Virtualisation has been one of the hot topics in IT over the last couple of years with key players such as VMware, Citrix and Microsoft pushing their products and associated benefits very hard. The benefits of virtualising servers and, to a lesser extent, desktops are well proven, resulting in significant usage by organisations of all sizes. Server virtualisation has made IT management simpler in many cases and there are quantifiable cost savings around hardware and power usage as well as the associated “green” benefits.
Less well known and much less common is the concept of Application Virtualisation. Application Virtualisation tools typically provide a way to package up a specific application so that it can be installed in an isolated, virtual environment on one or more servers. When a user wants to run the application from their PC, the application is ‘streamed’ to their PC so that it runs locally on their machine but in a contained, virtual environment. This means that the application doesn’t interfere or change anything on the PC itself and all its data and configuration information are kept on the servers.
So the obvious question is why would you want to do this? First of all, this is not usually a way to save money; although there may be possible benefits around application licencing or some management costs these are nearly always going to outweighed by the additional installation and management costs of the Application Virtualisation software itself. However, there are certain scenarios where Application Virtualisation can be an ideal solution, for example where:
• You have applications which are not compatible with each other and cannot co-exist on the same PC;
• Quick and frequent deployments/updates of an application to large numbers of clients are required;
• Application availability needs to be easily linked to users’ roaming profiles as they move from one PC to another;
• A poorly written application needs to be isolated so it doesn’t cause problems on client PCs;
• Security control around an application’s usage needs to be tightly controlled and monitored;
It’s unlikely that Application Virtualisation will ever achieve the same level of widespread use as its better known virtualisation technology siblings, but in the right circumstances it’s certainly worth considering.
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