At a minimum, the workspace consists of everything above the operating system kernel – applications, data, settings, and any non-privileged operating system subsystems required to provide a functional desktop computing environment.
By doing this, applications within the workspace can interact with each other, enabling them to do some of the things users are accustomed to and which are missing in application virtualization such as embedding a Microsoft Excel worksheet into a Microsoft Word document.
Further, the workspace contains applications settings and user data enabling the user to move to a different operating system or to a different computer and still preserve applications, settings and data in one complete working unit.
Because the applications in a Desktop Virtualization environment run at a different location, on a remote machine or in a local virtual machine, and technology simply offers a way to present the graphics interface locally using technologies such as Remote Desktop.
Workspace virtualization, on the other hand, offers the advantage that the amount of time required to move from one client computer to another is small because applications, settings and data are stored locally on the client.