As we proceed boldly into a brave new world, one dominated by virtualized infrastructure of one form or another, some things remain consistent. As hardware capacity expands in significant proportion, applications aren't quite keeping pace at filling the capacity. Servers are already significantly under-utilized. Virtualization provides a viable means to better utilize hardware capacity by allowing multiple OS instances to exist on the same physical server.

By now we've all heard about the benefits of consolidation. This is a good thing. The value and the benefits of consolidation are real, and there are several alternatives to choose from as the technology matures. Hardware virtualization, as offered by VMWare and Xen, provides the flexibility to run multiple OSs. Paravirtualization offers slight improvement in performance compared to full hardware virtualization at the cost of significant complexity. OS virtualization such as Solaris Zones and SWsoft Virtuozzo provide flexibility with greatly improved performance. Native virtualization is similar to full hardware virtualization as it supports multiple disparate guest OSs and is based on virtualization support provided by advances in CPU technology. There's a solution here for your unique needs.

As your infrastructure becomes virtualized - storage, server and network - your flexibility and usage increases. This is a good thing... but what about the applications? Do the configuration management struggles that exist related to applications today go away in the context of a virtualized infrastructure? They don't - and this is where application virtualization comes in.

Enter Trigence Application Capsules, which are consistent with a common theme. Even with all of the server virtualization options available, companies still have the same problem with applications as they did in an all-physical server world. Existing management tools need to evolve along with your virtualized infrastructure. By extending the benefits of virtualization to the application, Application Capsules are an evolutionary component to the application configuration management morass. Trigence Application Capsules are not a new management tool: they are an adjunct to your tools, an extension of the reach of your existing tools.