Skip navigation
Dealing with Difficult Apps

Dealing with Difficult Apps

How to move pesky legacy systems to virtual environments.

We’re seeing greater amounts of virtualization within today’s IT environment. In fact, midsize and enterprise organizations are striving for 90% and higher virtualization levels. This means more VMs, more virtual content, more resource requirements and more delivery options. Creating and deploying virtual servers is one task; moving bare-metal applications into a virtual ecosystem is a bit more challenging.

Dependencies, settings, configurations, resource requirements and application complexities have been formidable barriers around application virtualization. They present challenges around moving the app from a physical into a virtual environment. Some apps have proven to be very virtualization-friendly, while others simply run better on local, bare-metal environments.

Some legacy applications, such as office productivity apps, custom made applications, complex CRM/ERM apps, and even resource-intensive applications (CAD) just don't want to move. Well, there’s good news. Now, moving entire sets of apps into a virtual ecosystem is much easier. We have vendor-level certification, improved support, and much better resource control.

But what if you still have those one or two apps that are giving you problems? Let’s look at migrating challenging apps and what you can do to optimize them for a virtual environment.

 

  • Application Streaming. You can install an application on a local host (bare-metal, non-virtualized machine) or server and stream it to VMs or virtual desktop as needed. This allows you to share the application without “virtualizing” it on a virtual server or delivering it as a virtual application. This app can live on a virtual server or on a physical server. The great part is that you have the flexibility to deploy a complex application in the environment that will help it work best. From there, you can package together all critical settings (network, graphics, policies, and even registry edits) and stream the app to a variety of end-points. If your application is too complicated or has too many dependencies, thus preventing full virtualization, packaging and streaming it might be a great option.

     

  • Hosted Applications. These are applications which have been fully virtualized on a VM, versus installed in the data center on a physical host. When an application needs specific resource requirements or even security policies, you can create those policies in the hypervisor. The modern hypervisor offers powerful techniques to allow the application to run in specific and sometimes isolated environments. Remember, you can still virtualize highly-compliant applications as long as you follow security best practices.

 

  • VDI. You might need to create an ideal operating system environment for an application to run smoothly, such as a unique set of drivers or even registry modifications. Using VDI, you can create images with the exact deployment specifications that your application requires.  From there, you can deliver application instances only to those users that need it. You can also segment the delivery of resources to those VDI sessions and how users access the virtual desktops, according to policy.

    In summary, IT has many options today when it comes to application delivery and virtualization. This means that you can control challenging applications from the hypervisor layer and deliver them in the method most optimal for both the app and the environment.

Underwritten by HPE, NVIDIA, and VMware

 

Hide comments

Comments

  • Allowed HTML tags: <em> <strong> <blockquote> <br> <p>

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Publish