Application Virtulisation (App-V, Xen-App or that VMWare thingy)

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Hi

Im looking for relative user experiance / thought's about deploying application virtulisation.
I am considering the above (but may consider others).

Im looking to do a basic evaluation of the above products in the next cupple of months.

Has anyone recently evaluated the above and has any insights that they would wish to share? any nightmare stories? any wonder stories? Has it made life easyer / more complex.

Basicaly im thinking about a network of 10,000 plus PC's accross a cupple of hundred sites with varying networks, and several hundred different applications (no joke)....


Thanks Denver

 

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I guess the first thing to ask is what your existing virtualisation platform is? next I would ask whether you have a deployment mechanism in place to manage and deploy these apps (System Center Configuration Manager for both App-V and ThinApp, Citrix for the Xen apps).

I would also ask if you have Microsoft Software Assurance because as I understand it App-V is part of the MDOP bundle and if you don't have SA then you're not getting App-V.

Out of the three you have mentioned I have experience with ThinApp (which used to be Thininstall before VMware got their hands on it) and I have to admit that it's a really nice product, 4.6 is fairly easy to use (I created a ThinApp of the VMware Client which was fairly easy). As far as backend infrastructure is concerned, ThinApp is pretty much it whereas with the MS and Citrix offerings you are going to need streaming servers. Also for the ThinApp environment there are lots of cookbooks with instructions on what's required to create each packaged app. Overall it's a really nice package.

One final word, expect something new with regards to ThinApp in the not too distance future as VMware are holding VMworld Las Vegas this week, so if it's not announced this week I would expect it will be announced at VMworld Copenhagen.

 

Hi Simon, In my theoretical world... (its real really)
VMWare is the Dogs, however i have experiance with it, Citrix XenServer and Hyper-V, im happy using all three, but would probibly stick to VMWare (big sites) / Hyper-V (small sites) for this project.

Im aware of the Software Assurance issue (it might not be a bad idea anyway!)

Ill keep my eyes on the the VMWare Option though im not sure it will be in the right price point at the moment.

Thanks
Denver

 

We have just started delving into the world of App-V so we can have multiple versions of Office running and I am impressed so far. It was fairly easy to set up and make the packages (so far). We are using a management server and haven't integrated with SCCM yet. Package creation is the usual capture install type scenario and then tweak after if need be.

 

We (1000 machines sized network) are at a similar stage with App-V, seems simple enough to setup and sequence, had one or two gotchas which took a bit of research, which I hopefully documented somewhere, we've only trialled Firefox and our helpdesk system (Richmond) so far (time seems to always be against us) and both seemed to run ok, once we get Windows 7 fully rolled out the aim is to completely App-V our applications layer or get as close as we can, thus simplifying our imaging & rollout strategy.

 

We would also like to expand the amount of software we do as well but like you time is a factor although it will be well worth it for time saved later on .

 

I've played a little bit with App-V, but it seemed easy enough to deply.

I have no experince on the alternatives, but Microsoft has with Citrix some kind of partnership for delivering virtualized applications using their products as well if App-V alone is not enough. Supposedly quite good (overheard it being discussed by a customer).

 

Thanks Folks

Think im going to go ahead and set up a SCCM 2012 / App-V test domain and see how i get on with it.
Ill take a look at Citrix's offering a little later on. Though im looking in the education domain so it will be much cheaper to run with the Microsoft option if it gets the job done.

Thanks
Denver