Microsoft released App-V 4.6 and MED-V 1.0 SP1 Release Candidate, two offerings designed to help businesses leverage virtualization to stream and host proprietary applications for workers, on Feb. 22. Both App-V 4.6 and MED-V 1.0 will conceivably give IT administrators the ability to plot out their virtualization strategy even as they prepare for Office 2010 and, in some cases, upgrade their office IT infrastructure to Windows 7. MED-V 1.0 lets applications that require Internet Explorer 6 or else are unable to run with Windows 7 operate in a managed virtual desktop environment.
Microsoft released two business-centric virtualization
applications-App-V 4.6 and MED-V
1.0 SP1 Release Candidate, designed to help the enterprise and SMBs better
integrate proprietary applications into their evolving IT infrastructure-on
Feb. 22. Specifically, App-V 4.6 is the next generation of Microsoft's
application virtualization product, extending 64-bit support to streaming
applications for business users; MED-V
1.0 SP1 RC is an enterprise desktop product that allows applications that
require Internet Explorer 6 or else are insupportable on Windows 7 to be run in
a managed virtual desktop environment.
This latest push comes as Microsoft is gearing up to release
Office 2010, one of the flagship elements of what it regards as its
next-generation productivity offerings. Although MED-V
is still in release-candidate stage, both it and App-V 4.6 will give IT
administrators the ability to plot their office's virtualization strategy for
2010 and beyond.
"New technologies like App-V and MED-V
(both included in Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack [MDOP] 2010) combined
with System Center Configuration Manager provide new ways to package, deliver
and manage locally installed and virtual applications in ways previously
inconceivable," Gavriella Schuster, Microsoft's general manager of Windows
Commercial Product Management, wrote in a draft of a blog posting distributed
to journalists ahead of the two applications' release announcement.
"These along with other technologies and best
practices form Application Optimization," Schuster continued, "a term
we use to describe a holistic approach to managing your application portfolio, [enabling]
testing and mitigating compatibility issues, packaging applications easily for
faster delivery to the user, and managing applications pivoted on the user and
not the device."
This more-modular virtualization technology, in other
words, gives increased flexibility for IT administrators looking to scale and
distribute offerings to workers even as they upgrade their existing software
stack to Windows 7 and Office 2010.
App-V 4.6 can be downloaded as part of MDOP 2010 at the Microsoft Volume
Licensing Site (MVLS) for existing MDOP customers. (MDOP 2010 can be
downloaded from MSDN
and TechNet.)
The MED-V
1.0 SP1 Release Candidate can be
downloaded here.
Nicholas Kolakowski is a staff editor at eWEEK, covering Microsoft and other companies in the enterprise space, as well as evolving technology such as tablet PCs. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Playboy, WebMD, AARP the Magazine, AutoWeek, Washington City Paper, Trader Monthly, and Private Air. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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