Application Virtualization is Confusing – But It Shouldn’t Be

Tennis elbow is one of those medical garbage terms that could mean any of ten or more diagnosis – just knowing that someone has tennis elbow is not enough to really know what is wrong with their arm. Virtualization is quickly becoming this way as many vendors are running to jump on to the trendy ‘virtualization’ bandwagon and calling anything they can some form of the solution. For example, some with application streaming solutions call their products Application Virtualization, which, at first glance, may seem reasonable – users are able to stream applications over the network to client computer, without the need to actually install the application on the client computer. However, just avoiding install is not necessarily a good definition for Application Virtualization – it misses much of the revolutionary change that Application Virtualization brings to how we manage applications. Under this definition, clients and server technology would be a part of Application Virtualization. The thing is, the application is really not running on the resources of the client computer – the product is more aptly named server-based computing, and while server-based computing bring some of the same advantages that Application Virtualization does, it misses on most of the important pieces. You still have to install the application on the server, and you still have to manage the application dependencies and conflicts and versioning on that server the same as you would if the application was installed on the desktop. Server-based computing does not change the way the application works with the underlying OS or platform.

Bottom line - Streaming does not make Application Virtualization.

So how is true Application Virtualization different?

Application Virtualization is a paradigm shift. Applications are freed from dependencies on the infrastructure, and the infrastructure is freed from dependencies on the applications. One standard platform can be a reality in the datacenter (significant reduction in management complexity), and one golden application configuration is possible for the application group (no more need to reconfigure application for different platforms or as patches and new OS’s must be used).

Let’s all agree on what our technical terms mean – it will simplify everything. In an effort to end the confusion, Trigence has started a glossary of industry terms. Check it out at http://trigence.com/glossary/.