| VMware Acquires Thinstall! What now? |
| Tuesday, 15 January 2008 by Michel Roth | |
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The clientless approach is absolutely unique and really separates Thinstall from other application virtualization vendors. But is it all that good? Well no, at least not in my opinion. As a relative new technology, I've noticed that many application virtualization solutions really lack enterprise-readiness. For example, the management tools usually are not mature enough, integration with other tools and systems is lacking and deployment to branch offices tends to be a pain. Thinstall is no different. In fact, from what I have seen from Thinstall is that they lack even a management console. All you can do is create a "Thinstalled" package, then dive into a sub-folder of the Thinstall program directory and create a executable. That's it. If you need to get the executable to a user or something like that, you're on your own. I think has been very intentional about not creating a management infrastructure. Their vision really has been about the "easy application virtualization approach" that is of course dramatically illustrated by Thinstalled applications being nothing more than a single executable. However, now Thinstall is going to go mainstream with VMware, I think that it can no longer do without decent management tools that are enterprise-ready. So how does this acquisition affect the Application Delivery industry? Well, I think it will put some wheels into motion at Microsoft, or rather I hope it puts some wheels into motion at Microsoft. Here's why: VDI is coming. Whether Microsoft likes it or not. Microsoft, on several occasions, has said that VDI is something that they do not expect to really take off any time soon, I think they were wrong. And I think they know now that they were wrong. So now you have VMware with this acquisition with a very complete portfolio. They have the hypervisor, they have the broker and now they also have application virtualization. What does Microsoft have? Well, they have the most sophisticated application virtualization solution and they hope to have their Hyper-V ready in Q2 of this year... but they will still be lacking a VDI broker. This is something pretty important if you want to take a piece of the VDI pie. So how will Microsoft react? Chances could very will be that they will buy a VDI broker (Leostream being the obvious candidate if not that they are Linux based) or perhaps even create one themselves. Or will they position Citrix as the preferred solution in another "joint-effort" against VMware? In any case, I'm sure we will see some increased attention to VDI from Microsoft in the near future. What do you think? |
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Maybe last sentence should be a joint-effort against VMware insted of against themselves?
Haha.... dumb typo. You're right! I've changed it.
Thanks.
>> management tools usually are not mature enough, integration with other tools and systems is lacking and deployment to branch offices
What type of management tools would you envision with a concept like Thinstall ? Apart for version control associated with the build process, wouldn't this be similar to provisioning/deploying standard applications - stream or copy the file ?
Well, it's indeed about the concept. I think the concept kind of needs to change now that it is going to be brought to VMware's enterprise customers. I do not think enterprises are looking to work with just copying a file. I think they want to know what client has which version or if they can distribute it with their existing ESD (seamless) integration. The version control also is a very good example.