Application Virtualisation

Eileen Brown (Technet fame) is punting an idea put forward by an MVP at a recent gathering. It's a killer use of their new acquirement, SoftTricity.

Now that MS have acquired SoftTricity, applications deployments over the next few years are going to become very interesting. This got me as excited as when I first started playing with OS virtualisation (thanks VMWare for killer software!).

I've always wanted to see this mess of integrating an application in to an OS's file system made obsolete (we could of done with this during the DLL hell days). Now we have the capability to compartmentalise each application so that it is running above a virtualisation layer that takes care of its needs and keeps it completely isolated from the OS.

Now think application in a bubble, and think MS releasing Beta products that don't need to be installed, just fired up via the virtualisation layer of SoftTricity. And smile

It's an awesome concept, check out Elieens comments on the subject.

I was at the MMS 2006 highlights in Reading recently and told a Microsoft employee that this product will allow companies to detach legacy applications from the OS so that they can upgrade from Win98\WinNT to keep up with Microsoft’s culling of support. Some companies just cannot upgrade their OS's right now due to the software they run requiring that OS version. For example the company I’m currently contracted to, pretty much 95% of their desktop estate is WinNT and they will eventually jump on to Vista when it's bedded in. But all their apps stop them doing so right now. It's a no go. The MS employee didn't seem to understand that this is why a lot of companies are locked in to their old tech and that they need help to get out of this mess. God knows how they will virtualise existing applications running on legacy OS's, perhaps implement something similar to P2V (Physical to Virtual) in the OS virtualisation space ... P2V for Applications yummy