Since the arrival of application virtualization I have been fairly supportive of the concept. It can really bring some benefits and solve some peoples integration issues.

Application Virtualization is not however the solution to all your problems and may even introduce new difficulties into your environment.

What is good about application virtualization?

Lets consider the old method of deploying terminal services or Citrix Metaframe. When you first installed your farm you probably siloed the applications. You had different applications on different servers. This was done probably for two reasons. Firstly, it just seemed like a good idea or secondly the applications relied on a component or components that were incompatible.

I’ve seen this many times. For instance, one application needs one version of MDAC and a different application needs another. Java was also another reason.

But if you wanted two versions of Microsoft Office, or any other product for that matter, you had to install it on another machine. You would end up wasting money and resources maintaining the extra hardware.

Virtualization, including application virtualization has provided more options. Now you can install multiple versions of the same software, deploy applications and leave almost no foot print on the end device. Better still the performance of the streamed application is very close to the native performance of the application.

One such application is the use of multiple java versions for applications. How can you provide separate web applications with different versions of java?

Symantec has recently released an article on how to do this using the Altiris SVS product suite.

Virtualizing Java with Symantec Workspace Virtualization

If you develop and use various java applications but don’t want to run multiple servers or virtual servers to use the different versions of Java then this might be your solution.

Another great use of application virtualization is in public spaces. You can rapidly deliver applications, that perform well, but allow another layer of abstraction to prevent bad user behaviour. When done in combination with other tools you can create a very secure system that works very well.

When not to use Application Virtualization?

Well, even though you can quickly deploy applications to users you would not want to do this if you already have an application and image deployment system. It doesn’t make sense to use two systems when you can do it all with one.

The differences are minimal in terms of management, but you will be paying for twice the licenses and also have to educate users about the slight operational differences when using streamed applications.

Wrapping it all up

So you see in these few examples, that application virtualization has a place and helps us to deal with side by side installations of stubborn products.

What do you think about application virtualization?