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Using the Water and Storm Sewer products in a virtualized environment
There are many challenges and questions that arise when deciding which virtualization environment to use for a business. Some of these issues include cost of the software and hardware, ease of implementation, deciding whether the pros for changing to this environment outweigh the cons, and deciding whether all your software will function as designed in the virtualized environment.
Challenges with Haestad products in a virtualized environment
If you are using a virtualization software that virtualizes the application itself rather than virtualizes the entire OS with applications included then you will likely run into issues if you are using one of our products with a platform product such as Microstation, AutoCAD, or ArcGIS (ArcMap). This type of virtualization software appears to have the effect of isolating the application from other parts of the client system and in effect running the application in a sand-box. This is fine for WaterGEMS standalone, but for the integrated platforms our products can no longer interact with other installed programs due to the way it would have been isolated from the rest of the system.
Virtualization software that will work
Any virtualization software that executes our software locally and can get access to the full CPU/disk access of the end user system should work just fine. This would include applications like XenApp, XenDesktop, Hyper-V, and VMware vSphere (and many others…).
It all depends on what you are trying to achieve by virtualizing, but solutions that virtualize the entire operating system as opposed to trying to virtualize a single application, don't have the same limitations as the application specific virtualization appears to have. You could virtualize a complete desktop environment with interacting programs, run it on dedicated hardware, and have lesser powered client systems connect to the virtualized environment.
Generally speaking, our stance is that we “support” virtualization in that it is no longer considered against the license agreement and we’ll do our best to provide support in case issues arise. However, we are not “Citrix Certified” and we don’t test on Citrix as part of normal certification procedure.
See AlsoForum virtualization discussion