Application Virtualization Galore
For many environments, jumping into application virtualization is an ‘as-needed’ endeavor. There are a few big players in the space, including VMware
ThinApp, Citrix
XenApp, Microsoft
App-V, Symantec
EndPoint. If you didn’t see February/March issue, Ken Da Silva did a great
review of ThinApp and its smooth interface. In my opinion, application virtualization is the boutique segment of the larger virtualization market and can be tough for many organizations to find a use case.
The exception is XenApp, since Citrix has been in the application and presentation virtualization space for quite a long time. Further, many organizations have already invested heavily in Citrix installations. These have also made natural transitions to server virtualization, with Web front end servers and presentation servers being converted to VMs. It is also darn cool to virtualize a server that is already a virtualization solution - a "double-dip," if you will.
What got me thinking about application virtualization was this whitepaper that compared the four biggest products in the space. What I like is that there is a really good breakdown of the architectural differences between the various solutions. This material put ThinApp on top for performance reasons, but definitely made me want to poke around the other solutions. A major criteria for choosing application virtualization is the costs, as usually only the largest environments need the technology – and it could be applied to a large number of systems.
Where are you with application virtualization? Have price models got in the way of using this technology? Share your stance on this slice of virtualization below or email me your comments on the products and how you use them.
Posted by Rick Vanover on 05/05/2009 at 12:47 PM