Compatibility through Virtualization

Kevin posted a great write-up on SoftGrid and I just now have had a chance to read it.  Nice work Kevin.

Kevin and I are thinking about including application virtualization in the Vista lab at Educause this year.  Why?  Because when it comes to dealing with compatibility, especially in computer labs, our customers could really beneift from a technology like virtualization.

Imagine you have a course that requires an application which only runs on XP and the vendor has no plans to release an update this semester.  Do you re-image for each class?  Hold the entire lab back just because of one application?  What if you could completely virtualize the offending app and run it within an XP environment, utilizing the local resources (memory, proc, etc) from each workstation?  I'm not talking about running XP as a virtual machine, with SoftGrid you virtualize just the application and deliver it through a stream to the desktop until it has been cached.

This technology just blows me away...

Link to Kevinsul's Management Blog : Playing with SoftGrid...