CloudVolumes Extends Management and Performance for VMware ThinApp

CloudVolumes, the company that virtualizes everything above the OS, today announced a partnership with VMware to enhance ThinApp management and performance. CloudVolumes’ new ThinApp Edition integrates with ThinApp technology to leverage any VMware vSphere datastore and make individual ThinApp packages instantly available to users logging in to virtual desktops, Citrix XenApp, or Microsoft RDSH, in real-time and on demand through a service catalog. The combined solution and benefits are explained in details in a newly published VMware whitepaper .
VMware ThinApp is designed to deliver virtualized instances of applications in order to help IT administrators with software migration to a newer operating system and eliminate specific conflicts and compatibility issues. The integration with CloudVolumes will enhance the ease of management, speed of deployment, and performance of applications, all while leveraging customers’ existing storage infrastructures. It will also allow IT to scale up without sacrificing the benefits of application virtualization and centralized management.
“Since the acquisition of Thinstall by VMware, ThinApp customers have asked for centralized management of ThinApps,” said Henrik Rosendahl, the former CEO of Thinstall and former director of application virtualization at VMware. “CloudVolumes not only delivers centralized management, but also significantly boosts the application performance by eliminating the need for network streaming. Furthermore, by using CloudVolumes full Desktop Edition, customers can support user-installed applications as well as deploy and manage applications that cannot otherwise be virtualized.”
CloudVolumes has broad applicability beyond just enhancing ThinApp. CloudVolumes enables a hybrid-persistence model: the desktop pool is non-persistent, saving on hardware and storage; however, the user has a persistent desktop experience with their profile and user-installed apps managed and delivered separately. CloudVolumes can also deliver complex server applications such as databases, Web servers, and middleware. These virtualized applications and data are placed into one or more virtual disks (VMDK and VHD files), which are dynamically attached and shared across all virtual machines. This approach provides the fastest and most scalable way to deliver applications to any virtualized datacenter or cloud.
CloudVolumes’ shared volumes significantly decreases I/O traffic from the network and improve application performance, while maintaining isolation between the applications and the operating system. This turnkey solution provides predictability in performance and removes the network as the limiting factor, allowing companies to leverage high-speed and SSD-based storage.
To ensure simplicity, IT can utilize its existing ThinApp packages with CloudVolumes ThinApp Edition. It complements ThinApp’s dense application environment by dramatically enhancing the responsiveness of applications for end users. It enables IT to scale while leveraging existing infrastructure without sacrificing the benefits of application virtualization and centralized management.
Key features of CloudVolumes ThinApp Edition include:
“We are extremely happy to extend our partnership with VMware and provide a complementary solution to ThinApp which allows users to enjoy a completely persistent and native desktop experience, while IT continues to manage the environment as non-persistent and centralized, including automated entitlement and analytics,” said Raj Parekh, CEO, CloudVolumes. “CloudVolumes ThinApp Edition will significantly reduce the time required to provision, maintain, or decommission ThinApp packages.
Pricing and availability
CloudVolumes ThinApp Edition is currently available as a freemium product, with and without support. For more information, visit http://www.cloudvolumes.com/products/thinapp-edition.