I’ve been playing with View 4 and a Windows 7 non-persistent desktop pool for the last month (between a lot of other things). Combined with roaming profiles and user folder redirection it seems to be a good solution for users with a well defined set of applications. The issue always comes with the applications outside the base build that are used by a small subset of the user population. Being able to provide non”standard build” applications to specific users and still have them use the non-persistent desktop simplified image management.
On the APAC Virtualisation podcast this week Appsense were almost talking about an upcoming product that will address user installable applications. But for now the best solution seems to be to use application virtualisation or streaming for less widely used applications.
Being a VMware kind of guy I have also been playing with ThinApp, which works well for applications on Windows XP, but doesn’t yet fully support Windows 7. I already have a packaged version of Office 2007 which I use to deliver courses, it’s inside a TrueCrypt container on a USB key that I take to the classroom with me.
This post on the VMware View-Point blog (linked from the ThinApp blog) makes interesting reading about why agentless application virtualisation is great and says that they are close to releasing ThinApp 4.5 which will support Windows 7 as well as being faster than ThinApp 4.o.
I have a list of applications to virtualise with ThinApp once Windows 7 support arrives, to make available in the non-persistent desktop. If it works well for me it could have the side benefit of making laptop rebuilds so much simpler, particularly if my main applications live inside that TrueCrypt container on my laptop.
On a side note we’re waiting for ThinApp 4.5, View 4.x and vSphere 4.x. Is it just me or does it sound like there might be some important releases before VMWorld 2010?
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