Software Virtualization Enters the Mainstream
Software virtualization is finally becoming mainstream. Various companies are bringing their new products, and everybody wants a piece of the pie.
And now another company brings their software virtualization solution to market. DeltaISIS has succeeded with the SVS add-on DVS4SBC on terminal server and Citrix. And now Citrix is finally coming with their own virtualization product.
Citrix software isolation solution?
So it is brought to the market as a virtualization solution and it is called isolation.
I had to figure out what it now really is, so I installed, configured and investigated it.
I found out some interesting stuff. Citrix is using a similar kind of technique that Microsoft SoftGrid is using. The isolated application is in a kind of a bubble, and it stays inside that bubble. Local installed software is not able to talk to the isolated software.
Isolating Microsoft Office is not a good idea, because various applications have to talk to Office, and that is not possible. Can you imagine that you have office virtualized, and in a Internet page you find a mailto:. So what happens when you click on the link?
It cannot find Outlook!
If you use SVS this will not happen, because the OS thinks that Outlook is there when you have it activated.
But can it do things better then SVS?
- Yes, it can. To be honest, it has a full integration with the Citrix metaframe management console, where SVS doesn't.
- It runs on 64 bit platform where SVS isn't.
- It does a somewhat better job in preventing you from getting compromised from older DLLs.
Citrix also brings streaming technologies with this new product. Using these technologies is easy, and it works awesome. But streaming installs the application locally on your client, and that can harm some of your systems, and all the benefits of virtualization are completely gone.
Streaming software with SVS Pro does a better job, and is also very easy. But the installation of SVS pro is not that easy. It uses LDAP for rights and that is not easy to configure. But it has the benefit that you don't have to change settings in your Active directory.
After testing the Citrix Isolation solution I believe that SVS is still the better way to go around.
But the biggest benefit is that packaging applications for SVS saves you over 50- to 60-percent of the time needed over time needed to package applications for other solutions.