I have been doing Application Virtualization for a long time – a dozen years now. For a long time AppVirt was more of a niche than it is today. Originally it was used with Citrix and Terminal Servers, but even when desktop and laptop support was added it was used by a relatively small number of leading edge companies. That changed somewhat when Microsoft acquired the technology (renaming it App-V), which signaled to many enterprises that they could depend on the technology well into the future.
But it has been the migration to Windows 7 that has finally allowed this technology to break out from being niche and into the mainstream of enterprises worldwide. The numbers and ranges of companies adopting App-V are stagering. A major driving force appears to be companies that are facing the prospect of a migration project for Windows 7; they tend to adopt App-V as a key ingredient of the project for what I find to be some common reasons:
- The average effort required by premium (hard to get / hard to keep / expensive) packagers to prepare an application for deployment is significantly less with App-V versus MSI repackaging.
- Isolation of applications eliminates application conflicts.
- Isolation allows “standard rights” users to run legacy apps (which would normally need admin or power privileges to run).
- Virtualizing applications makes the OS more stateless and much more stable.
- They will have some VDI, and “non-persistent” VDI needs App-V.
Our master’s level App-V training classes have been overfilling in the last two years with companies that are in their migration projects. If you are still working on your Migration project you have a lot of company out there. If you are still planning (or thinking of planning), you might be a bit behind the curve.
Companies come to us at TMurgent, not because they want every application delivered via App-V, but because they want to get as many as they can, and quickly. Given a week of time, we educate your people completely in App-V from the ground up. We offer public classes roughly 5 times a year, and on-site private “quick-start” engagements as well. We also provide on or off site consulting to tackle difficult applications.
It isn’t too late. And now that Windows 8 is around the corner, guess what? Those virtualized Windows 7 apps will work great on Windows 8 desktops too!
