A Blog by Andrew Rothfield Re-Think, Re-New, Re-Invest in IT

At the gym this morning, we had a lively conversation about applications and virtualization.  The other person, a software rep from Lawson, told me he was often asked if his application was VMware compliant.  My customers seem to have many questions on what can be virtualized and what cannot.  I recently read an article about this subject.  The question what applications cannot be virtualized, not want can.

Here is a set of criterion that might help:

1. Applications that install and rely on a system-level driver, i.e. an application that installs a print driver or a USB device driver. Some applications may allow for the drivers to be installed independent of the other components of the application. As a work around for this scenario, the driver portion of this application could be installed locally on the client system, allowing the other components of the application to be virtualized.

2. Applications that install boot-time services.

3. Applications that use COM+.

4. MAPI virtualization

5. COM DLL surrogate virtualization, i.e. DLL’s that run in Dllhost.exe.

6. Applications with licensing enforcement tied to machine, e.g. the license is tied to the system’s MAC address.

That is about it.  I hope this will help you. 

Someone once asked me how you eat and elephant, I answered, one bite at a time.  The same is true when you start to re-think your datacenter and how you will go forward into the future of IT.

I am no genius but, it does look like the network is the computer.  (I think Steve Balmer from MS kind of missed it when he say the future is the PC.)  It also doesn't take a genius to see the amazing opportunity coming over the next three years when the three billionth person joins the network.

Scale is required to reach this vast audience.  You can succeed by first re-thinking how a competitive advantage can be had through IT.

A Forrester Research  report last fall found that half the businesses surveyed said they are currently "virtualizing" their computer servers; two-thirds said they will start using server-virtualization technologies by the end of 2007.

First you need the recipe to cook the elephant - we can help.