Application dependencies challenge vast majority of virtualisation projects

An independent study, sponsored by the company, used a random sample of 100 key applications working with enterprise systems – and ran those through its AOK Virtualise-IT testing suite. It found that two thirds could be virtualised but half would need some remedial work or deployment with dependent components. Grant Ford at Changebase AOK says the aim of the survey was to establish useful numbers that might help organisations understand potential issues when moving to a virtualised platform – as well as to define what’s likely to be required to enable virtualisation technology. He also says that the survey demonstrates that using AOK Virtualise-IT consistently enabled problems to be identified in minutes – and that 70% of resolvable problems can be automatically fixed, saving 200—300 man days per 100 applications compared with manual testing and remediation. “Of the issues and information revealed by AOK, the largest group was the identification of the need for Microsoft Office availability – meaning an application wants to use an Office application, and that if this is not loaded in the Virtual environment the application will experience problems,” explains Ford. “131 informational messages were raised across 16 of the applications that could be virtualised, showing that they had a dependency on Office components being available to them – which proved interesting, as the biggest concern that clients had voiced was the ability to be able to identify dependant middleware or missing dependencies,” he adds. Excluding the Office file dependencies, 219 issues were raised across six different categories for 49 applications that required attention. Ford says that in total, AOK could fix 155, taking just two minutes to complete. The remaining 64, required a packager decision, to be remediated manually. Of the top five categories of issue that required remediation, four were automatically fixable in AOK.