RE: Thin clients

Whew, thanks Pete. A bundled VM environment makes more sense.
I can see if the hypervisor had a copy and paste function, it might be
installable in the VMs in much the same way as Parallels (a VM product)
has a "Parallels Tools" installer that facilitates things such as mapped
drives, copy and paste, etc. between the VM and host environment. The
"hypervisor tools" install would be made when VM images get deployed to
the thin client.

Loyd Goodbar
Senior programmer/analyst
BorgWarner
TS Water Valley
662-473-5713

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Pete Helgren
Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2007 14:45
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Thin clients

Loyd,

"Are you saying there would be a VM for Word, another for Acrobat, and
another for Outlook?" Nope. I guess you "could" do it that way if that

was necessary but I would expect that vendors would have a tool for
bundling applications into a VM or offer a pre packaged VM with a set of

applications. An "Office VM" for example (although MS makes too much
money on OS's to go to hypervisor layer VM's). The idea is that if you
package and deliver a set of applications that can't be modified or
updated by the end user, you have a more secure environment. Of course
you'd want to package other applications as well and perhaps in some
cases you'd just go ahead and deliver a whole OS with installed
applications as your VM. However, switching running VM's on a
hypervisor could be easy as clicking an icon on the task bar. I switch
between running VM's in XP all the time (I have Windows 98 in one VM and

Linux in another) and it is quick and seamless. Of course these are
running on top of an OS but there is no reason they couldn't perform the

same on a hypervisor.

Copy and paste would be something to consider as you determined what to
bundle together and what you could run in an individual VM. I suppose
the hypervisor layer could do this. However, since this is all
theoretical at the moment, we'll assume that it IS a hypervisor feature
:-) That would take care of it.

Pete