RE: Thin clients

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
AGlauser@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2007 4:33 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: RE: Thin clients

Charles Wilt wrote on 12/09/2007 16:15:04:

It all come down to what you call an OS, in simple terms,

an OS talks

to the hardware and provided services to the applications

running in

it.

I saw a presentation by some VMWare folks at my local Linux
Users Group recently, and I got to thinking along the same lines.

Just think of the file/web/email servers you can get as hardware
appliances today. Now, instead of an
physical machine, you could just get a VM image to run on your own

hardware.

VMWare actually has a bunch of VM appliances like you describe for
download on its website.

Good point, but AFAIK, all those are built using standard OSs.

I'm thinking more in terms of a proprietary OS, (though perhaps based on Linux), customized
specifically to run a web/email/file/DB server application.

For instance, Oracle now offers its "Unbreakable Linux". Now imagine, they cut and customize that a
little more, package it along with Oracle 10g in a VM image where you don't have any access to what we
could call the OS.

This could make sense. Oracle would be in control all the way back to the hypervisor.

The only thing is, if it makes sense, why wouldn't Oracle have done it before? It's not any easier to
talk to a VM than it is to talk to a physical one. It's not like the x86 platform has changed in a
while.

Charles



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