Application Virtualisation : An Application for the 21st Century

In general, Citrix is widely used in large corporations especially in the area of branch office communications where the least amount of network traffic is required however there are several problems with trying to virtualise applications in this environment.

Problems with Application Virtualisation

Most of the problems I found were easily overcome by good organisation and planning or going to the vendor help site. The major show stoppers experienced by customers have been in the Terminal Server/Citrix environments. These problems include:-

• Memory Leaks.

  Using virtualised software in a Citrix environment causes memory leaks after about nine or ten open sessions the Citrix server will run out of memory and crash (ie a blue screen problem will occur). 

• Security Risks.

  There is a security risk when using application virtualisation in a Citrix/Terminal server environment that allows users to see other people’s last opened documents.  For example if we have six or seven users using Word 2007, the next user that logs on can see all or some of the others’ last opened documents even if they are held in their home directories. This is because SID information can be exchanged.