virtualbox.org

I Have been out of things a long time doing web apps and drifted away from the networking and hardware I started in. I have fallen in love with this stuff again! (Except the security and incredibly senseless things that people seem to do on their work computers?!?!?!)

I was wondering if it would be possible to install a platform that would offer virtulized environments instead of log-ins, for workstations. I would think that for the average user this would be more secure and allow areas that have multiple users accessing an individual computer a little more security.

Also it could allow the use of a few servers to farm out the workload (Is this starting to sound like a cloud?) to individual terminals. I think that it could allow a layer which would host the VM's to monitor and restrict unauthorized computer use and potentially block it as well.

I probably am sounding like i am a few decades out of touch and I am sure there is something that is already doing this but Google searches aren't helping. Please let me know if there is anything that is doing this currently and if it is something that I can look into.

Thank you,
K

Hi, i'm a total VM beginner.

I had the same idea, here is why :
with VMs instead of sessions, i could
- have three (or even more) windows XP (or MicroXP) installed at the same time, but independent (in term of registers, etc), and thus not weighting on each other (this is a naive idea, is this realistic?), and i could reinstall/restore only one of them at a time, and they wouldn't share viruses.
- "freeze them" and turn them back on...
- ... which would enable me to jump very fast from one VM to the other. I could even run two at the same time, if needed (i shouldn't, most of the time)
- make clones, that i can use as backups, and use to have to install WinXP only once (and then clone)
- make scripts to control them, switch between them in an automated way, etc.
It all sounds very nice and exciting, but is also very naive as i have no experience. Please tell me where i'm wrong.

The problem being also that it would make everything slower.
I'm hoping that with 8GB RAM, and lightweight OSes, it would be alright. For example a lightweight ("businesscard") Debian as host (64bits, to be able to use more than 4GB RAM), and WinXP as guests, or even lighter : MicroXP.

Please correct me, so that i can know whether and how this "dream" would be possible.