Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Desktop

VMware buys Thinstall…

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Damn what a surprise this is… I never expected that VMware would buy Thinstall. But it seems they’re really going to compete with Microsoft(Softgrid) and Citrix(Presentation Server). I do believe that Thinstall is one of the most promising Application Virtualization tools around. I’ve seen a couple of demos by my colleague Edwin Friesen of Thinstallguru.com and was amazed by the simplicity and effectiveness.

With VDI, the range of Virtual Appliances and Thinstall VMware is definitely on for the challenge. After the speculation of Virtualization.info I dug into Fastscale and it wouldn’t surprise me if they are next on the list.

OVF Tool and Nostalgia

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I was trying to convert the great Nostalgia Virtual Appliance to a VMware Workstation compatible format but just copying didn’t work. I did the following to get this thing running directly under VMware Workstation 6.02:

  • I exported the Nostalgia VM from VirtualCenter 2.5 into an OVF format.
  • Copied the OVF files to my PC(d:\ovftools).
  • Downloaded the OVF Tool and unzipped it into: d:\ovftools
  • Ran the following command cause the damn ovf batch file didn’t work: C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_05\bin\java” -jar d:\ovftool\ovftool.jar d:\ovftool\nostalgia.ovf d:\nostalgia\ (The batchfile was complaining about the fact that the JAVA_Home environment variable wasn’t set, but it actually was…)
  • Now it’s converted to a Workstation 6 compatible VM, just open it and start it.

Let’s see if I can fix that sound in the next couple of days…

Update:
Arne just posted a solution to the JAVA_Home environment error… And I just discovered that the fact that the ovftool.bat doesn’t work is because of the long file names within dos. You’ll have to set the environment variable with an 8.3 notation: JAVA_HOME = C:\Progra~1\Java\jre1.5.0_05\
No quotes or what so ever because VMware already used quotes in the batch file for the if exist statement.