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Sorry, but ewww. Are you saying there would be a VM for Word, another
for Acrobat, and another for Outlook? And when a user clicked on a Word
attachment in Outlook, it wouldn't view because Word is on "another
computer" for all intents (not local to Outlook)? Does copy and paste
work between VMs? Not like when Windows runs multiple remote desktops -
there you rely on Windows to orchestrate the copy and paste
functionality. But at the hypervisor level?

That sounds "too secure". And we all know what a secure computer is -
powered off and unplugged in its own closet.

Loyd Goodbar
Senior programmer/analyst
BorgWarner
TS Water Valley
662-473-5713
-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces+lgoodbar=borgwarner.com@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces+lgoodbar=borgwarner.com@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Pete Helgren
Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2007 14:16
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Thin clients

Booth,

Actually, it is even simpler than that. The hypervisor vendor would
develop a hypervisor that worked with a specific set of common hardware
components. You could then boot the machine, not to an OS, but to the
hypervisor itself. The hypervisor might be burned as firmware or is
might boot from the network. The hypervisor would access a config file
that would identify what applications are available and those
applications would boot as VM's on the hypervisor layer, pulling the
software off a server (similar to Citrix or other thin client
applications). No local OS, no local file system (unless it was
needed). So you could have a diskless workstation with just hardware,
memory and CPU. Keeps things simple from a management standpoint. Yes,

if there was new hardware, the hypervisor would have to support it but
you *could* also have the VM itself BE a Windows or Linux OS. Again
the machine itself wouldn't be running and OS, just the hypervisor to
boot the VM. So the VM could be a standalone app (like word
processing) or a complete OS with installed applications. But the
hypervisor is the key since it could support many VM's of different
types.

The hardware/software savings is probably not the compelling reason
(unless open source projects started writing to the hypervisor layer
negating the need for an OS) and you can be sure that some application
vendors would still change for their apps, even if they were running on
a hypervisor instead of an OS but the whole issue of management is even
further simplified here. You have hypervisor and hardware. Anyone who
runs on an OS (ANY OS) and that is all of us, knows that the OS
contributes to some application management issues (not ALL but some).
Eliminating the OS just further reduces the complexity.

Mind you, this is just an idea I have been musing over. Reality is a
long way off.

Pete Helgren




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