Virtual execution environment for windows applications

Application virtualization has been a trend for the architecture of Software as a Service (SaaS), which isolates applications from OS and from other applications. This paper provides a solution of virtual execution environment for windows applications, which intercepts a select subset of system calls at the user-level, incorporates the resources requested by the applications which are stored in different places through copy-on-write scheme and renaming mechanisms and implements three modules, including virtual registry, file visit virtualization and system objects virtualization in order to isolate applications from OS and from other application partially. Using the environment, the applications could be run in the host system without installation and without any changes. Experimental results demonstrate that the overhead of our solution is limited and acceptable.