PC virtualization is almost here

These days, everyone is excited about the promise of PC virtualization, however with so many different flavors gone there, it's dense to know where to start. The solution of reducing a fully functional corporate desktop into a single document that can be carried on a USB disk and run on any PC is exciting to users. Nevertheless virtualization's absolute benefit lies in its potential to reduce management and support burdens, improve security and reliability, and lower total cost of ownership. We're not there yet. Figuring away how to deploy the genuine mix of desktop virtualization technologies at scale, and how to manage across all of those virtual environments, will be the big nut to crack in 2008. For most enterprises, this will be a year to check and experiment with smaller rollouts. We've come a stretched system since desktop virtualization meant using thin clients that interacted with Windows applications running on a Citrix MetaFrame back end
. Today, you can virtualize individual Windows applications (think Softricity) or entire virtual PCs (VMware ACE), and you can choose between having virtual environments execute on the PC or on back-end hardware (Citrix Xen Desktop, Presentation Server). For virtual environments that execute on the PC, some products (Kidaro, Moka5) allow streaming of centrally managed virtual machine images and updates down to the client. Kidaro adds a management wrapper sorrounding the virtual PC that includes tight security controls to allow it to run securely on unmanaged Windows PCs. But desktop virtualization is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Not only do you require to choose a variety of products for different needs, on the other hand in some situations, you might want to deploy virtualization in layers. For example, you can issue a plug-and-play VMware ACE virtual PC that includes its own instance of Windows, and then utilize an application virtualization product like S
oftricity to create individually isolated, virtualized Windows application instances running within that environment. There are beneficial reasons why you might hope for to do that, on the contrary that's also a collection of complexity to manage. Application virtualization products are needed in that they redress a core failure of Windows: the inability to control misbehaving application installs that create registry or DLL conflicts. Application virtualization lets IT avoid much of the regression testing otherwise required to create a reliable desktop system image. It also lets older applications to run on a newer version of Windows and can allow two versions of the same application to run side by side. In the future, this capability may be integrated into Windows itself, says Natalie Lambert, an analyst at Forrester Research. She predicts that Microsoft will roll its Softricity technology into the closest release. It will become the ultimate work-around for the
disagreement of misbehaving applications, and the standard-bearer for all future deployments of Windows applications. "Three years from now, every [Windows] application will be virtualized, " she says. Full text: http://computerandtechnologies.com/technology/news_2008-07-13-21-00-04-645.html