Virtualization, It’s Not Just for Operating Systems Anymore

Application virtualization is a technology that is starting to pick up steam. It decouples applications from the operating system and enables them to run as network services. This simplifies image management of the desktop and ensures that there is no degradation of the host operating system or other applications. There are several companies with varying approaches to virtualizing applications, including Microsoft’s SoftGrid Application Virtualization (or as it will be known in version 4.5 “Microsoft Application Virtualization”), Thinstall, and Altiris SVS. Let’s take a minute to dig a little deeper on some of the application virtualization basics.

In standard OS environments, applications install their settings onto the host operating system, hard-coding the entire system to fit that application's needs. Other applications' settings can be overwritten, possibly causing them to malfunction or break. In most situations, when application conflicts were found during regression testing, either each conflicting application would have to be separated on their own operating system or the applications would not be able to be used.

With application virtualization, each application brings down its own set of configurations on-demand, and executes so that only it sees its own settings. This allows applications that normally have issues to be run side by side without conflicting with each other.

Machine virtualization provides an abstraction layer between the hardware and the operating system that's running on top of it. It also allows managing and simultaneously operating multiple environments on a single machine. Application virtualization takes this concept and moves it up the logical stack. In fact, many clients use both application and machine virtualization to maximize server and IT management efficiencies. The abstraction layer created by application virtualization lies between the operating system and the applications that run within it. The power of application virtualization is that it allows applications to be delivered dynamically as services that can be added or removed without installation.

All of this sounds pretty wonderful, but what is the catch? Most products are focused only on their deployed applications and cannot replace features such as imaging and inventorying that are present in ZENworks or SMS/SCCM. They are currently viewed as complementary software to those products. Additionally, you will need to repackage any applications that you want to run as virtualized applications. For many organizations, this could be a very large undertaking.