Most VM systems actually handle this quite well.
Turning up a bunch of WinXP/Win7 VMs that are all running the same
software actually chews up a *lot* less memory than you'd expect because
of this feature.
Wow, didn't know that existed. So freaking cool!
Sounds like this may be very relevant to the discussion I was having
with Ian last night re Cyber Defense Challenge ridiculous RAM
requirements as well.
Also, logging multiple users into a single Windows Server isn't anything
like UNIX - that's a Windows feature called Terminal Server, which
requires separate, additional licensing, and requires significant
expertise in Terminal Server to configure correctly.
Thanks for letting me know that I should never bother, sticking with
unix-like systems for true multi-user knowing this!
Attention Skullspace donors -- forget what I said -- don't throw your
money away to the licensing on Terminal Server, as it sounds so broken
that the admin labour will *never* be there to put it to use.
Probably easier to scale a Windows lab up in the Skullspace setting by
calling for with machines with hard drives and using broadcast ghosting.
Though, at the end of day, after all the admin work to do this, it seems
to me there should be a startup performance advantage with Terminal
Server over the multiple-VM approach?
You mention a 4-5 hour deploy time -- is that due to the system working
hard to find shared pages between VMs? That's what it seems like we're
talking about with the KVM implementation, following your kernel doc
link and looking at what it links to:
http://lwn.net/Articles/306704/
http://lwn.net/Articles/330589/
These describes the whole damn thing *searching* for shared pages
between VMs and comparing them with SHA1 hashes which is pretty intense!
You get at lot of shared pages automatically when things are happening
all under one operating system that has active knowledge over its own pages.
Never realized quite how spoiled I am being a unixen for my entire adult
life.
And until a few years ago, I didn't realize how spoiled the FreeBSD and
OpenBSD folks have been for a long time with access to containers (one
kernel, many well isolated userlands where root can be safely used)
until I started playing with the less mature LXC (linux containers)
http://linuxcontainers.org/
.
One kernel to rule them all, and in the darkness page them.
Mark
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