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

[Mark Williamson <mark.williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> - 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.

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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