Microsoft Talk

Mike Neil, Microsoft’s virtualization strategist, talks about security, cloud computing and other virtualization topics from the floor of the VMworld conference in Las Vegas.

A growing roster of customers has discovered that both desktop and server virtualization are no longer technologies of the future; they are cost-effective, secure, dependable, and easy to implement and manage today. The 14,000 IT professionals, developers and technology providers attending the VMworld 2008 virtualization conference this week understand that virtualization has matured into a priority for many enterprises because it allows businesses to reduce their IT costs and be more nimble in responding to changing IT needs.

Microsoft is highlighting several new virtualization product milestones at the conference, including:

• the recent release of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and the release within 30 days of Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 hypervisors;

• a new version of Microsoft Application Virtualization, available through a new edition of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP);

• the release within 30 days of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 along with the rest of the System Center suite of management software; and

• progress on the company’s work with industry partners to ensure interoperability with non-Microsoft software.

In part he alsp discusses:

Most people associate virtualization with servers, but application virtualization is really heating up. Application virtualization offers capabilities like dynamic provisioning, which allows end users to connect to their applications from multiple devices. Think of it as applications on demand: IT maintains management control over the applications, and users have instant access to them without worrying about software installations, application management or potential software conflicts.

Microsoft’s latest application virtualization package, Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 (App-V 4.5), was released and will be available soon as part of MDOP 2008 R2. App-V 4.5 is a big step forward toward making application virtualization a universally deployed desktop technology. We’ve included new capabilities that will help IT pros support large-scale virtualization implementations across many sites and provide multiple delivery options, including over-the-Internet application delivery.

App-V has been popular among commercial and public-sector customers, as well as with software vendors. For example, manufacturing-software supplier AspenTech has used App-V to give its process-manufacturing customers faster access to its aspenONE software package, while streamlining interoperability testing and version upgrades. One customer’s deployment time was cut from months to just weeks.

So far there have been almost 10 million units of MDOP sold since it was first introduced.