Application virtualisation means many things to many customers, however the main choices for virtualisation are a selection of the following:

• Server hosting of applications presented to the desktop or thin clients – centralisation of control and reduced deployment effort
• Presentation of applications to a virtualisation client on the desktop – desktop client providing virtual OS shell to applications and reducing application conflicts
• Distribution of virtualised applications that contain their own OS Shell – no desktop client requirements and potentially gives multiple OS delivery

NATOLI offer virtualisation services for the leading toolsets as follows:

Softgrid & App-V

Using streamed or stand alone techniques, NATOLI provide the standards to ensure consistent quality of sequenced applications.  Control Gate processes are used to ensure application functionality, sequencing optimisation and standards conformance.

ThinApp

Using an agentless virtualisation system, ThinApp is an excellent toolset for semi complex applications.  Enforcing Standards and processes allows NATOLI to help overcome the typical virtualisation restrictions by pre-configuring “Sandbox” rules to allow required applications to communicate and enabling applications to run on restricted or locked down systems.  Benefits include single packages running on multiple Microsoft OS, and conflict removal.

Citrix

Creation of Citrix packages to give streamlined rebuild and recovery, consistent load balancing, bandwidth optimisation and component management across all packaged applications to ensure the elimination of conflicts during upgrades or application removal.  All of our processes and skills reduce the multiple user impact associated with server hosted applications.

What cannot be virtualised

Not all applications can be virtualised, and discovery work is often required to review each application prior to virtualisation.  Virtualisation is certainly a good solution for parts of your application management portfolio.  Although toolsets vary the typical virtualisation restrictions are shown in the following table.  NATOLI can identify these issues early within the packaging or virtualisation process.

Topic	Issue
Virtual OS Wrapper or Bubble	OS Wrappers allow the application to see elements of the physical OS, however the physical OS cannot see the OS Wrapper OS Wrappers cannot see other OS Wrappers
Complex actions – Virtualised applications fail if the following are integral to the application	System level drivers (i.e. printer or USB device drivers) Boot time service requirements COM+ DLL’s that run in dllhost.exe Licensing tied to a physical machine Interaction between other applications Plugins or addins Global hook DLLs
Performance	Some applications loose performance once virtualised
Multi application suites	Suite related applications cannot be individually virtualised whilst retaining suite