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Windows Vista Virtualization: What You Need To Know To Get Started

Posted by Danielle Ruest and Nelson Ruest
March 10, 2008

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Channel: Other, Networking & Mgmt, Servers & Storage, Virtualization, Wireless

Microsoft's release of Windows Vista and its Service Pack 1 coincides with one of the greatest revolutions in the IT industry: the coming of virtualization technologies. VMware, Oracle, Citrix, Symantec, Sun Microsystems, Thinstall, Microsoft, and others have entered the fray to release products that are oriented towards virtualization.

Running Windows Vista through desktop virtualization.

These products fall into two main categories.

• Machine virtualization lets you run complete operating systems within a virtualized layer on top of physical hardware, making better use of hardware resources. This level of virtualization is proving to be a boon to organizations at many levels seeking server consolidation, desktop virtualization, disaster recovery planning, and more.
• Application virtualization lets you "sandbox" applications so that they do not affect the operating system or other applications when deployed to a system. Application virtualization, or AppV, will make it much easier to manage application lifecycles because applications are no longer "installed" on systems, but rather, copied to systems.

Both of these technologies have a significant impact on Vista adoption. Overall, it is a good thing most organizations haven't moved to adopt Vista yet because they will be able to take advantage of virtualization in their deployment. Here's how.

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