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Part 2 - Rethinking Application Management

by Chris Hampton

The management of traditional applications involves a labor-intensive life cycle of testing, deploying, installing, patching, updating, and uninstalling. Add to this the issue of maintaining this life cycle across multiple hardware platforms and OSs. For organizations with large application pools, this translates into increased man hours supporting applications and fewer available hours to respond to business demands and provide needed innovations.

With application virtualization, the management model is greatly simplified. Applications are initially profiled or captured using a clean OS environment. All required application patches are included within the profile and prerequisite applications such as .NET Framework or Java Runtime can be included or linked to the profiled application. The profiled applications are saved as encapsulated files and stored on a secure network file share. From this point, the applications are streamed directly to physical workstations, virtual desktops, or server environments all from a single encapsulated file. The real value of this process lies within the ongoing maintenance of the applications.

Each application has a single source repository to manage for updates and patching. Thus, IT only needs to touch an application one time when applying updates or patches, greatly reducing the man hours required. Updated applications are immediately available at the next launch by end users without requiring a deployment or installation at the endpoint.

Most organizations do not grasp the fundamental difference in thinking that is required when considering a move to application virtualization. Application virtualization changes the way IT organizations approach application management including life cycle management as described earlier and the deployment of applications.

Traditional Application Deployment

Traditional application deployments involve a complicated process of installing, tracking, and supporting an application on individual workstations and laptops. For many organizations, this means the use of a dedicated infrastructure of deployment and management tools and often dedicated IT resources to manage the entire process.

In the end, the organization is left with a cumbersome patchwork of imaging, deployment, metering, and patching tools along with applications that reside locally on a disparate group of endpoints and OSs. The following list highlights further details regarding the shortcomings of traditional application deployment methods:

  • Inflexible— Inability to quickly respond to business fluctuations and application changes.
  • Poor application security and control— Traditional application deployments do not allow for dynamic control of application access.
  • Incompatibility issues— Many organizations face application compatibility issues when attempting to use a traditional application deployment.
  • Complicated desktop images— Due to the nature of traditionally installed applications and disparate OSs, many organizations opt to create base desktop OS images with pre-installed applications. This leads to management headaches for multiple desktop images with regard to updates and patches.

Virtualized Application Delivery

Application virtualization changes the entire method from deployment to delivery. At first glance, these two words may seem very similar, but in reality, these two methods differ greatly. Application deployment was all about installing and managing applications on multiple endpoints, but application delivery is about packaging an application once and delivering the application to multiple endpoints, for use, without the need for installation.

The power of application virtualization is the separation of the application from the endpoint OS. This alleviates all the shortcomings that come with a traditional deployment and provides a number of key benefits:

  • Ease of management— Applications are now managed using a single image, so updates and patches are only applied once and delivered everywhere.
  • Dynamic applications— Because of the ease of packaging and updating virtualized applications, IT can quickly respond to business changes.
  • No compatibility issues— Every virtualized application is delivered into an isolated environment or sandbox on the endpoint. Thus, multiple versions of the same application can run on a single endpoint.
  • Data center centric— All virtualized applications reside in the data center improving overall security and compliance of data and applications.
  • Branch and remote access— Remote users have quicker access to updated applications without the lengthy process of deployment on the remote endpoints.

Chris Hampton, is a professional IT consultant based in Englewood, Colorado. With nearly 12 years in information technology, Chris has developed extensive experience in systems administration, engineering, and architecture specializing in VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft remote application and virtualization technologies. He has traveled extensively teaching for VMware. Chris has also contributed to the authorship of the recent The Authorized Guide to Citrix XenApp Platinum Edition (McGraw-Hill Publishers). He is currently working with the latest virtualization technologies on numerous consulting engagements. Chris holds some of the industry’s highest technical certifications from VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft in the areas of server-based computing and virtualization.