Application Virtualisation

[alsheron]

I've just read the article on anandtech about software virtualisation and went right ahead and download a copy of Altiris (which is FREE for personal use amazingly)

I was wondering if anyone out there already uses it or something similar and knows how far you can use it/take the concept in real world use?

One thing that springs to my mind is performing a clean install of my system (Vista 32bit Ultimate) and then virtualising ALL my software, including things like the mighty Photoshop.

Will Photoshop or similarly heavy software run noticeably slower when virtualised with software virtualisation and is is a reasonable thing to do to virtualise EVERYTHING? Surely that's the eventual aim of these software programs?

Anyone interested in finding out more can look at the Altiris Juice website and because it's not so easy to find the link, you can download the free for personal use version from here.

[AStaUK]

I currently work for a small company in the IT dept. I have MS Virtual PC setup on my machine for testing various pieces of software, XP Pro/Vista/Server 2003/2008/Linux.

For testing purposes it is great you can do anything on the virtual PC that you can on a real world PC and if you screw it up, no problem just close the window, delete changes and start over. We're also looking into the possibility of using a virtal server in the event that our main office goes down. The plan is we would simply load a preconfigured virtual server on to the main server at a backup site and run it until a replacement system can be setup. Potentially it would be slower than using a real server, but on the plus side we could have the backup site up and running in hours instead of days.

As a side note if you've not already read it, a virtual machine should be treated the same as a real world PC. So you must have the licences to run the software on it, and you must keep it fully patched and instal a suitable AV program.

As for running Photoshop from within the virtual PC I guess that depend on the amount of RAM you have in you main system and what you assign to the virtual PC. The disc speed/access will be noticbly slower on the virtual PC from my experience so if you are dealing with large files they may take longer to load/save than expected. Bear in mind also that you now have the overheads of two OS for your PC to look after.

With regards to my job, I'm not sure what I would do without my virtual PC's now, they are so handy to have. Also great for running legacy apps on newer machines. I.E I have a few old games which don't run in Vista, now not a problem load a copy of my virtual Win98 and play them from within that :)

AStaley.

[alsheron]

  AStaley said:

I currently work for a small company in the IT dept. I have MS Virtual PC setup on my machine for testing various pieces of software, XP Pro/Vista/Server 2003/2008/Linux.

For testing purposes it is great you can do anything on the virtual PC that you can on a real world PC and if you screw it up, no problem just close the window, delete changes and start over. We're also looking into the possibility of using a virtal server in the event that our main office goes down. The plan is we would simply load a preconfigured virtual server on to the main server at a backup site and run it until a replacement system can be setup. Potentially it would be slower than using a real server, but on the plus side we could have the backup site up and running in hours instead of days.

As a side note if you've not already read it, a virtual machine should be treated the same as a real world PC. So you must have the licences to run the software on it, and you must keep it fully patched and instal a suitable AV program.

As for running Photoshop from within the virtual PC I guess that depend on the amount of RAM you have in you main system and what you assign to the virtual PC. The disc speed/access will be noticbly slower on the virtual PC from my experience so if you are dealing with large files they may take longer to load/save than expected. Bear in mind also that you now have the overheads of two OS for your PC to look after.

With regards to my job, I'm not sure what I would do without my virtual PC's now, they are so handy to have. Also great for running legacy apps on newer machines. I.E I have a few old games which don't run in Vista, now not a problem load a copy of my virtual Win98 and play them from within that :)

AStaley.

Thanks for the feedback! I do pretty much the same and find hardware virtualisation to be an indispensible tool when I also need to test software or most often, test my web pages in IE6. I use VMware for a lot of stuff as it seems more capable when managing VM's in terms of it's easy to use snapshot facility.

I've only just noticed this software virtualisation stuff properly after probably knowing about it's existence for a while now. It seems to be useful for protecting a system from the effects of software and/or facilitating the adding/removing of software completely in a very easy way. One other thing I think it promises is allowing otherwise incompatible software to run side by side. In relation to what you do with your hardware VM is something i'd love to know how to do: Software Virtualise IE6 so i can run it on Vista! Then I wouldn't have to boot up my XP VM in order to test my web pages!

If you havent read the article on anandtech, i highly recommend it. Software Virtualisation is still a grey area to me but it looks VERY interesting and has certain benefits to hardware VM which might come in very handy....

[samg]

We're currently testing moving our live environment over to VM. Just spend ?60k on a new blade enclosure and 9 blades (plus licences etc). It certainly is flexible and very good performance wise!

Allot of people I talk to say they are all moving into VM due to the huge list of benefits. Blades suddenly become hot swappable! True server load balancing across separate hardware.

[alsheron]

  illmonkey said:

We're currently testing moving our live environment over to VM. Just spend ?60k on a new blade enclosure and 9 blades (plus licences etc). It certainly is flexible and very good performance wise!

Allot of people I talk to say they are all moving into VM due to the huge list of benefits. Blades suddenly become hot swappable! True server load balancing across separate hardware.

Do you mean hardware VM or software VM as they are quite different... ?

[samg]

  alsheron said:

Do you mean hardware VM or software VM as they are quite different... ?

Software VM, VMware.

[petrossa]

I use Virtualbox as vm, runs on a separate core under xp 64. It willl let you integrate your vm desktop into your normal desktop. Now i run xp 32 in a VM with openvpn to proxy the UK for watching BBC whilst at the same time i can browse direct with my normal ip address under x64 or run whatever other task with minimal performance penalty. I've put the x64 toolbar at the right and the vm xp 32 toolbar at the bottom of the screen. I can at liberty switch between the two systems by just opening a process either on the left or at the bottom. Very cool indeed

[alsheron]

  illmonkey said:

Software VM, VMware.

VMware is not software VM, it is hardware VM, and they are two different technologies as far as I know, which is the point of my original post. Hardware VM allows the virtualisation of an entire computer i.e. allows you to install an operating system and then of course the software on it. Software VM "virtualises" or allows you to install and run software in a "sandbox" so that it does not affect the OS you're using and remains separated from affecting your main OS.

  petrossa said:

I use Virtualbox as vm, runs on a separate core under xp 64. It willl let you integrate your vm desktop into your normal desktop. Now i run xp 32 in a VM with openvpn to proxy the UK for watching BBC whilst at the same time i can browse direct with my normal ip address under x64 or run whatever other task with minimal performance penalty. I've put the x64 toolbar at the right and the vm xp 32 toolbar at the bottom of the screen. I can at liberty switch between the two systems by just opening a process either on the left or at the bottom. Very cool indeed

Hardware VM is very cool, i use it all the time, but please! :D I'm talking about Software VM here about which i'm no expert but as far as i know it is significantly different in operation to hardware vm and equally fascinating. I must admit, i don't understand the mechanics or working of it and it seems a bit more difficult to get your head round than hardware VM, which is relatively easy to understand. Part of this is because there a few differences in the way software can be virtualised. Read this for a better explanation than I could give at this point.

I was hoping someone on Neowin either knew about Software Virtualisation better than I do at the moment (not hard) or was willing to try it out and could give us all a few pointers on this fascinating new technology.

[petrossa]

  alsheron said:

VMware is not software VM, it is hardware VM, and they are two different technologies as far as I know, which is the point of my original post. Hardware VM allows the virtualisation of an entire computer i.e. allows you to install an operating system and then of course the software on it. Software VM "virtualises" or allows you to install and run software in a "sandbox" so that it does not affect the OS you're using and remains separated from affecting your main OS.

Hardware VM is very cool, i use it all the time, but please! :D I'm talking about Software VM here about which i'm no expert but as far as i know it is significantly different in operation to hardware vm and equally fascinating. I must admit, i don't understand the mechanics or working of it and it seems a bit more difficult to get your head round than hardware VM, which is relatively easy to understand. Part of this is because there a few differences in the way software can be virtualised. Read this for a better explanation than I could give at this point.

I was hoping someone on Neowin either knew about Software Virtualisation better than I do at the moment (not hard) or was willing to try it out and could give us all a few pointers on this fascinating new technology.

sorry, virtualbox is software....... It can use hardware virtualisation if you have it, but runs well without also.

[alsheron]

  petrossa said:

sorry, virtualbox is software....... It can use hardware virtualisation if you have it, but runs well without also.

You mis-understand what i'm saying here. If you read the Anandtech article, all will become clear. ;)

[petrossa]

  alsheron said:

You mis-understand what i'm saying here. If you read the Anandtech article, all will become clear. ;)

read it, by software virtualisation you mean to say application virtualisation. Use that term it will be less confusing to others as software virtualisation is generally accepted to be hardware virtualisation by software.

Your product is is more an intermediate layer between the OS and the software whereby the software has no direct access to the innercore drivers of the os.

Seems to me a very specialised product for big enterprises and not much use to a regular user. Evidently it will be slower. And isnt VMWare derived from OS/2 which ran MS Windows 3 as a guest which ms broke by taking out the possibilty for ms 3.1 to run as a extended memory guest but only as server?

[alsheron]

  petrossa said:

read it, by software virtualisation you mean to say application virtualisation. Use that term it will be less confusing to others as software virtualisation is generally accepted to be hardware virtualisation by software.

Your product is is more an intermediate layer between the OS and the software whereby the software has no direct access to the innercore drivers of the os.

Seems to me a very specialised product for big enterprises and not much use to a regular user. Evidently it will be slower. And isnt VMWare derived from OS/2 which ran MS Windows 3 as a guest which ms broke by taking out the possibilty for ms 3.1 to run as a extended memory guest but only as server?

ok, my mistake, Application Virtualisation - any mods, can you please change the topic title...

Although it's specialised, it has HUGE implications for the end user and not just the enterprise market. It could effectively wipe out software incompatibilites and allow a Windows based system to degrade much less over time because the registry and system areas become less clogged up/messy, increasing stability and longevity. I'm using Altiris now and it's AMAZING how I can simply activate the layer and, say, Firefox is there and funnly functioning, and then de-activate the layer and it's suddenly and completely gone from the system like it was never installed at all. I can also archive the layer and import it elsewhere which makes all my apps portable too, within Virtual Machines and on regular OS installations too... This has massive possibilites for anyone administering systems of course, but for techies/geeks/specialists/enthusiasts like a lot here on Neowin, this is a big deal as it now gives us control over our systems we never had before. Trying out software will be much less problematic. One of the main considerations is of course the performance, so i guess i'll have to test out installing my Adoobe CS3 application virtualised myself. I'll report back when i get round to it....

I don't use Windows 3.1 any more but miss it dearly.... :cry:

[petrossa]

  alsheron said:

ok, my mistake, Application Virtualisation - any mods, can you please change the topic title...

this is a big deal as it now gives us control over our systems we never had before. Trying out software will be much less problematic. One of the main considerations is of course the performance, so i guess i'll have to test out installing my Adoobe CS3 application virtualised myself. I'll report back when i get round to it....

I don't use Windows 3.1 any more but miss it dearly.... :cry:

looking forward to your results, but i am hesitant to its uses. With a hardware virtualisation enabled setup and vm software you can install as many instances of a virtual machine running anything from linux to vista in seperate machines as your computer will take at the same time. I run a simple dualcore with 8 gb and have run vista and xp at the same time, testing out the software compability of the os's whilst still being able to run my dialy chores in my 'real' xp x64. You delete the machine you delete the application. Or you just format the virtual disk..... As an added bonus you can interface the virtual disk with physical disk thus you can install thesame software from a sole directory into different vm setups. Thusly you can really try out the software without risk to your original os.

[alsheron]

  petrossa said:

looking forward to your results, but i am hesitant to its uses. With a hardware virtualisation enabled setup and vm software you can install as many instances of a virtual machine running anything from linux to vista in seperate machines as your computer will take at the same time. I run a simple dualcore with 8 gb and have run vista and xp at the same time, testing out the software compability of the os's whilst still being able to run my dialy chores in my 'real' xp x64. You delete the machine you delete the application. Or you just format the virtual disk..... As an added bonus you can interface the virtual disk with physical disk thus you can install thesame software from a sole directory into different vm setups. Thusly you can really try out the software without risk to your original os.

I would guess that Application virtualisation is more likely to become mainstream (possibly even built into OSes) than hardware VM, so in that sense it seems that Hardware VM is more of an enterprise/server feature than is Application Virtualisation. To me, it's inconvenient and time-consuming to keep either rolling back to a previous system state with Vmware or even re-formatting the VM completely. Also, as far as I know, hardware VM doesn't give access to the hardware as effectively as Application VM because with AppVM there is the ability to access the system resources, like services that the Hardware VM does not have the ability to access.

[Si Veteran]

Title fixed

[Dogward]

I just wanted to show some support here. I am almost as enthusiastic on AppVM as you are, alsheron. If you ever come across some sort of easy AppVM software, please do notify us.

Thanks for the heads up on the article.

[alsheron]

  Dogward said:

I just wanted to show some support here. I am almost as enthusiastic on AppVM as you are, alsheron. If you ever come across some sort of easy AppVM software, please do notify us.

Thanks for the heads up on the article.

Thanks for the support! Altiris is very easy.... well, i managed to figure it out so almost anyone here should be able to also, and it seems to work very well too. I'd be happy to share any info or give some help with it's use as far as I can...

It's very simple in that you install Altiris, reboot, and then load Altiris and click File > Create new layer. It then prompts you to specify the program installer and then it installs the program. Close the installer and Altiris add the program to its menu. From then, it's as simple as right clicking to activate the "layer" or program and right clicking to "deactivate" the layer. Programs installed as "layers" can be exported as packages and imported elsewhere or backed up. The help file is surprisingly useful and the user website seems active enough for those very specific questions. I highly recommend giving it a try!

[petrossa]

  alsheron said:

Also, as far as I know, hardware VM doesn't give access to the hardware as effectively as Application VM because with AppVM there is the ability to access the system resources, like services that the Hardware VM does not have the ability to access.

i actually count the last as a plus for VM, it leaves much less room for a roque app to mess about with my system. I see no other reason for virtualisation then to be able to safely run apps/os's whilst keeping a 'main' system operative to run your dialy chores. If i'd want to run apps with full access to system resources i'd just run them in realtime and uninstall them if not needed.

Adding a separation layer between an app and the underlying os IMHO just adds room for error. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

[alsheron]

  petrossa said:

i actually count the last as a plus for VM, it leaves much less room for a roque app to mess about with my system. I see no other reason for virtualisation then to be able to safely run apps/os's whilst keeping a 'main' system operative to run your dialy chores. If i'd want to run apps with full access to system resources i'd just run them in realtime and uninstall them if not needed.

Adding a separation layer between an app and the underlying os IMHO just adds room for error. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

Uninstallation is one of the big problems unfortunately. It almost always leaves a mess of registry entries and usually files strewn across the OS. Do it with too many programs, too many times and your OS will deteriorate in stability and speed very rapidly. Also, even in a Hardware VM, running apps side by side will cause the same potential application incompatibilites as running them on a "real" system. You can therefore replicate the installed application base you have on your host system in a VM and have the same problems as you would on a bare metal install. While undoubtedly useful, Hardware VM is most appropriately used where a separate machine is needed and AppVM is more suited when software needs to be kept in check/Sandboxed, which is, in my opinion, in the needs/interests of most users whether they know it (us more technologically minded) or not (the general home user).

If i could AppVirtualise IE6 (notoriously difficult if not impossible at the mo) and run it on Vista, i'd have no real use for HardwareVM. As it stands, VMware or VirtualPC do the job just fine, although it's a lot of unnecessary overhead.

[Rudy]

very interesting, I think I might try it in the next month or so. Could someone who tried all the offerings care to give us a small review of each and maybe recommend one?

[Dogward]

  Rudy said:

very interesting, I think I might try it in the next month or so. Could someone who tried all the offerings care to give us a small review of each and maybe recommend one?

As Alsheron adviced, I've downloaded and installed altiris. It is truly amazing.

I made a test and installed PhotoShop CS3 in this virtualized install-environment. Running fine. It is true that its performance in a bit slower than in the real environment BUT it is quite workable.

I think I will be doing a clean vista install one of these days and install everything through the virtual invironment.

I promise to make a review once done.

PS: my specs are: Core 2 Duo E6600, 2Gb Ram, 8600GT, so it is not a "big rig".

  alsheron said:

If i could AppVirtualise IE6 (notoriously difficult if not impossible at the mo) and run it on Vista, i'd have no real use for HardwareVM. As it stands, VMware or VirtualPC do the job just fine, although it's a lot of unnecessary overhead.

I'm trying this as writing ;) if I manage to I'll be sure to let you know. I am really quite excited about this. Thanks again for the heads up !

[Rudy]

how much slower are we talking about? and when does the slowness happen? when writing to the registry ?

[Marshalus Veteran]

I have been playing with Microsoft SoftGrid for a little while, trying to do some application visualization with it. Can't ever seem to get it to work right.

[petrossa]

  alsheron said:

Uninstallation is one of the big problems unfortunately.

it's true, but in case of the vm i just run diff apps in different vm's. I don't get that 'interaction' duplication you talked about and just format the virtual disk. I have different iso's on disk for unattended installs in the vm's, so it's no hassle reinstall a fresh copy.

Furthermore, through the desktop integration virtualbox offers you'd know which vm you'd run only by setting different colour scheme's in the different os's so smootly it works. And the hardware assistance for the virtualisation offers good performance.

Sure you can't run any serious games, but years of fieldstudy into the effect of beer on hand/eye coordination left me incapable anyway to play games...

Still i'm well pleased to let others try out and give the results here ;)

[alsheron]

  Dogward said:

As Alsheron adviced, I've downloaded and installed altiris. It is truly amazing.

I made a test and installed PhotoShop CS3 in this virtualized install-environment. Running fine. It is true that its performance in a bit slower than in the real environment BUT it is quite workable.

I think I will be doing a clean vista install one of these days and install everything through the virtual invironment.

I promise to make a review once done.

PS: my specs are: Core 2 Duo E6600, 2Gb Ram, 8600GT, so it is not a "big rig".

I'm trying this as writing ;) if I manage to I'll be sure to let you know. I am really quite excited about this. Thanks again for the heads up !

Great news about getting Photoshop CS3 virtualised! I look forward to the review and hopefully will add some of my own mini-review/guide type things too. I have very similar system specs to you and I think anyone with a decently modern system would benefit greatly from AppVM.

One thing i'm not sure about though is whether it's possible (or sensible) to virtualise ALL programs, although I don't know of any reason not to. The worst that can happen is that a program doesn't work as expected and i have to install it the "normal" way. It certainly makes sense for program that aren't used very often or are known to be buggy/bloated. In fact, the bloat of programs can be completely side-stepped because you can install them to a "layer" and then only "activate" that programs layer when needed, de-activating it when not needed, which i'm guessing maintains system stability and possibly performance.

One thing i'd like to know the answer to is what would happen if you try to AppVirtualise a driver install. My guess is that it would go horribly wrong and is a very bad idea, but i'd kind of like to play around in a Hardware VM and test all this stuff out!

I'd also like to know how much slower CS3 was when you AppVm'd it please as I use it quite a lot at work. I'm going to give it a try myself at some point this weekend hopefully and may even re-install my system (it needs it anyway)

Does anyone else remember uninstallation programs that did similar things to this AppVM stuff (watch exactly what happens during an install) during the Win95/98 era? They only provided "complete" uninstallation features but the capturing seemed to follow a similar system. By the way, why on earth are application uninstallers (from installshield and wise installer) SO BAD at removing the applications they install?

[petrossa]

  alsheron said:

By the way, why on earth are application uninstallers (from installshield and wise installer) SO BAD at removing the applications they install?

From my personal experience (bit dated now) it's used to be mostky due to imperfections in the registry management by windows itself. If i wrote an uninstaller more often then not the api calls for removing keys and such just failed without an errorreturn so you'd have no idea if it worked or not.

Since by trial and error i found out it's best to call with the same parameters a couple of times, you'd stand a chance it worked.

Haven't done much since 2005 so i couldn't say if that has changed