Microsoft Application Virtualization Alternatives

Microsoft Application Virtualization

Microsoft Application Virtualization is an application virtualization and application streaming solution from Microsoft. It was acquired by Microsoft during the acquisition of Boston, Massachusetts-based Softricity (SoftwareWow!) on July 17, 2006. Softgrid represents Microsoft's entry to a new avenue of virtualization product, alongside their existing Hyper-V package, Microsoft Virtual Server, Microsoft Virtual PC, and other products newly announced in 2006, such as System Center Virtual Machine Manager, the latter of which is designed for "Datacenter Virtualization".OverviewMicrosoft Application Virtualization platform allows applications to be deployed in real-time to any client from a virtual application server. It removes the need for local installation of the applications. Instead, only the App-V client needs to be installed on the client machines. All application data is permanently stored on the virtual application server. Whichever software is needed is either streamed or locally cached from the application server on demand and run locally. The App-V stack sandboxes the execution environment so that the application does not make changes to the client itself (OS File System and/or Registry). App-V applications are also sandboxed from each other, so that different versions of the same application can be run under App-V concurrently. This approach enables any application to be delivered without making any changes to its code LUN.