Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 Nears ReleaseMicrosoft Application Virtualization 4.5 Nears Release

As Microsoft readies the next version of its application virtualization software for release later this summer by releasing a near-final test version of Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 (formerly SoftGrid) this week, some organizations are looking to increase their deployments of the technology.

Along with Merrill Lynch, whose plans to virtualize tens of thousands of clients within a few years information recently detailed, the State of Indiana and the Fairfax County School District in Virginia are looking at how they might cut management headaches by expanding their use of Microsoft Application Virtualization.

Microsoft Application Virtualization streams an application from a server in an organization's data center to a local PC as pieces of the application are needed. The streamed data is stored in a local cache, but it's never formally installed on the local machine, so applications don't corrupt the registry or interact improperly with other apps. Microsoft is one of several companies in the space, VMware bought Thinstall earlier this year and its ThinApp application virtualization technology, while Citrix has its own line of competitors and a number of start-ups have their own technology.

The State of Indiana is in the midst of a multi-year transformation of its IT infrastructure, having centralized the state's formerly disparate IT functionalities while actually cutting staff. As part of the transition, central IT went from supporting 900 PCs to supporting 25,000 and created a common configuration across many of them, and has had to deal with a multitude of old applications and old computers.

"We've got legacy applications we need to run, and in some places that means people need like three different versions of Oracle," said Gerry Weaver, the state's CIO. Since SoftGrid apps run in a bit of a sandbox isolated from one another, the state decided to use SoftGrid to deliver the applications rather than install them all and hope for the best.

SoftGrid's also changed the way Indiana does IT support. Instead of tinkering around with broken apps for an hour or more, help desk employees are now taught to re-image the PC if a problem can't be solved in 15 minutes, especially with an old machine. With SoftGrid, it's much less time consuming to give employees access to apps, and the state also has a number of already-imaged newer PCs at the ready if a few break here and there. "I need to deploy at least 6,000 PCs every year for the next 3 1/2 years to make sure we're completely refreshed at the end of that," Weaver said. "If we're monkeying around working on some PC that was put in there in 1997, I'm not that excited." So far, Fairfax County School District (FCSD) has only deployed SoftGrid to two schools, including Virginia's largest public school. However, this will scale to 10,000 seats by this fall and potentially all 90,000 seats in the school system sometime later, though FCSD hasn't yet committed to the latter figure.

"This changes the way we think about application delivery," Chris Lewis, manager of FCSD's desktop management team, said in an interview. "Either you do a standard push where you walk up to it and it's installed locally or it's a virtual image." Deployment becomes much quicker.

After seeing SoftGrid for the first time a few years ago, he and his team were impressed that unlike Citrix Presentation Server, SoftGrid didn't rely as heavily on the network and server, instead balancing its implementation by using the PC's hardware. "With computers as powerful as they are today, why would anyone even do presentation virtualization," Lewis said. He is also impressed with the fact that applications running under SoftGrid appear to the end user just like any other application on their machine, though Citrix had that feature.

Lewis ran through a few benefits he thinks companies will see from application virtualization. Since apps run virtually and in a sandbox, they'll be more reliable and stable, and rather than switching from one version of software to another immediately, old versions can stay behind too while people are getting trained on the new version.

Additionally, end users no longer have to be in a particular classroom or on a particular PC to get the apps they need since they'll be delivered centrally, which means that students don't always have to go to a specific computer lab to do certain work and teachers can hold classes in any room, rather than just one.

FCSD is in the early adopter testing program for Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 and likes the new caching options. The new version of Microsoft's application virtualization software also includes improved security, support for multiple languages, works better with Microsoft's System Center management tools and adds more diagnostics, and better support for third party plug-ins like customizations to Microsoft Excel. Available in a release candidate now, Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 will be released later this summer as part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, which itself is an option only for Software Assurance customers.