Publishing apps from virtual desktops

One of the reasons people look at implementing virtual desktops over the traditional terminal services/presentation server/XenApp server based computing environment is application compatibility and co-existence.  In those server based multi-user environments, some applications don’t work – or at least require a fair bit of time to get working and keep working. Sometimes applications simply require the workstation version of the OS. Sometimes the apps don’t like to be run by multiple users at the same time. Even in a well designed and well managed environment, and even using application visualisation, some apps still don’t run or don’t run well.  In a virtual desktop environment, the remote session is running on a workstation OS (rather than a server OS), and the session is dedicated to a single user. As such, many of those applications that have issues in the terminal server environment work fine in a virtual desktop. And if they don’t, since the environment isn’t shared, the problem only affects the one user.

However,  giving users a whole virtual desktop so they can run a couple of extra applications remotely isn’t always desirable. Sometimes it would be ideal to publish an application that is installed on a virtual desktop to a user, so they can run that application without also presenting them a whole desktop. Remember back to when  Citrix introduced seamless published applications – so much of that complexity went away for the user when they could just run the application, without also having to interact with a second desktop session.

Another usage scenario applies to thin terminal users – the users today that do run a whole published desktop from a multi-user server OS. Administrators could provide those users a published application within their published desktop – but instead of running on the server desktop, the application runs from a workstation virtual desktop, and is presented into the user’s server desktop session. This would effectively allow more applications to be provided in the thin client environment, without switching over to a completely virtual desktop environment. In essence, it would allow you to run some server based pulished apps, and some desktop based published apps – whatever was needed and whatever made sense for the administrators.

So, sounds like something that makes sense, right?  Citrix thought so, and have recently announced this new feature (planned for Q3 2009) that allows you to publish applications that are running on virtual desktops. These applications can then be run remotely, just like any other XenApp seemless published application.

Citrix has called the feature VM Hosted Apps, and it will be a great addition to the XenApp suite which will give orgainisations another option for those applications that don’t like running in a multi-user, or server based environment.

Of course Quest has had this capability for a while now with via their vWorkspace product.  In fact Quest has long been promoting a use case for virtual desktops along these lines – using the single user workstation OS to run applications that the terminal servers can’t – but publish the apps through to the terminal server environment where user density is more cost effective.

And I should also mention Microsoft’s RAIL – Remote Applications Integrated Locally. It’s essentially the same concept also, and is used in Windows 7 to publish applications that are running on the “XP Mode” virtual desktop through to the Windows 7 start menu and desktop.

Whichever way you look at it, publishing applications from a variety of machines and OS’s, and running them in a variety of combinations and locations will soon be possible from multiple vendors. More options. More flexibility. More complexity?  The question is, how will we manage and assign apps? But that’s a conversation for another day.