Microsoft Launches Desktop Virtualization Tool for Windows Upgrades

I don’t need to tell anyone reading this that the biggest hurdle to OS upgrades is application incompatibility – what’s the point in spending money on a Windows 7 license if the software you need to do business won’t run? Enter Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V), a new tool released in beta for Windows Vista and Windows 7 designed to transparently run applications in a previous version of the OS (say, Windows XP). Here’s the scoop.

MED-V is currently available through the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, a solution for helping reduce deployment costs and control enterprise desktops, which in turn is only available to Software Assurance customers. Administrators can deploy and provision the virtual Windows XP Virtual PC environments and choose what applications will be available within the image from a central dashboard. It can even reroute web requests that require Internet Explorer 6 to the Virtual PC.

The goal, according to Microsoft’s literature, is to ease the migration path from XP to a version of Windows that doesn’t predate social networking – as of next year, we’ll be ten years out from Windows XP’s release – by making sure every required application works transparently to the end-user.

Microsoft obviously has a vested interest in getting enterprise Windows XP holdouts to buy licenses for the newer versions of Windows and make the migration. All the same, it’s not hard to see how MED-V could be of great utility to enterprise administrators.

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