[ale] Mass Machine Virtualization w/ Remote GUI Access

[Steven A. DuChene]

You might want to look into a product concept offered by IBM called
Deep Computing Visualization (dcv).

The company I an currently working for is using this to allow multiple
remote people to run gui apps from a central server displayed to their
desktops located all over (china, india, france, california and etc).
It is based around VNC. We have found that even using a big
server system with multiple GB
of memory there is still a practical limit of around 4 - 8 people who
can run VMware sessions off of a remote server.

-----Original Message-----
>From: Jeff Hubbs <hbbs at comcast.net>
>Sent: Feb 21, 2006 2:03 PM
>To: ale at ale.org
>Subject: [ale] Mass Machine Virtualization w/ Remote GUI Access
>
>I've got a situation where a number of users on a development shop LAN 
>are in a bad way because they're trying to run a number of different 
>Win2K3 Server virtual machines - done up in Microsoft Virtual PC - on 
>their desktops.  This has come to result in people trying to pull and 
>push around 4-6GB of MSVPC files on the LAN, and, of course, anyone who 
>wants to actually run an instance on MSVPC has to have scads of RAM and 
>this is often incompatible with various people's desktops and laptops 
>who may be running "only" 512MB, tops. 
>
>My way of addressing this would be to use VMware instead of MSVPC, 
>running it on an "uberserver" capable of  holding and running numerous 
>virtual machines at once, such that various people can connect to the 
>virtual machines at the display level from their own WinXP desktops and 
>laptops. 
>
>It's that last part that I have a question about.  Given that it would 
>be nice if more than one person could actually connect remotely to any 
>one of these virtual machines (i.e., fighting over mouse/keyboard if so 
>inclined), how to best cover the remote access?
>
>Ways I'm aware of include Xorg+Cygwin, a commercial X Server for 
>Windows, VNC, or MS Terminal Services. [NOTE:  I assume that all but the 
>last would take place over OpenSSH].
>
>What do you think?
>
>Jeff
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