Application Virtualization May Reduce Desktop Support

The next version of Microsoft’s application virtualization product, based on a product gained in the 2006 acquisition of Softricity, is in public beta. Application virtualization can make desktop management easier and less expensive because it reduces conflicts between applications and allows applications to be streamed from centrally managed servers, ensuring that users always have the most current version of the application. But organizations may be trading the costs of desktop management for the costs of packaging applications and building a fault-tolerant application infrastructure.

What Is Application Virtualization?

System Center Application Virtualization 4.5, the first Microsoft-branded version of Softricity’s SoftGrid Application Virtualization, entered public beta in Nov. 2007 and is should be available in Q3 of 2008.

Application Virtualization lets applications run in an isolated environment on each user’s computer and can deploy and update the applications from centrally managed servers. This is meant to reduce desktop management costs by reducing application conflicts on computers, and by enabling application components to be loaded on demand from a server as they are needed by the executing application.