VAP What is a Virtual Application ? A virtual application is an application that has been optimized to run on virtual infrastructure. The application software along with Just Enough Operating System, 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.

Types of VAP Fedora 14 Gnome desktop (Virtual Desktop) isyVmon v2.0 (Network Monitoring System) BitNami Joomla! Stack (CMS) BitNami RubyStack (VMware virtual machine) Zenoss (Network Management System)

Types of Implementation The basic concept of application streaming has its foundation in the way modern computer programming languages and operating systems produce and run application code. Only specific parts of a computer program need to be available at any instance for the end user to perform a particular function. This means that a program need not be fully installed on a client computer, but parts of it can be delivered over a low bandwidth network as and when they are required. The initial launch of an application would be important for the end user and the Packaging process might be optimized to achieve this. Once launched, common functions would be followed. As these functions are requested by the end user, these may be Streamed in a similar manner. In this case the client is pulling the application from the stream server. Otherwise, the full application might be delivered from the server to the client in background. In this case, the server pushes the application to the client. Software as a service (SaaS), sometimes referred to as "software on demand," is software that is deployed over the internet and/or is deployed to run behind a firewall on a local area network or personal computer. With SaaS, a provider licenses an application to customers either as a service on demand, through a subscription, in a "pay-as-you-go" model, or (increasingly) at no charge. This approach to application delivery is part of the utility computing model where all of the technology is in the "cloud" accessed over the Internet as a service. Platform as a service (PaaS) the delivery of a computing platform and solution stack as a service.PaaS offerings facilitate deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software and provisioning hosting capabilities, providing all of the facilities required to support the complete life cycle of building and delivering web applications and services entirely available from the Internet.PaaS offerings may include facilities for application design, application development, testing, deployment and hosting as well as application services such as team collaboration, web service integration and marshalling, database integration, security, scalability, storage, persistence, state management, application versioning, application instrumentation and developer community facilitation. These services may be provisioned as an integrated solution over the web.

Why do we need it ? Improve the efficiency and availability of IT resources and applications through virtualization. Start by eliminating the old “one server, one application” model and run multiple virtual machines on each physical machine. Free your IT admins from spending so much time managing servers rather than innovating. About 70% of a typical IT budget in a non-virtualized datacenter goes towards just maintaining the existing infrastructure, with little left for innovation. An automated datacenter built on the production-proven VMware virtualization platform lets you respond to market dynamics faster and more efficiently than ever before. VMware VSphere delivers resources, applications—even servers— when and where they’re needed. Consolidate most of your infrastructure to Virtual servers and more space is available to scale up your business and electricity costs are reduced dramatically because only 1 or 2 physical servers are running, most people will say that if your consolidate all your servers into 1 or 2 physical server then your have multiple points of failures, that would be the case 5-10 years ago but now you can have 2 servers and have 1 server that has a heartbeat system in place so if 1 of the physical servers is down then the third server will automatically startup and take over.

Pros and Cons of Virtual Servers Pro Consolidate IT infrastructure Reduce cost of electricity Increase flexibility of servers and virtual applications Easier to backup Cons Requires better hardware HDD more prone to failure Hardware problem renders entire server out of order Higher risk of data theft because of server consolidation

Conclusion VAP would be highly valuable in a school environment with fedora 14 and isyVmon where they would reduce the load on the desktop PCs and also would make it easier to monitor network traffic and usage spikes, there would however be a need to upgrade the servers and a need for faster connections for a larger classroom but for individual computer labs these would be ideal over conventional methods of installing standard images with a lot of software on each computer that might not be used and so space is being wasted.