John Sheehan: Architecture and Engineering of Microsoft Application Virtualization (AppVirt)

Charles — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 19:45:00 GMT

Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 (AppVirt) allows the flexibility to control virtual application interaction. Administrators wanting to consolidate virtual environments, and enable faster, easier administration, can use the product’s Dynamic Suite Composition, which sequences and manages packages for middleware applications separately from the main application. It shrinks potential package size by eliminating redundant packaging of middleware, allowing, for instance, multiple web applications to communicate with the same single instance of a virtualized .NET Framework or Java Runtime Environment (JRE). Updates for the common virtual middleware are simplified as well as one virtual application is updated instead of several. This “many-to-one” capability greatly reduces the cost of updates. It also makes it easier to deploy and manage applications with multiple plug-ins and add-ins, and improves management of plug-in distribution to different user groups.

John Sheehan, Architect of Microsoft's AppVirt (SoftGrid) technology, spends some time with me digging (deeply) into the architecture and engineering of the application virtualization technology he and team create. A few months ago John joined us for a Going Deep on application virtualization and you asked for more (and you asked for us to go deeper - John only scratchd the surface last time we spoke). Well, here you go, Niners. Deep AppVirt. This is whiteboard-heavy and John's mic'd so the sound quality is exceptional. Enjoy!

Duration: 58:31

John Sheehan: Inside Application Virtualization

Charles — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:41:00 GMT

Application virtualization is different than machine virtualization which virtualizes the machine on which an operating system (and applications) are installed. Machine virtualization provides an abstraction layer between the hardware and the OS that's running on top of it. It also allows managing and simultaneously operating multiple environments on a single machine.

Application virtualization takes this concept and applies it to programs. The abstraction layer created by application virtualization lies between the operating system and the applications that run within it, allowing applications to be delivered dynamically as services that can be added or removed without installation.

Microsoft purchased a company named Softricity a while ago and the application virtualization product SoftGrid was forged from the algorithms created by both Softricity and Microsoft engineers.

Marketing says:

"Microsoft SoftGrid Application Virtualization provides the most extensive virtualization on the market. In addition to virtualizing application related Windows Services, it virtualizes per user, per application instance, key application components including the Registry, file system, DLLs, COM/IPC, .INI files, fonts and more.

SoftGrid's application virtualization can work in concert with other virtualization technologies – including machine virtualization – as part of a comprehensive services-oriented architecture."

Here, John Sheehan, the primary architect of SoftGrid (formerly the chief architect of Softricity) digs into the details of how application virtualization (as implemented in SoftGrid) works. It's an incredibly interesting technology with a very promising future. There are many possibilities for using application virtualization to solve problems affecting not only the enterprise, but standard users and developers as well. Just use your imagination. This is a deep dive and John told me he'd like to go even deeper next time he's in Redmond. For now, this conversation should suffice as a technical introduction to the world of application virtualization and how Microsoft is innovating in this space.

Enjoy!

Entries tagged with appvirt - Channel 9

John Sheehan: Architecture and Engineering of Microsoft Application Virtualization (AppVirt)

John Sheehan: Inside Application Virtualization