Application Virtualization tutorials

Nice articles on Application Virtualization. Martin Brown explains:

You can consider a grid to be a form of virtualization -- if you consider the individual components and functionality within your grid as virtualized components that can be accessed by higher-level applications. For example, within a typical grid environment, the security of the grid, storage methods (particularly for resources and persistent, but transient, data used during grid execution), and the entire method of executing the application are abstracted.

The grid infrastructure sits on top of one or more platforms and provides services within a standardized environment. You can almost consider the environment to be a new operating system and platform. Effectively, the underlying platforms (hardware and OS) are hidden by the grid environment. The grid then provides a new environment for the execution of applications, and the application runs in this virtualized environment. In this respect, your application runs in a virtualized environment created by the grid, which in turn creates the virtualized environment by collectively organizing the grid components to operate as a single resource.

In this series, we will examine the three levels -- grid infrastructure, grid environment and grid applications -- and how they interact, and how to build and adapt your applications using the standardized environment offered by the grid and the solutions offered by the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA), service-oriented architecture (SOA), the Web services (WS) standards, and other techniques.

Here check them out part 1, part 2 and part 3.