself if Altiris can do this, there must be someone else doing it. It was nearly a whole year before I actually followed up the technology and that was when Google introduced me to Softicity.

When Microsoft bought Softricity back in 2006 it brought application virtualization to the attention of a wider audience, not just Citrix administrators. It made people like me who work at the top end of enterprise environments have a proper look at what virtualisation could do for us, now that it had the support and resources of the worlds largest software development company, namley Microsoft.

We started a POC of SoftGrid v4.1 and straight away could see some major cost savings when compared to the traditional MSI packaging environment, but is SoftGrid the best product for us? As it turns out, yes it is. The only way to find that out was to actually get the leading vendors in the app virtualization space in and try their offerings.

We completed a POC of ThinApp with the help of one of their freindly engineers from Norway. The product worked well, it did what it said on the tin and did it well. We were using v4.x , I can't remember the exact version, but AppLink has just been released. Everything was going well and looked a good contender.

So why didn't we go with ThinApp? Well being able to virtualize the applications is just part of the story, it's no good if you can't get them to the users. VMWare offer no management of package distribution, they expect that login script,GPO's are run to handle that. They even allow the creation of an MSI to ease integration with your current ESD system (e.g. SMS 2003, SCCM 2007), something that App-V does as well I should add.

Management of the applications was the clincher for us, one major piece of functionality within App-V was the 'Refresh Applications' feature, this allows to users to be added to Active Directory package groups and dynamically get their new applications without the need of logging off and on again, something that's must for a user base that doesn't like logging out at the end of the day (they need forcing every few weeks).

So that was it App-V it is for us, that was the criteria we had, you may have differnet requirements, but unless you try them how are going know .

Welcome

Welcome everybody and thanks for reading my new blog on everything 'Virtualization'. In this blog I will be posting my views and thoughts on everything from virtual desktops to virtual applications and anything else that can be virtualized.