I came across a great post on Adam Hall’s blog talking about aspects of application virtualisation. I’ve only come across this recently to tell you the truth, with the rollout of SoftGrid here at IOMG, and have been pretty impressed with what the package achieves.
So what is application virtualisation you may ask? It’s a process by which applications are encapsulated and segregated away from the operating system they are running on. The main advantage of doing this is that it keeps applications and their OS requirements totally seperate and allows you to run applications that may previously have conflicted with one another, or the underlying OS. It also helps an enterprise desktop strategy in that applications are more mobile and a standard desktop is now a possibility. This, coupled with the fact that operating systems are now protected from the applications that run on them, is a pretty compelling story for anyone responsible for more than just a few machines.
Anyway, back to Adam’s post, he raises some great questions that this strategy needs answering to guarantee the success of the implementation. I’m going to quote them here:
Can the applications be virtualised. Some things just do not virtualise well. The answer to this will vary dependent on the solution. Softgrid bubbles cannot talk to each other directly, only through the OS. So multiple applications may need to be in the same bubble, which may well defeat the purpose of the Virtualisation in the first place.
Where do the applications need to run from. On the LAN? Over the Internet? Running under Terminal Services? (Softgrid is as close as I have seen to being a silver bullet for applications under Terminal Services)
What investment does the customer have in their application packaging and deployment solutions. What is the migration path and cost.
Some great thoughts there Adam, keep ’em coming!