These days, everyone is excited about the promise of PC virtualization, but with so many different flavors out there, it's hard to know where to start. The idea of reducing a fully functional corporate desktop into a single file that can be carried on a USB disk and run on any PC is exciting to users. But virtualization's real benefit lies in its potential to reduce management and support burdens, improve security and reliability, and lower total cost of ownership.

We're not there yet. Figuring out how to deploy the right mix of desktop virtualization technologies at scale, and how to manage across all of those virtual environments, will be the big nut to crack in 2008. For most enterprises, this will be a year to test and experiment with smaller rollouts.

We've come a long way since desktop virtualization meant using thin clients that interacted with Windows applications running on a Citrix MetaFrame back end. Today, you can virtualize individual Windows applications (think Softricity) or entire virtual PCs (VMware ACE), and you can choose between having virtual environments execute on the PC or on back-end hardware (Citrix Xen Desktop, Presentation Server). For virtual environments that execute on the PC, some products (Kidaro, Moka5) allow streaming of centrally managed virtual machine images and updates down to the client. Kidaro adds a management wrapper around the virtual PC that includes tight security controls to allow it to run securely on unmanaged Windows PCs.

But desktop virtualization is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Not only do you need to choose a variety of products for different needs, but in some situations, you might need to deploy virtualization in layers. For example, you can issue a plug-and-play VMware ACE virtual PC that includes its own instance of Windows, and then use an application virtualization product like Softricity to create individually isolated, virtualized Windows application instances running within that environment. There are good reasons why you might want to do that, but that's also a lot of complexity to manage.

Application virtualization products are needed because they redress a core failure of Windows: the inability to control misbehaving application installs that create registry or DLL conflicts. Application virtualization lets IT avoid much of the regression testing otherwise required to create a reliable desktop system image. It also lets older applications to run on a newer version of Windows and can allow two versions of the same application to run side by side.

In the future, this capability may be integrated into Windows itself, says Natalie Lambert, an analyst at Forrester Research. She predicts that Microsoft will roll its Softricity technology into the next release. It will become the ultimate work-around for the problem of misbehaving applications, and the standard-bearer for all future deployments of Windows applications. "Three years from now, every [Windows] application will be virtualized," she says.

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