The Israeli startup InstallFree releases today the second generation of its application virtualisation Bridge. Bridge 2.0 comes exactly two years after the company public launch and first product release . Bridge is able to create autonomous virtual applications (they don’t require an agent on the target OS to run) which can be updated or incrementally patched without the need to repackage them. Like other application virtualisation products, this one can’t virtualize those applications that depends on components running at kernel-mode, like device drivers, but it can virtualize a critical component of the Windows OS: Internet Explorer. Any customization of the virtualized app is saved inside dedicated encrypted files, which can be centrally stored and redistributed, and which are not involved in any future application update. Bridge also includes a centralized management console which leverages Microsoft Active Directory to distribute the virtual apps to corporate users. From there the administrators can pack applications and patches, apply them to users and groups for delivery, and even manage the available technology licenses accordingly. First of all, Bridge 2.0 introduces the support for Windows 7. This means that the products provides application portability from XP to 7 and that it supports virtualized versions of Internet Explorer 6.0 and 7.0 side by side with Internet Explorer 8.0. Unfortunately InstallFree doesn’t support yet 64bit versions of the Microsoft operating system, but plans to introduce it by Q3 2010. Bridge 2.0 also introduces support for multi-domain environments and a smart connection manager that automatically select the nearest repository where to get application updates. This last option may be especially useful for branch offices deployments. With this release InstallFree is trying to attract the many companies that waited so far to abandon XP because of the (many) Windows Vista faults but that are now facing technical issues in moving key technology packages. To do so, the company is offering an interesting promotion: customers can purchase a special license that allows them to virtualize just five applications of choice (no limitations here, customers are invited to pick up the most problematic ones). InstallFree offers to pre-package those five apps on behalf of the customer, giving away five incident support tickets to solve any issue after migration. If the customer likes the technology he can extend the limited license to the full one (no way to have an additional five-apps-package). And for those customers that want to try the product before buying, InstallFree now offers an online facility that can be accessed through a standard Microsoft RDP connection. The lab environment is activated on demand: unfortunately, it still lacks the capability to see how application packaging works, but it’s a good opportunity to see how the administrative console works for distribution and execution of virtualized apps.

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TechTarget just published an article about the upcoming VMware View 4.5, expected later this year (virtualisation.info heard unconfirmed rumors about this summer). The most interesting part of that piece is that ThinApp will be released as part of it, and that it will support server-side applications. So far no company except the US startup AppZero (formerly Trigence) has claimed capability to virtualize multi-tier, mission critical server workloads through application virtualisation technologies. Besides AppZero, the only other company that is known for working in this area is Microsoft, which disclosed its plan for a server-side version of App-V in January 2008 and showed a first demo in May 2009 at its MMS conference. So far Microsoft didn’t disclose any release date for such version of App-V

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Just before the Christmas break, Citrix has released the first updated for its XenServer 5.5, which introduces a number of improvements and addresses a critical issue with the LVHD snapshots: When LVHD snapshots are deleted, disk space is reclaimed by freeing unused snapshot data. This is provided automatically by XenServer while VMs continue to run. However, there is a known limitation in the 5.5 implementation of this feature: when all snapshots are deleted for a given VM’sdisks, some disk space allocated to these snapshots may remain. To address this limitation, Update 1 includes an ‘Off-line Coalesce’ tool that can reclaim all disk space previously allocated to deleted snapshots while the VM is temporarily set offline.

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