Re: [Xen-devel] App virtualisation, not OS virtualisation

[John Levin <xenjohn@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 10/21/05, Mark Williamson <mark.williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > - I want to have several copies of an application running, each with a
> > remote user. How do I pass the keyboard / mouse data to the right
> > application if there is only one Windows message queue?
>
> Sadly, I don't have much to suggest here but I'm not a Windows person...
> Thought of getting a more expensive Windows which allows multiple RDP
> connections?  That'll probably really hurt the wallet, though...
>
> > If the NX you are referring to is Linux terminal server then that's no
> > use because:
> >
> > - it doesn't solve the two problems I mentioned above
>
> Well, separate NX login sessions *ought* to solve both problems but it'll only
> work for Linux apps *unless* your app is friendly enough to run under Wine
> (might be worth a try).
>
> > Well that was my original question. As I understand it, Xen has been
> > designed to act as an encapsulation of the OS so that several copies /
> > versions of OS can be run. But it seems a waste of memory (and licence
> > fee?) if I need a complete copy of Windows XP for each copy of the
> > application I want to run
>
> I can't remember what the MS position is on licensing virtual machines these
> days.
>
> > I was wondering whether Xen, or a part of Xen
> > could run on top of Windows XP to encapsulate just the application
> > instead, so that I could run multiple copies of the application but just
> > one copy of the OS.
>
> Not really: Xen is extremely oriented towards encapsulating operating systems.
> Encapsulating an application (whilst useful) is too "high level" for Xen;
> it's really a separate problem space, since it'd basically share no code in
> common with Xens current functionality.

On a sort of related note, I was wondering if it was on any roadmap to
support RAM sharing between OS instances -- like with VMware's clone
feature (or something like that), I think if you had two very similar
VMs, they would actually use less RAM and disk than each have, they
would just diverge where they are different (some sort of
copy-on-write scheme).

Thanks


>
> Unfortunately, there appear to be fewer means of encapsulating apps on Windows
> than Linux anyhow - there's the separate RDP logins approach, or you may find
> there's a commercial "jail" system for Windows (I thought Virtuozzo used to
> have something for this but I think they dropped it...).  There's also the
> various third party login solutions like Citrix, etc.  Other than that I
> don't have any ideas...
>
> HTH,
> Mark
>
> > g.
> >
> >
> >
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