Conclusion
Things are changing in the business IT market. For a long time, the unstoppable growth of IT infrastructure in companies made the life of many a system administrator very frustrating, forcing them to spend a large amount of time troubleshooting, patching, installing, and reinstalling software. Every new piece of software can create new problems, with a seemingly infinite number of configurations; getting everything to "play together nicely" can be a truly daunting task.
How can we be certain that a piece of software will not cause trouble on our network, how can we monitor the used applications more closely, and how can we distribute our tested software to all of the client PCs in an efficient manner? These questions relate to the many problems that application virtualization solutions attempt to solve.
The fact that quite a few major software developers have moved into this field means we may finally see changes here, and the current competition will undoubtedly force every solution to strive for the best possible user experience. We're very excited to watch as the situation unfolds, and we'll definitely be keeping you up to date with further developments.
Application virtualization is on the move, and we are optimistic about its future. We hope this article was able to provide the interested with a good introduction to its possibilities.
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Genx87 - Monday, February 25, 2008 - link
About 18 months ago I was introduced to VMWares virtual server. Right now I am in the beginning phases of planning for a Hyper-V envrionment which should consolidate nearly all of our servers onto a few boxes. Easier to manage, easier to backup, easier to migrate, and easier to recover from a disaster.Software virtualization looks like an awesome technology for the IT admins around the world. Being able to spit out a package to a client and roll it back if there is an issue with the latest patch while preserving the OS is a godsend.
I appluad Anandtech for taking a look at these technologies. Virtualization is the way of the future imo.
Olaf van der Spek - Monday, February 25, 2008 - link
Doesn't this basically show that installing applications and keeping them up-to-date is too hard on Windows?Sounds like proper package management instead of virtualization would go a long way to fixing this.
lopri - Monday, February 25, 2008 - link
but intro only.. :PJokes aside, I thought there would be a lot more pages in this article, until I turned to the last page. Great job, wetting others' appetite! Also a joke. Grr..
Anyway, great article and lots of information. Thanks.
ninjit - Monday, February 25, 2008 - link
Reading the article, I kept thinking of Valve's Steam game/content delivery system.If you've ever looked at at the files with the Steam folder, they look nothing like the files that would normally be installed if you had bought the game traditionally on CD/DVD (or direct download from the publisher), yet I don't believe developer's have to change much (if anything at all) in order to have their game delivered through steam.
It appears a game's installed files are placed within virtual disk-files that Steam then manages.
I'm not sure, but I think steam also virtualizes many user settings/ registry entries a game may require - I've been able to move my steam folder about willy-nilly (e.g. from my main drive to a new faster secondary one) and steam (+ my games) still work fine, the only thing that gets broken are shortcuts.
GTVic - Monday, February 25, 2008 - link
Nice article. I believe AMD and Intel are touting virtualization support in their newest CPUs/chipsets particularly on the server side.Is this "hardware" virtualization another type of virtualization. Some info on that would be a nice addition.
Lizz - Monday, February 25, 2008 - link
That is in fact a different kind of virtualization, as explained on page 2 of the article.A more in-depth article on hardware virtualization will be posted very soon, so if you're interested in this subject, I'd suggest waiting on that. Johan will be putting it up later today, I believe. :)
smitty3268 - Monday, February 25, 2008 - link
There's an interesting Linux project called Klik2 in development that aims to provide application virtualization.Less as an enterprise solution and more as an easy way of demoing apps across multiple linux distros, I think.
Doormat - Monday, February 25, 2008 - link
"Using MAV in a streaming environment prevents any of the applications from actually being installed on the client computer (apart from the user's local settings). This means that all applications need to stream to the system over the network every time they are requested, and nothing is actually saved on the client. However, MAV does provide the option to run virtualized apps locally without the use of streaming, should the need arise."Most situations would run the streamed apps over the network the first time, and run them locally from then on. I know thats how our Softgrid is implemented at work. The plus is that Softgrid checks for upgrades whenever the app is started.
Lizz - Monday, February 25, 2008 - link
I was under the impression that only the user's local settings and profiles were saved, to minimize the amount of data saved locally on the client computer. I'll have another look at this in a bit, thanks for pointing it out!anandtech02148 - Monday, February 25, 2008 - link
Overpaid and always whinning, sure its only a few hundred machines to installed, but hey.. overtime is even better pays right?Interesting, will google's cloud computing replace this virtualization someday?