A virtual application is an application that has been optimized to run on virtual infrastructure. The application software along with just enough operating system (JeOS or "juice") is combined inside a virtual machine container in a manner that maximizes the performance of the application. By minimizing the system software to the smallest set of packages required to support the application, the maintenance and administration burden of the virtual application is greatly reduced.
Just Enough Operating System is a paradigm for customizing operating systems to fit the needs of a particular application such as for a software appliance. The platform only includes the operating system components required to support a particular application and any other third-party components contained in the appliance,. This makes the appliance smaller, faster and potentially more secure than an application running under a full general-purpose OS.
By including Application streaming in the design of an application server capable of hosting a Virtual Application, no application specific code need reside on the server at all. Packages of code reside on the server, but the details on how they are to be invoked in order to create the functionality that adds up to the application, gets passed to the server as and when needed. In effect the application does not exist on the server at all. Though clients can still invoke it almost as if it did. The difference being that the incoming request must either include application logic ( exploiting the code packages on the server), or information on where to locate such logic in a repository.
Application streaming is a form of on-demand software distribution. In these scenarios, only essential portions of an application's code need to be installed on the computer: while the end user performs actions in the application, the necessary code and files are delivered over the network as and when they are required.
Virtual appliances are a category of virtual applications which are further optimized for simplified setup and configuration by the customer and remote management by the application vendor.
A virtual appliance is a pre-configured virtual machine image, ready to run on a hypervisor; virtual appliances are a subset of the broader class of software appliances. Installation of a software appliance on a virtual machine and packaging that into an image creates a virtual appliance. Like software appliances, virtual appliances are intended to eliminate the installation, configuration and maintenance costs associated with running complex stacks of software.
Application Virtualization is software technology that encapsulates computer programs from the underlying operating system on which it is executed. A fully virtualized application is not installed in the traditional sense, although it is still executed as if it were. The application behaves at runtime like it is directly interfacing with the original operating system and all the resources managed by it, but can be isolated or sandboxed to varying degrees.
Microsoft Application Virtualization is an application virtualization and application streaming solution from Microsoft. It was originally developed by Softricity, a company based in Boston, Massachusetts, acquired by Microsoft on July 17, 2006. App-V represents Microsoft's entry to the application virtualization market, alongside their other virtualization technologies such as Hyper-V, Microsoft User Environment Virtualization (UE-V), Remote Desktop Services, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager.
Turbo is a set of software products and services developed by the Code Systems Corporation for application virtualization, portable application creation, and digital distribution. Code Systems Corporation is an American corporation headquartered in Seattle, Washington, and is best known for its Turbo products that include Browser Sandbox, Turbo Studio, TurboServer, and Turbo.
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The term "software multitenancy" refers to a software architecture in which a single instance of software runs on a server and serves multiple tenants. Systems designed in such manner are often called shared. A tenant is a group of users who share a common access with specific privileges to the software instance. With a multitenant architecture, a software application is designed to provide every tenant a dedicated share of the instance - including its data, configuration, user management, tenant individual functionality and non-functional properties. Multitenancy contrasts with multi-instance architectures, where separate software instances operate on behalf of different tenants.
A software appliance is a software application combined with just enough operating system (JeOS) to run optimally on industry-standard hardware or in a virtual machine. It is a software distribution or firmware that implements a computer appliance.
In computer science, storage virtualization is "the process of presenting a logical view of the physical storage resources to" a host computer system, "treating all storage media in the enterprise as a single pool of storage."
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In computing, the term remote desktop refers to a software or operating system feature that allows a personal computer's desktop environment to be run remotely on one system, while being displayed on a separate client device. Remote desktop applications have varying features. Some allow attaching to an existing user's session and "remote controlling", either displaying the remote control session or blanking the screen. Taking over a desktop remotely is a form of remote administration.
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