Virtualised Windows 7 Migration
The wait for Windows 7 combined with the comparatively lower than anticipated uptake of Vista has, as we know, left many users clinging for dear life onto XP. It has also, arguably, provided a breathing space for the virtualisation market to edge a little closer to users’ desktops. As I have postulated in the past, we may see a rise in virtual desktop and virtual application suites actually being used because of these combined factors.
Virtualisation and ‘optimised’ computing player Parallels has been edging closer to every corner of this market for some time now. Although Microsoft was in attendance as a “partner” at the company’s Las Vegas summit, Parallel’s would clearly love to see its own technologies further embedded in the average corporate stack.
The company’s latest Beta features a solution that claims to enable users to migrate to Windows 7 and run “legacy” Windows XP programs side-by-side with Windows 7 applications. Parallels says that its new product can overcome compatibility issues with apps such as Roxio 2009 and AOL Instant Messenger by using its adaptive hypervisor and tools such as Coherence and SmartSelect – both technologies designed to help run differing OSs and their applications side-by-side.
Being a Mac user I will be staying cheerfully distanced from Windows 7 for as much of the rest of my natural life as is physically possible, so I feel I should provide you with a link here to try it for yourself if you wish. That said, I am in the process of installing Parallels Desktop for Mac so perhaps they’ll get me in the end.
Judging by the “innovations” that Parallels and other vendors in this space are pumping out, it will be factors like 3D graphics support, USB compatibility and actual on-the-job performance that these products will ultimately be judged upon.
It will be down to ease of use too yes, but what will that really mean? Most likely that will be down to the difficulties users experience when physically trying to transfer applications and data from older operating systems such as Windows 2000, XP or Vista to a new Windows 7 machine. Thankfully, tools already exist in this space to ease this burden, although their effectiveness is still open to question.