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GCN Home > 03/17/08 issue

LANDesk Application Virtualization

GCN Lab Review: LANDesk’s Application Virtualization product was the least intrusive of all the solutions we tested, as well as the most flexible

By Paul Ferrill, Special to GCN

“If you don’t have time to build it, then buy it” goes the saying. That’s what LANDesk did to get into the application virtualization game. The company brought together Thinstall and its LANDesk Application Virtualization Suite product along with some integration work to make it compatible with LANDesk’s management tools. Thinstall uses an approach similar to Altiris’ SVS but different enough to merit further discussion.

While SVS uses a client application and installs a filter driver on the local machine, Thinstall builds an executable image, including a cut-down version of the Windows operating system (VOS) adding about 400K to the size of the virtualized application. When you launch a Thinstall virtual app, the program first loads the VOS, which in turn loads the application into an isolated environment. All access to the underlying operating system and file system is controlled by a configuration file created at the time you build the virtual application.

It’s important to point out that all LANDesk virtual applications run exclusively in user mode.

That can be critical for enterprise environments with locked-down PCs without administration rights. User mode makes possible a number of significant benefits from a security perspective.

All virtualized applications using this approach run at the same security level of a typical user, so a malicious attacker would have no path to an elevated privilege, as he might when some part of a program runs in kernel mode.

Because of this, there are some applications that cannot be virtualized using this approach. Anything that needs to talk directly to the hardware — an Ethernet sniffer tool such as Wireshark, for instance — or that requires some type of driver won’t work. Windows Vista 64-bit also can have problems with the current release of the software.

Building a virtualized application consists of taking before-and-after snapshots of a Windows machine in the process, while installing the application in between. It’s important to use a clean installation of Windows to build your virtual applications.

If one of the system files required by the application already exists on the system, the setup program won’t know to load that into the image, and your virtual application won’t work.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Software Applications



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