Application Virtualisation : An Application for the 21st Century

All of these can result in numerous support calls when any of these situations do occur. The bottom line is that when any of these situations occur, it can mean anything from support having to remove and reinstall the application but with a different configuration to totally rebuilding the user’s desktop in extreme cases.

Thus resulting in lost revenue due to the user’s downtime plus the cost of the computer engineer who has to go and fix the problem in the first place.

As of January 2008, there are currently two programs (Altiris Software Virtualisation Solution and Microsoft Application Virtualisation software formerly Microsoft Softgrid) that allow you to run a virtual application environment in such a way that your desktop applications will be installed without affecting any of your core operating system components.

If we take our original example, it is now possible to install as many applications as you like without any of them affecting the Windows operating system components; for example you could have three different copies of Microsoft Word (Word 2000, Word 2003 and Word 2007) all running concurrently without any impact on one another. 

This would normally be impossible to do without having several virtual machines running on your operating system.

This is the concept of application virtualisation. Note for a few of the current differences between the two products you can listen to our Podcast with an SVS engineer.