Cool! The iQurious / visionapp Experience is now free

Written on Aug 14 2007 Filed under: Third Party Software, Industry Buzz 10,971 views, 2 comments

by Brian Madden

At BriForum in Chicago this past April, Rick Dehlinger told me about a project he was working on called the “iQurious Experience.” (iQurious is the kooky name of Rick’s company. But Rick’s a kooky guy, so it’s all good.) Based on visionapp’s Platform Management Suite, the “Experience” is a product that automatically builds a complete working Presentation Server 4.5 environment in about 20 minutes.

The general idea is that you download the tool, point it towards your Windows Server 2003 media, your Citrix Presentation Server media, and a blank server (or VM). Then use a wizard to answer a few questions, click “go,” and stand back.

The Experience creates a single-server PS 4.5 install (including Web Interface) with everything set up and ready to go.

In terms of what this gives you, it’s similar to what Citrix is now offering with their Evaluation Virtual Appliance (EVA) lab (that set of pre-built PS 4.5 Virtual Server disk images you can download). But the Citrix EVA and the iQurious / visionapp Experience each have their own pros and cons. The Citrix EVA is literally ready to power on the instant you get it, but you have to download 10GB and it only runs on MS Virtual Server with at least 2GB of RAM. The iQurious / visionapp experience builds everything on a single server, but you can customize what you get (via the wizard) and you can use it with VMware or on a physical server.

The iQurious / visionapp experience used to cost $100, but now it’s available for free from visionapp’s website. It’s being branded as the “visionapp Experience 2007, inspired by iQurious.” (I think that’s just a really fancy way of saying this was Rick’s idea, built with visionapp’s provisioning technology.)

Comments

Kurt Moody wrote Truly inspired

on 08-14-2007 3:04 PM

The iQurious “inspired” Experience is pretty slick, if you haven’t played with it yet I highly recommend that you do.  As Brian said the Evaluation Virtual Appliance that we have made available has it’s merit from a basic evaluation perspective, but if you are looking for a more customized proof of concept class installer the Experience is an excellent option.   My personal  favorite benefit of the iQurious/VisionApp Experience is that after answering a very small set of questions I am free to do other work as the Experience chugs along through the various installers that make up a complete CPS Enterprise install.

Good Stuff.

Kurt Moody

Citrix Systems

Dan Shappir wrote The importance of speed and ease

on 08-14-2007 5:15 PM

Being able to quickly and easily set up a demo / evaluation environment is indeed very important. It can make the difference between a prospective customer and rejection. This has been our approach with PowerTerm WebConnect from the get-go. As I showed in a live demo on stage at the latest Briforum, it is possible to go all the way from a clean Windows Terminal Server to remotely accessing published applications using PowerTerm WebConnect in 10 minutes. This includes the time required for the installation script. You can see a recording of such a demo at: http://www.ericom.com/webinar_sbc.asp. And the cool thing is that the result is not a crippled demo environment - it is a fully functioning production installation.

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