[SparkMonkeyHellion]

My coworker told me about this new technology coming out... or maybe already available...

but basically it is the equivalent of a Virtual Machine for programs...

Instead of shared DLL's and files and all that stuff a program would be wrapped in it's own "bubble" much in the same way a VM is...

anyone know what this is called?

[Saxon]

This closest thing I can think of is a FreeBSD Jail, it's like a VM but without the overhead it lets you separate user defined processes or applications from that of the rest of the machine.

[SparkMonkeyHellion]

nah I think it's actually a M$ thing coming out since everything is migrating towards virtualization.

The idea was to isolate different programs/services so that way you wouldn't get conflicts. Right now the only way to do that is to have different VM's for each application. And since something like ESX is WAAAAYYY better at running VMs than M$ they are losing some of the competition.

So now M$ is doing their "end-to-end virtualization" gig.

I'm just waiting to see the bloatware take over (and price) just like most M$ apps. They will have a lot of competition considering that ESX has a 32 MB footprint (yes, 32 megs!!!) and it is probably the most efficient server app I have ever seen.

My coworker installed a brand new Server 2k3 VM in 13 minutes flat using ESXi

M$ will have to work very hard to even get close to competing with that.

[kmote]

Originally Posted by SparkMonkeyHellion

My coworker told me about this new technology coming out... or maybe already available...

but basically it is the equivalent of a Virtual Machine for programs...

Instead of shared DLL's and files and all that stuff a program would be wrapped in it's own "bubble" much in the same way a VM is...

anyone know what this is called?

The whole point of dlls is that they can be used by multiple programs. I'm confused.

[SparkMonkeyHellion]

Originally Posted by kmote

The whole point of dlls is that they can be used by multiple programs. I'm confused.

The problem is that many things try to use the same DLL's and different apps break them/make them unusable to other DLL's

This is why Vista comes packed with the 10 GB \winsxs folder now - it has many copies of the same DLL's

[SparkMonkeyHellion]

VMware ThinApp for Application Virtualization - VMware

This is it!