The VRC Team (Ruben Spruijt, Sven Huisman and Jeroen van der Kamp) have just released their new VRC Phase IV whitepaper which is about the impact of application virtualization on VDI. A very interesting read, especially when you’re interested in the performance differences between the several application virtualization solutions.

Here a statement from the article:

Depending on the use case scenario, Project VRC discovered that this impact can be significant. Test results show that Application Virtualization has impact on the VDI user density, which can be decreased by 20% to 45% when Office 2007 is completely virtualized. This should be considered as a worst case scenario. When only a couple of specific (business) applications is virtualized, the session density decreases by only 3 to 12%. In practice the Application Virtualization overhead will be highly dependent on how often virtualized applications are started, and how much file IO and registry access they generate: specifically the creation of the virtualization ‘bubble’/environment for the application can have a significant overhead.

Link: BrianMadden.com

If you want to know how you get your Thinapp packages start even quicker, you should check out the new blog post of Peter Björk, who’s the ThinApp expert in EMEA. He describes which steps to take to optimize the virtual applications.

Link: ThinApp Blog

If you are working with VMware ThinApp, the most important thing is to understand the Isolation Modes with which the virtualized application can be configured. Peter Björk a VMware ThinApp expert from Sweden explains in a video how it works. Brilliant Peter!
 

Deploying the SAPGUI can be very time consuming in a large enterprise environment. It can even be worse if you’re using physical desktops, virtual desktops and terminal services because you may need to deploy it to different operating systems, what means that you have to package it several times. To make your live easier you could use VMware ThinApp and virtualize the application to get a single EXE file which can run isolated from the operating system and other applications for conflict-free execution on the different endpoint devices. After several month of QA testing SAP has now official support for packaging the SAPGUI with ThinApp. This support is documented in the SAP support note 66971.

You can get official support if you’re using the SAP GUI for Windows from version 7.20 patchlevel 5 and VMware ThinApp 4.6 or higher.

Here is some information from the note:

For the SAP GUI to work with Thinapp and Office 2003 you need to

change:

Search for “VirtualizeExternalOutOfProcessCOM=0 ” and uncomment it

by removing the “;” at the beginning of the entry.

o For the SAP GUI to work with Thinapp and Office 2007 (2010) you

need to change three parameters in the “package.ini” file found in

the project folder

a) Search for the saplogon.exe entry and add an additional line with

“ForcedVirtualLoadPaths=%ProgramFilesDir%\Microsoft

Office\Office12\PPCORE.DLL”

For Office 2010 the entry looks like this:

“ForcedVirtualLoadPaths=%ProgramFilesDir%\Microsoft

Office\Office14\PPCORE.DLL”

b) Search for the saplgpad.exe entry and add an additional line with

“ForcedVirtualLoadPaths=%ProgramFilesDir%\Microsoft

Office\Office12\PPCORE.DLL”

For Office 2010 the entry looks like this:

“ForcedVirtualLoadPaths=%ProgramFilesDir%\Microsoft

Office\Office14\PPCORE.DLL”

c) Search for “VirtualizeExternalOutOfProcessCOM=0 ” and uncomment it

by removing the “;” at the beginning of the entry.

Rebuild the package with “build.bat”

The usage of SAP GUI for Windows in conjunction with other virtualization

products like Microsoft App-V (Softgrid) is currently not supported.

If you need more information about virtualizing the SAP GUI with ThinApp please check the support note 66971.

Via: VMware blogs (Virtualization for SAP solutions)

Peter Rudolf from Mightycare has released a new tool Explorer tool for compiled ThinApp packages. with that tool you can look into the ThinApp packages, register them or install and uninstall the packages on your computer. The first version has the following features.

* Information about a package
* Register / Unregister ThinApp Packages
* Install / Uninstall ThinApp Packages
* Shortcut list
* View virtual Registry entry
* View virtual Filesystem
* View options (package.ini) for the ThinApp package
* Retrieve icon

Link: Mightycare

There is also a new release of VMware’s application virtualization software ThinApp. The new maintenance release 4.6.1 includes more than 160 fixes for known issues. Additionally there are enhancements for Office 2010. With those changes it’s possible to virtualize Office 2010 without any need of separate agents, components or deployment kits. Read the rest of this entry »

VMware just released a new version of ThinApp full of great features. My favourite is the new ThinApp Converter 1.0 but read the full article to learn more.

Read the rest of this entry »

Web applications should be platform independent because their are standards like HTML which can be interpreted by any browser out there. They should, but many web applications are not true web applications. They use components like ActiveX or special plug-ins for the browser. Siebel is one good example for that. Loads of companies invested in web applications in the last few years and many of them are tight connected to a dedicated browser. But what if a browser goes EOL, like we see with Internet Explorer 6 today? Internet Explorer 6 can’t be installed natively on Windows 7, but many web applications still depends on it. For a company that means that they can’t move to new client operating systems, have to redesign the applications or find another way to run the legacy web application. On the VMware ThinApp blog there was an article published two days ago, which brings some videos showing how IE6 can run on Windows 7 with a Tech Preview of Thinapp.

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in my Desktop Specialist days I’ve created several beginner videos which explain the different functions in ThinApp. For example they are about AppLink, Entry Points, ThinReg, sbmerge and also about the isolation modes and the virtual file system. Unfortunately they are only available in the German language but if someone speaks it, please enjoy. You’ll find the videos in my Vimeo ThinApp group at: http://www.vimeo.com/groups/thinapp

My colleague Raymond van’t Hag wrote an article about the ThinApp basics on his blog bright-streams.com. If you haven’t worked with ThinApp yet, you should definitely check his article. By the way bright-streams.com is Raymond’s blog, dedicated to VMware View & ThinApp.