Thanks to all who have replied. All, do linux users use a mouse. I would
think that mouse tracking would be a nightmare in the VM environment. I
remember way back when we used to ask users monitoring jobs in OS/VS1 to
not hit the enter key constantly. It's ok for a few, but when you have
5,000 connected to an opsys running under VM, at least the old releases
it became a problem.

-----Original Message-----
From: The IBM z/VM Operating System [mailto:ib...@listserv.uark.edu] On
Behalf Of Rob van der Heij
Sent: Thursday, May 14, 2009 6:51 AM
To: IBMVM@LISTSERV.UARK.EDU
Subject: Re: Virtualized Desktop

On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 10:28 PM, Ward, Mike S <mw...@ssfcu.org> wrote:

> Since SLED is an Enterprise Desktop, does that mean you would have to
> have one SLED for every user under VM?

My approach would be indeed to run just one desktop per virtual
machine, instead of what Matthew suggested with all desktops on a few
Linux virtual machines. My preference would be the simplifier security
issues and the ability to ensure that resources can be granted to the
virtual desktop that is supposed to use them, and the ability to
charge for consumed resources.

Something to think about is whether the virtual machine needs to be
there when the user is not. One of my pet projects was to speed up
Linux boot process so that we could start the virtual machine when the
first TCP/IP packet arrives (and get it done within the time that
TCP/IP allows you).  I even worked with a customer who considered to
migrate unused virtual machines to tape and restore them when needed
(and accept that it may keep the developer waiting for a few minutes).

Clearly you want something to share the program code so that you can
do software management in a central manner and not upgrade each
virtual server separately. That requires you separate data from
(centrally managed) code and server configuration.
When you review the thread about "stateless Linux" on the list
yesterday, it appears an attractive approach to have a small supply of
"luke warm" Linux servers ready to get personalized when the user
attempts to connect to the desktop. It would require their data and
configuration to reside on a separate file server. I would be tempted
to hibernate to disk rather than RAM (and expect z/VM paging to
restore it) but either approach might work.

Rob
-- 
Rob van der Heij
Velocity Software
http://www.velocitysoftware.com/
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