Vmware and AdminStudio

[CChong]

Am very, very new to AdminStudio. Also, very intimidated by it but have to learn it.

I am told that the BEST way to publish applications to MSI is to use VMWARE workstation and use it instead of another PC. Is this the recommended method? What advantages does VMware provide?

[DavidLock]

You'll be fine PearlyShells learning AdminStudio is fun. You could always book a place on one of ourtraining courses.

VMware is a great tool. It allows you to quickly try out an install, troubleshoot things in the registry, snapshot a package and then revert back to a clean OS within ten seconds. Whereas if you had to reinstall or ghost a physical machine everytime you want to go back to a clean image it would waste much more time. So VMWare is a great tool for testing out msi installations.

[TsungH]

I concur with David.

If money isn't a factor, it wouldn't be a bad idea to invest on a separate machine with ghost capability, in addition to VM. It's rare, I have run into unexplained application runtime errors in VM environment, whereas the application runs perfectly in a "true" machine freshly ghosted.

[CChong]

I am very encouraged. Our company has AdminStudio ver5 and VMWARE ver3. I'm doing a lot of reading and have successfully installed both on a Dell GX200/128mb RAM/hdd0 is 20gb and hdd1 is 100gb. I've configured VMware for Windows 2000 Pro, Bridged in typical install. Still not sure what is the best configuration for Vmware but I'm told that the cleaner it is the better so I took typical. Now, I'm going to try to package a simple application and see how it goes. Some of the applications that the company is interested in are not the usual, off-the-shelf: Query Analyzer, QMF for Windows, DB2, PermitsPlus. Some are already MSI applications so I'm not sure how this will work. QMF for Windows needs DB2 to work so the package has to combine both.

But, for a start, I think I'll try something small like WinZip or Adobe Acrobat 6.

One question: It appears that the focus in VMware is O/S. Does it matter how I configure it for hardware? I'm thinking that the package probably doesn't matter with regard to VMware hardware setup and it's really the O/s that makes a difference as to how it will package. Is that correct?

one other question: I understand that some of this in AdminStudio will be available in Windows 2003 server. We intend to move to Windows 2003 servers. How will AdminStudio benefit us if we do 2003? Anyone reviewed the packaging side of Windows 2003 yet?

[MHagen]

PearlyShells,

Thank you for your question regarding AdminStudio 5.0 and Windows 2003.

I'm not fully sure what you're asking, as to what "benefits" AdminStudio will give you with Windows 2003. AdminStudio should provide the same benefits and features that it provides for any other operating system with which it is compatible.

I did a quick check of our online Knowledge Base and forum questions, and there doesn't appear to be any major issues regarding AdminStudio 5.0 and Windows 2003. So, in short, you should be OK to upgrade to Windows 2003.

Let us know if you have any other questions.

[CChong]

Actually, what I meant was that I've been told that Windows 2003 servers come already equipped with a Microsoft Packaging Tool that is very similar to InstallShield. So, my interest is "should we use the packaging tool in Windows 2003 server" or " should we continue to use InstallShield AdminStudio". So, the focus is what benefits are there to using (a) Windows 2003 packaging tool and (b) what are the benefits of continuing to use AdminStudio over Windows 2003 packaging. Obviously, the question hopes to determine sizeable benefits for AdminStudio and purchase of later updates to it. The big benefit for Windows 2003 packaging, obviously, is that it is part of the O/S and we don't need to purchase upgrades for it. BUT, and this is a big BUT, one wonders how much benefit we'll see with packaging thru Windows 2003.