If you are interested in learning more about VMware ThinApp –  whether you just got started with application virtualization or you’ve got a particular app you are packaging — join us at the VMware ThinApp Lounge. This online event, held the first Tuesday of each month at 9am Pacific time, is a great opportunity to talk to members of the product team and learn more about ThinApp. (Tell your boss it’s free consulting if he thinks you should be alphabetizing your TPS reports instead.)

I wanted to get more of an idea of what the ThinApp Lounge was all about, so I sat down with VMware’s own Dean Flaming, host of the Lounge, to find out what goes on there. The next Lounge is tomorrow, Tuesday, October 6, at 9am PDT (-7 UCT). Join Dean each month in the Lounge — and say hi for me!

Q. Who should attend the ThinApp Lounge webinar?
A. Anyone interested in getting an introduction to ThinApp, what it is, how it works, and a demonstration of it.  Questions are welcome!

Q. How long have we been doing the ThinApp Lounge?  Why did we start?
A. VMware has had the ThinApp Lounge since the acquisition of Thinstall and the release of ThinApp.  Originally it was designed as a presentation of a technically specific ThinApp topic with Q&A but was revamped about 4 months ago to become more of an introductory piece to assist both customers and partners, as well as others, in spreading the word on ThinApp.  We started the ThinApp Lounge to give people a means to come find out about ThinApp at a time and place of their choosing without having to interact with additional personnel if they didn’t desire to as we found many IT people like to have the option of scheduling when they wish to learn something as well as learn about something without being hampered by sales types.

Q. How hard is it to get started with ThinApp?
A. It’s extremely easy to get started with ThinApp.  In fact, a two-part video exists on YouTube and elsewhere showing ThinApp from Start to Finish in 20 minutes from ground up!  http://t3chnot3s.blogspot.com/2009/04/vmware-thinapp-from-start-to-finish-in.html

Q. Do I need to have a ThinApp Problem to join the ThinApp Lounge or will there be other content presented?
A. No problems necessary!  Only a desire to learn a little about ThinApp as a product is needed.  Currently the ThinApp Lounge is defined to deliver ThinApp Introductory webinars but in the near future as demand grows, we look to have some intermediate level webinars as well (such as “How to use AppLink”, “How to use AppSync”, etc.).

Q. Any good stories or “Ah-ha!” moments from the Lounge?
A. One of my favorite things is seeing the light turn on in peoples eyes when they start to realize just how malleable ThinApp really is and the options it presents to customers.  Two areas I commonly see this around are Security and App Packaging.

With Security, the insecurities of a legacy application that is still required often turn out to be the bane of the customer’s issues as that application’s needs end up driving what the customer can and cannot do – especially when compliance requirements come into play.  When that legacy application is wrapped within ThinApp, it’s insecurities start to become insignificant – and depending upon the app and environment,  almost to the point of not needing updates to fix the insecurities of the app.  This is because the insecurities of the app are contained within the “Virtual Bubble” and are not allowed outside that “virtual bubble” onto the native system.

With App Packaging, it’s always fun to show how one can create a ThinApp package which has no executables in it whatsoever – but rather, executes a natively installed application through the “virtual bubble”.  This “virtual bubble” could have additional settings, configurations, plugins, add-ons, or other items which allow the natively installed application to operate entirely differently than it is configured to on the native system.

Q. In a past life, you were a Citrix expert – how should people experienced in Citrix & Terminal Services deployments be thinking about ThinApp?
A. I spent more than 10 years as a Citrix/Microsoft consultant and solutions provider, developing solutions to customers issues and needs.  In that time, I found many customers implementing Citrix solutions often had one or more applications which wouldn’t play nicely with other applications needed by all employees.  This resulted in the creation of a separate Citrix or Terminal Server SILO where that specific app was housed.  Setting up this SILO always took additional time, effort, and money to do as it was just a pain to get that pushed to everyone who needed it.  ThinApp solves this issue with extreme ease by virtualizing the conflicting components or applications so that one can reduce their Citrix footprint.  I’m usually countered on this point by Citrix’s Application Isolation Environment, but I can safely say (and most likely anyone who has worked with an AIE will attest to this) that AIEs are hard to configure properly, still require the application to be installed, and do not virtualize the application but rather just isolate it’s calls via a hidden redirect.  With ThinApp I can also build completely vanilla Terminal Servers and drop in the applications on a per user basis as they login – very similar to a VDI scenario.

Since SBC (Citrix and Terminal Server), VDI, and Application Virtualization solutions can not only work together but can all solve some of the same or similar issues – even though they are all completely different technologies – it is very relevant to ask oneself what the issues really are and what the solutions are accomplishing with regards to business needs.

With ThinApp, we aim to solve software issues with a software solution – and we believe ThinApp is the best, most powerful, and most simplistic application virtualization product on the market. 

Week 40 already, before you know it it is christmas again. This week we had some excellent posts again, but probably the most exciting thing that happened this week was the VMTN Community Podcast with Vaughn Stewart, Chad Sakac, Andy Banta, Eric Schott and Adam Carter. The vGods of iSCSI. If you didn’t join last wednesday you can find it via Vaughn’s article here. Here’s this weeks top 5:

• John Arrasjid – VCDX Tips from VCDX 001 John Arrasjid
  Practice what you preach and learn from others. Architects listen first. Don’t assume the answer before the discussion starts! Scenarios for VCDX defenses test journey to solution, not necessarily the final answer. Whiteboard, talk and ask questions. Troubleshooting scenarios – think of the architecture and implementation approach to resolution. Logs, design, SC commands.
• Eric Gray – PowerShell Prevents Datastore Emergencies
  When a datastore is about to run out of space, the fastest resolution may be to simply migrate virtual disks to another datastore. VMware Storage VMotion provides that capability with zero downtime for VMs and no disruption to end users. Fortunately, PowerCLI can perform this feat with ease, thanks to the Move-VM cmdlet.
• Chad Sakac – HOWTO: Use Site Recovery Manager and Linked Clones together
  VMware and EMC collaborated on a project recently with a customer, and that project included documenting the detail on why this occurs, and also the workaround.

  If you’re interested – read on!

  The key is that the ADAM and View SQL databases actually store the vCenter instance name (in the form of a Moref ID – also known as the MOID), which after SRM failover has changed, which breaks the replica/linked clone relationship. Further, the parent location is explicitly in the vmdk descriptor.

  You can (without doing anything fancy), you can deploy new desktop pools, but can’t access existing linked clones, or recompose or refresh.

• Massimo Re Ferre’ – Ad Hoc Designed Infrastructures: do they still make sense?
  Simply put, IT is comprised of two major building blocks: Functional Requirements and Non-Functional Requirements. This is how Wikipedia defines them:

  Functional Requirements: “A functional requirement defines a function of a software system or its component. A function is described as a set of inputs, the behavior, and outputs (see also software)”

  Non Functional Requirement: “A non-functional requirement is a requirement that specifies criteria that can be used to judge the operation of a system, rather than specific behaviors. This should be contrasted with functional requirements that define specific behavior or functions”.

  So the question I have been thinking about for the last few years is simple: in a virtualization context, do I really need – during a customer engagement – to go through a deep level analysis of the applications currently being deployed or soon to be deployed? In addition, defining the new virtualized infrastructure to support the applications mentioned, do I need to analyze all those applications one-by-one (from a Non Functional Requirement perspective) or can I treat them as a whole? You can depict the answer from the following two slides which are included in a set of charts I created back in 2007.

• Duncan Epping – What’s that ALUA exactly?
  This “problem” has been solved with vSphere. VMware vSphere is aware of
  what the most optimal path is to the LUN. In other words VMware knows
  which processor owns which LUNs and sends traffic preferably directly
  to the owner. If the optimized path to a LUN is dead an unoptimized
  path will be selected and within the array the I/O will be directed via
  an interconnect to the owner again. The pathing policy MRU also takes
  optimized / unoptimized paths into account. Whenever there’s no
  optimized path available MRU will use an unoptimized path; when an
  optimized path returns MRU will switch back to the optimized path. Cool
  huh!?!

There’s an interesting event that has been traveling under the radar until now, but it’s a unique opportunity to interact with virtualization experts from both Intel and VMware, so pay attention to this blip on your screen.

What: the Intel Xeon Processor Live Chat
When: Tuesday, October 6, 10am-12noon PDT (-7 UTC)
Where: Intel’s Open Port community site

Who will be there? This is where it really gets interesting. I’m still assembling the official biographies of the various attendees, but here’s what I know about the attendees on the VMware side:

• Scott Drummonds. Scott Drummonds is responsible for VMware’s
  technical marketing performance team which is tasked with
  application-based performance analysis and evangelization of VMware’s
  performance leadership.  Scott joined VMware from Intel Corporation,
  where he led Intel’s business applications desktop benchmarking group. 
  Scott received his bachelors of science from Auburn University in
  computer engineering and his masters of science from the University of
  Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in electrical engineering, focusing on
  digital test and diagnosis. Scott can be found on Twitter as @drummonds and on his new blog Pivot Point.

• Michael Adams. Michael Adams is Senior Product Marketing Manager at
  VMware in the Server Business Unit. His role at VMware includes
  handling all aspects of product marketing for the company’s flagship
  offering known as VMware vSphere™. Prior to VMware, Mike worked at
  Symantec/Veritas for seven years as product marketing manager for the
  Veritas NetBackup product family and at Giga Information Group (now
  Forrester Research) as an open storage market analyst. Mike holds a
  bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Michigan. Mike is the editor of the vSphere Blog.

• Ronald Kwan. Ronald Kwan is a Technical Alliance Manager at VMware supporting their strategic Storage and Server partners. Ronald has over 18 years of experience in the IT industry.  Prior to joining VMware, he was a Sr. Systems Engineer at StorageTek and Sun Microsystems architecting and designing infrastructure solutions.

• Jeff Weiss. Jeff came to VMware in 2007, an 11 year veteran in Software and Hardware technical sales by working for companies like Symantec and Sun Microsytems. His specialties have included datacenter continuity and disaster recovery solutions, software infrastructure identity management as well as email security and archiving tools. Over the years, he has architected and sold complex business solutions into a wide array of both public and private accounts, from commercial to government, healthcare to education. Prior to working in sales, he was a networking and datacenter manager at Hughes Aircraft for 14 years.

• Rupert Schultes. Rupert Schultes has been managing the Intel Alliance at VMware for the last 4 years. Prior to VMware he held several technical marketing, product management and alliance positions at Intel, ATI and Elsa AG in EMEA and Phoenix Technologies in the US.

Last year, Intel got hundreds of questions over this two hour chat, and they weren’t even talking about virtualization! This is the first time they’ve invited a partner to come in and join them on these chats, so we hope we can help Intel provide an interesting and valuable resource for you. Come by this event and talk about anything related to Intel and VMware – performance, business value, technical questions — whatever’s on your mind. There is no need to register in advance.

VMware Virtualization Gives SMBs Affordable Disaster Recovery;
Ability to Cut IT Costs Up to 50 Percent. PALO ALTO, Calif. – September 30, 2009 – VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced that its efforts to deliver increased value to small and medium businesses (SMB) have resulted in thousands of customers worldwide using VMware vSphere™ solutions, including significant deployments in key SMB markets, such as education, financial services, healthcare, IT consulting and manufacturing.
“We’re running numerous mission-critical applications on VMware vSphere™ and we expect to save between…

IT Process Institute Identifies Specific Procedures and Controls that Optimize Benefits and Reduce Risks at Different Levels of Maturity. ISLANDIA, N.Y. and PALO ALTO, Calif., September 29, 2009 – CA and VMware today announced the results of a study the companies sponsored investigating the impact of virtualization on data center operations. The study, conducted by the IT Process Institute (ITPI) in December 2008, identifies specific procedures and controls that should be considered to reduce risk as organizations virtualize business-critical systems and when production virtualization objectives beyond server consolidation evolve to high availability, disaster recovery, and dynamic resource…