About six months back when VMware had a deal going where if you purchased VMware Workstation you also received a license for VMware ThinApp Starter Bundle I decided to take the plunge and made the purchase (it was also at the time when workstation had a $50 discount going on).
Before now I hadn’t really had any reason to install ThinApp but recently I had decided to try my hand at packaging up the vSphere client using ThinApp (like VMware have done with the 4.1 release but my aim was to do it with the 4.1u1 release).
Last night I decided to install ThinApp on a dedicated ThinApp machine (Windows XP SP3) but ran into an issue when it came to actually licensing the application.
As you can see in the above image you can see that I have the serials for both ThinApp Packager Starter Bundle and the ThinApp client, you would imagine that this shouldn’t pose much of an issue when you try to actually install and use the application but as the following images show there is an issue.
As you can see with these images here, when it came time to enter the serial I had an issue with the key not working as it said that the key wasn’t valid for ThinApp Starter Edition.
On the VMware download site I went to the ThinApp 4.6.1 Enterprise Download link and discovered that I was able to download the product (usually if you’re not licensed for the product you can’t download it, at least that’s what’s happened to me in the past when I have tried downloading additional products like the Nexus 1000v module to play with). Once I had downloaded the small exe file (34mb) I then installed the product to see what would actually happen if I tried using my existing license.
Here you can see that installing ThinApp Enterprise Edition was successful (much to my surprise). I have to admit that at the time I haven’t actually run ThinApp yet to see what happens but the fact that it accepted the license leads me to believe that the product will work just fine.
As for the reason for installing ThinApp in the first place (vSphere client) I am aiming to get this recorded soon with the idea that the video will be launched here and over on my new site (My-TechVideos.com).
