Virtualization roadmap

Hi A3,

These are very high level questions in very small sentences. I'll try to give you my view on this with as few words as possible. I think probably any experienced techie could write a book about this, but I'll try to keep it as RESUG related as I can...

I guess in general you'd like to leave architecture to (us) architects. They are things that have to do with business drivers. For instance, it should be of no importance to your end-users and as long as you have introduced the workspace concept because the underlying architecture doesn't really matter. You can pretty much use heterogenous architectures like server based computing, client server computing and mobile computing in a mix if you properly setup workspace management. It's up to the business to decide what kind of computing solutions are needed based on particular business drivers. To illustrate, server based computing doesn't allways offer the same flexibility that mobile computing does, but mobile computing doesn't allways offer the same administration- and cost efficiency that server based computing does. So.. Having typed that, we'll leave it at that.

Now for my two cents...
Personally, I like to take a modular approach to things. Detach applications from the operating system if you can. Virtualization would be an excellent solution to achieve this. In IT it's pretty much all about automating/simplyfying your tasks and delivering predictable results in a cost efficient matter, so keep these applications as plain as you can. All user-based configuration related to applications can be done after deployment of these apps, regardless of the deployment mechanism. Using application virtualization technology, you can for instance manipulate virtual HKLM, HKCU, DSNs, MAPi, whatever based on whatever kind of business rule you can think of as long as you keep the workspace concept in mind.