Virtualization news for the channel community and you !

As posted earlier in October last year, mystery remains around APP-V and MED-V of Microsoft. John Savill has released an easy to understand FAQ on MED-V

The highlights:

• Aimed at solving compatibility issues between applications that do not run correctly on a certain OS. User with VISTA can run an XP application within a MED-V environment locally (which means that an OS is required next to the local OS of the user)
• MED-V integrates within the local OS and builts further on Virtual PC and it nothing more than a local VM.
• It includes the necessary functionalities for image updates of the VM and iamge distribution
• Currently the roadmap only contains support for Vista and XP 32bit
• Availability is foreseen first half of 2009

If I look at it, MED-V is nothing more than a client-side virtualization approach next to APP-V. Furthermore it still means that all the apps run locally within a VM (see image). From a management perspective this gets really complicated.

• The local OS requires updates, patches, …
• Applications that are physically installed on the local OS requires updates, patches, …
• Applications that are virtually delivered through APP-V require updates, patches, …
• Applications running within MED-V require updates, patches, … as well as the OS.

Altough MED-V offers some nice features when looking at application compatibility issues it does not solve any issues of management, maintenance and for sure not on ROI and TCO. Instead it will increase the TCO. Also ‘imaging’ of all the applications might get hard

For those that have SA and have the possibility to get into MDOP another aspect remains when to use MED-V versus APP-V. In short APP-V virtualizes an application while MED-V virtualizes at OS level. John formulates as

“If your problem is that applications are incompatible with one another or you need to deploy apps quickly with minimal testing, you want APP-V. If you have applications that won’t run on a new client OS or you want to manage VM images then you want MED-V”

Personally I believe that it is better to look at it from a consolidation point of view. Try to centralize as much applications as possible on a server-side application virtualization solution such as Citrix XenApp or Windows Terminal Services. Those applications that are not multi-user, multi-session can be delivered to the user through a client-side application virtualization solution such as Citrix XenApp (Streaming), Microsoft APP-V or VMware ThinApp.

In those case that you are running a client locally which requires an older application that is not compatible with the current OS (for example a SAP report which is coded in an old application running on an even older OS) you might look at MED-V. Altough that rescripting the report might be also a good alternative.

The full articles by John Savill can be found here and here.