VCAP-DTA – Objective 5.1 – Create a ThinApp Repository

There are two objectives in this section which are around setting up the ThinApp repository on the network to be used by the View infrastructure to distribute applications from. It’s telling that this topic has several tools references to it, so we’re going outside the confines of the View Administration guide really for the first time.

Again it’s difficult to imagine within the confines of a tight three hour exam that you will be asked to package up anything other than a relatively simple application, but be prepared for the odd curve ball. Ultimately as long as you understand the fundamentals, you can go a long way to scoring points on this objective, even if you don’t get it completely right.

• Create and configure a ThinApp repository – The creation of the ThinApp repository is done from within View Administrator. Go to View Configuration, ThinApp Configuration, Add Repository then enter in a Display Name and Share Path (e.g. \\server\thinapp\repo) and add a Description if you like.
  
   
• Configure a ThinApp repository for fault tolerance using DFS or similar tools – In order to create a DFS share, you need to have the File Services role enabled on the server. DFS is basically a network share made up of chunks of storage from different servers. You reach the DFS share by using the path \\domain\\dfsroot, so for example \\beckett.local\dfs-share. DFS also has file replication technology built in you can use for further resilience. I can’t really think you’ll be asked to do too much with DFS in the exam as much of this is based on the Windows server itself. What you will probably need to know is how to point a ThinApp repository at a DFS share (so use the example syntax above). This is pretty much all that is listed in the ThinApp reference materials.