There has been a number of announcements over the past few weeks in the area of Application Virtualization, most notably VMware’s release of ThinApp.  With the ability to wrap an application in a virtualization container and then run that virtualized application as a stand alone executable, virtualization has been taken to the next level.

As I have been talking to enterprises about application virtualization, a base understanding of why this is important is always needed.  The simplest example of where application virtualization can be used is when you think of the need to have two different versions of the same application.  Image you are a QA tester testing a web based application.  Usually, you verify that the web based application works with both IE 7 and IE 6 or now Firefox 2 and Firefox 3.  In the past, you had to have two machines (physical or ideally virtualized) with each browser installed since they can’t live together on the same machine.  Talk about overhead.  With application virtualization, each version of IE gets placed in the virtualized wrapper and becomes a standalone executable.  Allowing you to run both apps at the same time on the same machine.

Moving to a more complex example, think about virtualizing most of your core applications across an enterprise.  If each application is a stand alone executable, what happens when a user accidentally deletes one of the library files for the application?  First off, this wouldn’t happen because they are all placed in the virtualized wrapper.  But if it did, all IT has to do is tell the user to download the virtualized app again from a central repository.

The cost savings for IT administrators of the desktop can really start to add up.  These include:

• Less disk space requirements since the virtualized application is compressed
• Savings in admin hours just from not having to reboot Windows after an application is installed; virtualized applications don’t require a reboot to install, just copy to the machine and run it (or run it from a USB key).
• The elimination of the re-builds or re-installation of desktops due to user’s accidentally corrupting an application; the self contained virtualized apps can’t be corrupted like a natively installed one.
• A reduction in troubleshooting application conflicts since each application lives in it’s own virtualized world.

When you take each of these areas of time saving and extend this across 20k, 50k, 200k desktops the time savings starts to have huge impact to the efficiency of an Desktop IT organization.

Stay tuned as I get more real world examples…

(Disclosure: I am currently employed as a Global Accounts Solutions Consultant at VMware.)

Yesterday I spent half a day discussing virtualization strategies with a few CTOs from a $15B firm from the healthcare industry.  It was refreshing to see the same glint in the eyes of these CTOs regarding virtualization’s potential to revolutionize their data centers as I saw before joining VMware.  The key aspects of these discussions was how virtualization can help them reduce not only their capex but also their opex.  They also saw the potential that virtualization provides in the areas of increasing their service delivery times (provisioning new systems for customers in 2 hours instead of 2 weeks or 2 months like they are used to) as well as enabeling a new way of thinking about disaster recovery.

Like most IT executives, these CTOs knew about virtualization from the aspect of the hyperadvisor; the core of virtualization that allows you to run multiple operating systems on the same computer at the same time (with each operating system thinking it’s by itself).  This is just the start of the software computer revolution.  Now that you have isolated the OS down to just a bunch of files that can be moved between physical computers transaprently, you have the ability to provision a machine in a short period of time.  Create a base Virtual Machine image for each of your approved OS’.  Next copy that base OS to create another image for each of your general application types.  You now have a library of images that can copied within seconds to an existing physical machine, booted and viola, a provisioned server in minutes; substantially reducing opex.

Also, since the “data” that the enterprise is already backing up for disaster recovery now contains the applications and operating system, DR takes on a whole new meaning.  (and not just DR, but resource “load balancing”, server maintenance, data center migrations…pretty much all the maintenance work that IT has to do.)  You can take your old machines and deploy them to your DR site. Now use your existing data replication software to replicate the VM files.  When your main data center goes down, just turn on your VMs in the DR data center and back to business.  Sure, performance might not be the same, but the business is functioning; the key point of DR.  And since you used hardware that you already own, your capex is reduced.

“Cloud Computing for the Enterprise”.  That is what one of the CTO’s called virtualization.  As someone who has been living in the cloud for years on the Web 2.0, this is not a shocking way for me to think.  Cloud computing was easy for the web, where you had (or could build) apps out of standard web based (REST based) building blocks.  But for an enterprise architect who has to deal with complicated software packages from properitary vendors that process Billions of dollars in orders, this was a refreshing thing to hear.

Could this type of statement indicate that virtualization and utility computing has arrived for the enterprise?

I think that’s a safe statement.

“The Dawn of a New Era”.  That was the slogan that Intel used 30 years ago when they introduced the x86 processor.  And very fitting today for me as I start out a new era in the x86 virtualization space.  Last week I started working at VMware as a Solutions Consultant on the Global Accounts team.  This means that I will be responsible for selling the VMware virtualization solutions to a hand full of very large companies.

While I was talking to VMware about this position, I was impressed with how far they have taken the virtualization technology.  I was one of the 60,000 people who downloaded Workstation 1.0 during the first two months when it was released back in the Spring of 1999.  It was amazing with regards to what it could do back then.  But the magic wore off for me eventually; for most of last year I was using it to run my “work laptop” as a VM on my personal laptop at my previous job (the reason being that my personal laptop was a hell of a lot more powerful than what my employer gave me).  The magic had turned into rock solid technology, it did what it was supposed to and did it well.

But then I started to learn about the management and automation technologies that VMware has built and aquired over the past few years.  With my recent work within software development organizations at Fortune 100 companies, I immediately knew all the benefits to application development teams.   And when I saw a demonstration of Lab Manager, I was in awe once again with the magic.  Being able to run and test a multi-computer software configuration through a web browser and then saving a state of those machines as a bug…that is amazing.  And that is just one of the management/automation tools.

I feel that virtualization currently is and will continue to be the most transforming technology for enterprise computing for the rest of this decade.  That is the reason I decided to join VMware.  So, expect to see more and more postings here in the labs on virtualization moving forward.  Of course, everything I write here will continue to be my own opinion and not that of VMware.

Now, that doesn’t mean that I’m giving up my focus on some of the other technology areas that I have been focusing on lately (i.e., SaaS, Web2.0, Social Computing).  I will still be keeping an eye on many things in those areas and writing about them as time permits.  There are still experiments in the works at the lab…

I noticed something interesting tonight, I was cleaning out my feed subscriptions when I noticed a number of technology vendors that I was subscribed to had no new postings for many months (mostly vendors in the SOA space).  Got me curious as to what was going on.  Was Google Reader broken?  Was the feed broken?

After checkign out the blogs at the source, I realized that those companies just stopped blogging.  It’s one thing to have quiet periods with startups, but a public or large software firm?  What exactly does that mean?  That their adoption of blogging was only a test, not to be taken seriously?  Or that their marketing people are too stuck in the old ways of marketing and can’t keep pace with blogosphere?

Just thinking out loud…

Congratulations to the SnapLogic team for being selected Startup of the Week by InformationWeek.  I had the pleasure of doing a project with SnapLogic earlier this year and have been working on a few other projects using the SnapLogic data integration framework since then .  If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to expose data within your organization as a REST-ful interface, check out the SnapLogic framework.  It’s an open source platform and the recent 2.0 release (aka Cole) has made great strides forward in features and usability.

Congrats to the entire SnapLogic Team!

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