App-V Versus Altiris SVS

I was asked today to comment on the differences between Microsoft's App-V and Altiris' SVS virtualization solutions. I thought, aha! A blog posting for Thursday! Here are my initial thoughts. Note, I have heavily referenced a report published by PQR and so have included a reference to their more complete evaluations of currently available virtualization products on the market.

Altiris SVS leverages two technologies to deliver virtualized application environments to the user:

1. Virtual distribution—streaming allows the user to acquire applications from any endpoint, while minimizing bandwidth requirements and optimizing license consumption.
2. Virtual execution—layering applications on disk ensures that each application includes all of its appropriate resources, eliminates conflicts with other applications and the base operating system, and enables instant repair.
3. Rule based application and licensing management

Microsoft’s App-V environment provides a virtualization platform that delivers;

1. Application virtualization: Enable applications to be deployed an run without the need to visit a desktop, laptop, or terminal server.
2. Applications are no longer installed on the client—and there is minimal impact on the host operating system or other applications.
3. Dynamic streaming delivery: Applications are delivered, on demand, to laptops, desktops, and terminal servers. In some cases a small portion of the application is downloaded to the client in order to launch the application. 
4. Centralized, policy-based management (AD): Virtual Application deployments, patches, updates, and terminations are more easily managed via policies, and administered through the App-V console or via your ESD system.

A comparison between the two Virtualization Technologies (for my boss) would include;

• App-V is the most complete, best managed virtualization system on the market today
• SVS offers a local execution, layered virtualization technology that App-V does not
• App-V is fully integrated into Microsoft Active Directory management platform
• SVS experiences technical challenges when dealing when dealing with middleware (i.e. JAVA)
• App-V experiences difficulty with IE6 and some .NET packages.
• App-V sequencing  and SVS capture technologies are both relatively immature

For the full report, look here: http://www.virtuall.nl/download-document/application-virtualization-solutions-overview-and-feature-compare-matrix