I was at an interesting IT Pro/Developer talk tonight on Microsoft’s approach to virtualisation. Basically, they’re trying to take control of the whole virtualisation stack, so that they can provide technical support at all levels. Of course it doesn’t hurt that they’re going to take a significant part of the market share, particularly from SMEs who are going to be looking to get into the virtualisation arena without spending the phenomenal amounts charged by many of the large virtualisation software providers.

I was actually quite impressed with Microsoft’s approach, or at least the presentation of it we were given. While I’m sure any self respecting IT professional knows all this already, it was new to me and I was interested to hear what Microsoft plans to do with application and UI virtualisation. They’re doing something quite clever with Softgrid, having acquired Softricity last year. Softgrid allows applications to be packaged up and pushed down to locked down boxes and run without any installation. The applications a user is allowed are configured in Active Directory and this paves the way for individual users to get the programs they need without allowing them unnecessary privileges on the machine. I can see this being massively useful - no more re-creating disk images for each site or user group and no more problems with software not being deployed across the whole organisation (a problem we’re beginning to encounter with MS Office 2007) – just call the Systems team, and get the particular app enabled for that one user for as long as they need it on any computer they log into. There are some considerations. Pulling down applications has a bandwidth cost, and I’m not sure what the implications would be on a large, geographically spread out network like ours, with a fairly continuous stream of people logging in and out. With Softgrid, you can cache apps to the local machine for offline use, but again, if this is per profile, it may not alleviate matters much. Of course, there’s no limitation on how much virtualisation you can do. Installing some programs locally and virtualising others could still be worthwhile, although obviously you wouldn’t get the same value.

Everyone says that 2007 is the year virtualisation is really going to take off, and I think that could be the case. It’ll help if Microsoft manages to get their new technologies out on time, and it looks like the new Virtual Server with hypervisor could be out closer to Longhorn’s release, rather than the “up to 180 days after Longhorn” that’s been reported. The work that’s being done on Terminal Services and Virtual Server, along with the continued ramping up on features from Microsoft’s competitors could be what pushes virtualisation firmly into the mainstream.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a couple of virtual machines to play with.