Application Virtualisation In The Spotlight

Some IT industry observers confuse application virtualisation with server virtualisation - Steve Gold explains what the technology is and why it so highly advantageous to tap the advantages that it adds to the benefits of hardware virtualisation...

Application virtualisation is one of the most exciting advantages to stem from the explosion in virtualisation technologies in recent times.

In simple terms, the process isolates applications from the operating system on which they are running, streaming a clean copy of an application from a central repository to the end-user system.

Using this approach - which major IT players such as Citrix, IBM, Microsoft and VMware have all embraced in the last few years - gives IT managers the ability to rapidly re-provision users and so lower their desktop management costs.

Interestingly, application virtualisation is a key component of cloud computing platforms, since it effectively encapsulates the application in a software `bubble' that is quite distinct from the local hardware.

Perhaps more importantly, however, these bubble-enabled applications can still interact with other applications and local resources, such as printers and local disk drives.