Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
deployment of replacement or upgraded equipment, because the user
experience is automatically applied to any system when the user first logs
onto a new system.
Virtualized applications allow multiple versions of an application to
be available simultaneously on the same system, ensuring continuity of
operation for legacy applications depending on second-party add-ons or
applications. For example, an older form of Java virtual machine (JVM)
might be required for Application X to operate. Users could then auto-
matically use the older browser and JVM when accessing Application X,
but use newer versions of each during normal operations. Updates become
easier in a virtualized application environment, by allowing an updated
package to be uploaded onto the application virtualization server, which
is then automatically downloaded to a user's system upon next use of the
appropriate program or file type.
An additional efficiency provided by virtualized application environ-
ments is the potential to reduce software licensing costs by providing a
reduced pool of concurrent licenses, which are claimed upon application
access and freed up for reuse when the application is closed. Rather than
installing an expensive application on each computer system across the
network, or limiting application availability to a select group of worksta-
tions, users can be added to application virtualization groups to gain auto-
matic package availability using a smaller pool of concurrent licenses.
Virtualized Desktops
The next level of virtualization involves the user experience to include
the entire desktop, encompassing operating system and all other func-
tions into a virtualized setting mirroring the experience of sitting at a
dedicated workstation desktop environment. This is somewhat similar
to older mainframe operations, when terminals provided keyboard input
and returned displayed output from processes that ran entirely within the
mainframe's CPU, memory, and storage resources.
Remote Desktop Clients
Client systems accessing virtualized desktop environments may use
“dumb” terminals similar to older mainframe configurations or “thin”
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