How many applications have you virtualized?

Application virtualization isn't new.  It's been around for many years, and it's wonderfully useful with VDI deployments.  It solves so many IT management problems - single image management of applications, personalized application delivery, reduction of application conflicts (aka, "DLL hell") and more. 

Then why are most companies failing to virtualize even half of their applications? 

I think it boils down to two main reasons: complexity and incompatibility.

Application Virtualization - trying to do too much?

While application virtualization varies vendor to vendor, it typically performs three main functions:

1. Packaging applications into a single easy-to-deploy container, providing a single point of image management (for patching, updating, etc.)
2. Delivering the application to the appropriate desktops, simplifying the process of customizing desktops to individual needs.
3. Isolating those applications from conflict with other applications, sometimes called the DLL hell or Windows rot.  It does this by isolating the application inside a shell, sometimes called a "bubble".

One of the most powerful capabilities is the ability to isolate applications from each other.  This feature can be an absolute requirement - such as when a legacy application requires an older version of Microsoft Office, yet you want to have the latest version for productivity.  Or when needing to run two versions of the Java JVM on the same machine.  It can be a life saver.

The devil is in the details...

But virtualization comes at a great cost.  Determining how to configure each application to work within the confines of isolation can be fraught with problems.  You need a deep intimacy of the applications inner workings, often resulting in trial-and-error experimentation until you get it to work.  You also need to have a comprehensive understanding of how people actually use the application to ensure you configure everything correctly (for example, do your users expect Visio to work with Excel?).

A great example of this is Office.  I've found very few organizations that have successfully virtualized Office.  Just recently I had a customer tell me that they have tried every application virtualization solution out there, only to be unsuccessful in getting Office to work for their users.  It's not that it can't be done ... it's that it's out of reach for most IT departments.  Larger (enterprise) companies can be successful, but that's because they have dedicated specialists to solve these problems.  But for most IT organizations, the effort/reward relationship is out of whack.  Why?  Because the key benefit they were looking for was not isolation - it was packaging and delivery!  And it's isolation that makes everything so complicated.

This helps explain why so many applications are not virtualized.  And it also explains why an entire cottage industry of consulting firms exist just to help companies virtualize their applications.

Making it simple

Remember our customer that failed to get Office 2010 working with application virtualization?  When they tried it with Unidesk, it just worked.   No complex configuration, no detailed analysis and testing of application bubbles, no concerns about drivers and complex applications - they just installed it into a layer and they were done.  That's because Unidesk layering provides a simpler, better way to package and deliver applications.  And if you do need isolation, Unidesk can deliver ThinApp, App-V and other virtualization systems and virtualized applications in a layer, giving you one solution for managing your applications.  

The next time you're frustrated looking at your endless backlog of applications waiting to be virtualized, consider why you're virtualizing them.  If you're like most, it's not for application isolation.   If that's the case, consider taking a look at how Unidesk can help.