I wanted to  evaluate originally  ThinInstall  (now newly renamed by VMware to ThinApp) only. ThinApp requires as much as possible clean OS before capturing apps that should be virtualized. Since I didn’t want to boot my VM/install clean one I gave 2nd chance to MojoPac (a great idea, but half year ago MojoPac was crashing my entire Laptotp when trying to open files  with QGIS 10..) . This time MojoPac 2.0.0.0 positively suprised me. First of all I still don’t know how they technicaly do this. Could be by new windows session, but that was not proven…Back to my test. I decided to install fresh MojoPac ainto my WD external HDD and there I have installed trial version of VMWare ThinApp. I have choosen to virtualize complex caliber installation  application Bentley view v8i. All worked fine to my suprise. MojoPac was able to run Bently View as well as ThinApp successfully virtualised it. The footprint of the exe and dat file was huge (no compression)..1.3GB.  virtualised Bently view was able to run on host as well in MojoPac. The last test I have tried was to run both in MojoPac – Bently View installed reguraly as well as virtualised…just worked. To summarize this, I believe that MojoPac is a great way (if stable and improving) and directly competting with ThinApp from VMWare (which is not free).

On page http://www.xpnet.com/appvirt2008.pdf you migh find quite interesting  benchmark of current application virtualizations technologies of Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) 4.5; VMware ThinApp 4.0.1; Citrix XenApp 5; and Symantec Software Virtualization Solution (SVS) Pro 2.1.  In the report ThinApp is a winner.:[quoted from the research ]:

” Application virtualization solutions that use an embedded virtualization model (ThinApp) deliver the best application throughput. Only ThinApp delivers the combination of excellent raw performance plus low overall CPU utilization, making it the better solution for organizations seeking to minimize the performance “hit” typically associated with virtualization technology. “

2 Bently View v8i running inside MojoPac - 1 installed, 2nd virtualized by ThinApp (and both virtualized by MojoPac)

Here are my numbers of lunching Bently View v8i (all are measured by 4th run and untill dialog for selecting dgn file will appear):

run from installation in MojoPac: 2.8 s
run from ThinApp virtualization (uncompressed) in MojoPac: 4.9 s
run from ThinApp in host: 4.9 s
run MojoPac + Bently View from host : 14.8 s

this would give MojoPac 1.75x faster than default ThinApp virtualized application (regardless whether ThinInstall runs inside or outside MojoPac). But if compared to time from host to virtualized applicaiton run, than winner is ThinApp (3x faster) since there is no overhead with virtualisation of whole desktop environment.  (I  personally prefer – with regard to coherence introduced by Parallels – ThinApp way for smooth integration with current desktop)